Dawn

Although by contemporary standards William Dean Howells, in his otherwise commendatory review of the collection in which “Dawn” first appeared, comes across as unforgivingly patronizing, politically incorrect, and more than a bit racist when he describes the strength of Dunbar’s poetry as “white thinking and white feeling in a black man,” Howells’s intended compliment speaks to the heart of Dunbar’s position in the American literary canon. Was he the local colored poet who, like other regionalists of his era, captured in verse the patois of plantation slaves and backwoods blacks of the postbellum Midwest? Or was he, as he thought of himself, America’s Keats or Wordsworth 2.0, crafting elegant lines of lyrical poetry about nature, love, mortality, and art, revealing a mastery of the often tricky prosody of the British Romantics?

Remarkably, across his 20 years of prolific production, Dunbar managed to make both literary contexts part of his oeuvre. The tension between the two voices (underscored by the Major, Minor categories of the collection) came to be a profoundly unsettling element of Dunbar’s celebrity—he wrestled with the dilemma that his dialect poems made him financially secure, but he wanted his legacy to be the elegant and structured poems in the Romantic tradition.