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Lynda Koolish
Lyrics of Lowly Life
Paul Laurence Dunbar (1896)
When he published Lyrics of Lowly Life, a collec-
tion of poems with New York’s Dodd, Mead &
Company, in 1896, the then 23-year-old PAU L LAU-
RENCE DUNBAR, America’s first professional black
poet, had already privately printed by patronage
two volumes of his work: Oak and Ivy (1892) and
Majors and Minors (1895). During his short life
(he died at age 33), Dunbar, the Ohio-born son of
former slaves and an elevator operator by profes-
sion, would publish five more volumes, including
Lyrics of the Hearthside (1899), Lyrics of Love and
Laughter (1903), Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow
(1905), and Complete Poems (1913). Influenced
by the British romantic poets, particularly Alfred
Tennyson and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and American
poet Russell Lowell, Dunbar gained recognition as
an American literary phenomenon when the dean
of American letters and father of American real-
ism, William Dean Howells, favorably reviewed
Majors and Minors in Harper’s Weekly, noting, “So
far as I could remember, Paul Dunbar was the only
man of pure African blood and of American civi-
lization to feel the negro [sic] life aesthetically and
express it lyrically.” (quoted in Dunbar, xvi)
As a result of Howell’s endorsement, Dun-
bar gained international attention; he traveled
to England in 1897 to give poetry readings, and
he became “the most famous African American
poet and one of the most famous American poets
of his time.” (Robinson, 639). Although Dunbar
wrote in both standard English and black dialect,
Howells chose to celebrate his accomplishment
as a dialect poet. Eugene Redmond, in his criti-
cal history of African-American poetry, notes that
“Howell’s praise was a curse in disguise,” for Dun-
bar “struggled for the rest of his life to remove the
dialect stigma” (121). Dunbar laments this appar-
ent marginalization in “The Poet”: “He sang of
love when earth was young, / And love, itself, was
in his lays. / But ah, the world, it turned to praise /
A jingle in a broken tongue.”
Lyrics of Lowly Life, which Howells arranged to
have published by a mainstream press, includes
poems that first appeared in Oak and Ivy and Ma-
jors and Minors. As a whole, they clearly reveal not
only Dunbar’s range but also his masterful com-
petence as a poet. He begins the collection with
“Ere Sleep Comes Down to Soothe the Weary
Eyes” and ends it with “The Party.” Many of the
poems have become often-anthologized classics,
including “Frederick Douglass,” “A Negro Love
Song,” “When the Co’n Pone’s Hot,” “We Wear the
Mask,” and “When Malindy Sings.” Most of them,
as critics have pointed out over the decades, lack
“racial fire.” Dunbar preferred to think of blacks as
human beings rather than as Africans—hence the
celebration of and emphasis on black humanity
and sensitivity, as found in “When Malindy Sings,”
than on racially specific themes. Malindy is me-
morialized by the speaker for her gift as a talented
musician: “But fu’ real melojous music, / Dat jes’
strikes yo’ hea’t and clings / Jes’ you stan’ an’ lis-
ten wif me / When Malindy sings” (196). Similarly,
the speaker in “Sympathy” contrasts freedom and
destructive oppression in any form, racial or aes-
thetic. The speaker, whose purpose is to bear wit-
ness—“I know”—at the beginning of each stanza,
could be an artist, a male or female former slave, or
a black South African who experienced dehuman-
izing apartheid.320 Lyrics of Lowly Life