Georgia Douglas Johnson

1880–1966

A member of the Harlem Renaissance, Georgia Douglas

Johnson wrote plays, a syndicated newspaper column, and
four collections of poetry: The Heart of a Woman (1918),
Bronze (1922), An Autumn Love Cycle (1928), and Share My
World (1962).

Johnson was born in Atlanta, Georgia, to parents of African

American, Native American, and English descent. She
graduated from Atlanta University Normal College and
studied music at the Oberlin Conservatory and the Cleveland
College of Music. After graduation, she taught and worked as
an assistant principal. In 1910 she moved with her husband
to Washington, D.C. When her husband died in 1925,
Johnson supported her two sons by working temporary jobs
until she was hired by the Department of Labor.Johnson’s
house at 1461 S Street NW, which came to be known as site
of the S Street Salon, was an important meeting place for
writers of the Harlem Renaissance in Washington, D.C.
Johnson published her first poems in 1916 in the NAACP’s
magazine Crisis. Her weekly column, “Homely Philosophy,”
was published from 1926 to 1932. She wrote numerous plays,
including Blue Blood (performed 1926) and Plumes
(performed 1927). Johnson traveled widely in the 1920s to
give poetry readings. In 1934 she lost her job in the
Department of Labor and returned to supporting herself with
temporary clerical work.Johnson received an honorary
doctorate in literature from Atlanta University in 1965.
The Heart of a Woman
BY GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON
The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn,
As a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on,
Afar o’er life’s turrets and vales does it roam
In the wake of those echoes the heart calls home.

The heart of a woman falls back with the night,

And enters some alien cage in its plight,
And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars
While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.
Countee Cullen
1903–1946

Countee Cullen was perhaps the most representative voice of

the Harlem Renaissance. His life story is essentially a tale of
youthful exuberance and talent of a star that flashed across
the Afro-American firmament and then sank toward the
horizon. When his paternal grandmother and guardian died
in 1918, the fifteen-year-old Countee LeRoy Porter was taken
into the home of the Reverend Frederick A. Cullen, the
pastor of Salem Methodist Episcopal Church, Harlem's
largest congregation. There the young Countee entered the
approximate center of black politics and culture in the
United States and acquired both the name and awareness of
the influential clergyman who was later elected president of
the Harlem chapter of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In view of
America's racial climate during the 1920s, Harlem was
scarcely a serene place, but it was an enormously stimulating
milieu for Afro-American intellectuals. The high hopes of the
black community for acceptance and equality had turned to
disillusionment at the end of World War I, when returning
black soldiers all too often experienced unemployment and
were otherwise mistreated. Resentment pulsated through
black urban centers like Harlem, which had burgeoned
during the war as black workers migrated there to fill jobs
temporarily vacated by the diversion of white laborers into
the military. For the first time in Afro-American history, a
black urban consciousness conducive to the flowering of the
arts was developing. From Harlem, the largest of the new,
densely populated black urban communities in which Cullen
was listening and learning burst forth an outpouring of Afro-
American arts known as the Harlem Renaissance. While
Cullen's informal education was shaped by his exposure to
black ideas and yearnings, his formal education derived from
almost totally white influences. This dichotomy heavily
influenced his creative work and his criticism, particularly
because he did extremely well at the white-dominated
institutions he attended and won the approbation of white
academia. In high school Cullen earned academic honors
that in turn garnered him the posts of vice-president of his
class and editor of the school newspaper, as well as prizes for
poetry and oratory. His glory continued at New York
University, where he obtained first or second prizes in a
number of poetry contests, including the national Witter
Bynner Contests for undergraduate poetry and contests
sponsored by Poetry magazine. Harvard University's Irving
Babbitt publicly lauded Cullen's The Ballad of the Brown
Girl, and in 1925, which proved a bumper year for the young
man's harvest of literary prizes, Cullen graduated from New
York University, was accepted into Harvard's masters
program, and published his first volume of poetry, Color.
During the next four years Cullen reached his zenith. A
celebrated young man about Harlem, he had in print by 1929
several books of his own poems and a collection of poetry he
edited, Caroling Dusk, written by other Afro-Americans. His
letters from Harvard to his Harlem friend Harold Jackman
exuded self-satisfaction and sometimes the snide intolerance
of the enfant terrible. The climax of those heady years may
have come in 1928. That year Cullen was awarded a
Guggenheim fellowship to write poetry in France, and he
married Nina Yolande DuBois, the daughter of W. E. B.
DuBois, a man who for decades was the acknowledged leader
of the Afro-American intellectual community. Few social
events in Harlem rivaled the magnitude of the latter event,
and much of Harlem joined in the festivities that marked the
joining of the Cullen and DuBois lineages, two of its most
notable families. Because of Cullen's success in both black
and white cultures, and because of his romantic
temperament, he formulated an aesthetic that embraced
both cultures. He came to believe that art transcended race
and that it could be used as a vehicle to minimize the
distance between black and white peoples. When he chose as
his models poet John Keats and to a lesser extent A. E.
Housman, he did so not consciously to curry favor with white
America but for four logical reasons: First, though there had
been Afro-American poets, there was not yet an Afro-
American poetic tradition—in any meaningful sense of the
term—to draw upon. Second, the English poetic tradition
was the one that was available to him—the one that had been
taught to him in schools he attended. Third, he felt
challenged to demonstrate that a black poet could excel
within that traditional framework. And fourth, he felt
absolutely free to choose as exemplars any poets in the world
with whom he sensed a temperamental affinity (and he
certainly had that affinity with Housman and, especially,
Keats). In addition, he shared their romantic self-
involvement; he had an ego that was sensitive to the slightest
tremors and that needed expression to remain whole, and
like Keats he had to believe in human perfectibility. In poems
such as "Heritage" and "Atlantic City Waiter," Cullen
reflects the urge to reclaim African arts—a phenomenon
called "Negritude" that was one of the motifs of the Harlem
Renaissance. The cornerstone of his aesthetic, however, was
the call for black-American poets to work conservatively, as
he did, within English conventions. In his 1927 foreword to
Caroling Dusk, Cullen observed that "since theirs is ... the
heritage of the English language, their work will not present
any serious aberration from poetic tendencies of their times."
Braving the wrath of less moderate peers, he further stated
that "negro poets, dependent as they are on the English
language, may have more to gain from the rich background
of English and American poetry than from any nebulous
atavistic yearnings toward an African inheritance." Even the
subtitle of the collection, An Anthology of Verse by Negro
Poets, reflects his belief in the essential oneness of art; it
implies no distinction between white poetry and black
poetry, and it assumes there is only poetry, which in the case
of Caroling Dusk is simply composed by Afro-American
writers. His dedication to oneness led Cullen to be cautious
of any black writer's work that threatened to erect rather
than pull down barricades between the races. Thus, in a
February, 1926, "Dark Tower" column in which Cullen
reviewed Langston Hughes's The Weary Blues, Cullen
pressed Hughes not to be a "racial artist" and to omit jazz
rhythms from his poems. In a later column he prodded black
writers to censor themselves by avoiding "some things, some
truths of Negro life and thought ... that all Negroes know, but
take no pride in." For Cullen, showcasing unpleasant realities
would "but strengthen the bitterness of our enemies" and
thereby weaken the bridge of art between blacks and whites.
Such warnings, however, did not prevent the critic Cullen
from praising black artists whenever he found their work
meritorious, even when it was overtly racial. In another of
his "Dark Tower" columns, he complimented Amy
Spingarn's Pride and Humility, for example, even though he
thought its "clearest notes" were to be heard "in those poems
which have a racial framework." Since his primary criterion
for judging a work was always aesthetic, Cullen applauded
any poetry that appealed to him, without regard to the color
of the writer. He had good things to say about Edna St.
Vincent Millay, E. A. Robinson, and Robert Frost, but he was
less favorable toward such avant garde poets as Amy Lowell,
in whose work he found little "for the hungry heart to feed
upon." Generally, three principles informed his criticism:
First, he tended to be more attracted to romantic rather than
unromantic poetry. Second, he was conservative in his tastes
and therefore put off by experimentation such as that of Amy
Lowell. Third, although he put special effort into trying to
further the interests of black artists, he was governed by a
keen sense of impartiality and a commitment to bringing the
races into closer harmony. A paradox exists, however,
between Cullen's philosophy and writing. While he argued
that racial poetry was a detriment to the color-blindness he
craved, he was at the same time so affronted by the racial
injustice in America that his own best verse—indeed most of
his verse—gave voice to racial protest. In fact, the title of
Cullen's 1925 collection, Color, was not chosen
unintentionally, nor did Cullen include sections with that
same title in later volumes by accident. Both early and late in
his career he was, in spite of himself, largely a racial poet.
This is evident throughout Cullen's works from the Color
pieces and the introduction of racial violence into his 1927
work The Ballad of the Brown Girl to the poems that he
selected for the posthumously published On These I Stand,
of which substantially more than half are racial poems. Of
the six identifiable racial themes in Cullen's poetry, the first
is Negritude, or Pan-African impulse, a pervasive element of
the 1920s international black literary movement that scholar
Arthur P. Davis in a 1953 Phylon essay called "the alien-and-
exile theme." Specific examples of this motif in Cullen's
poetry include his attribution of descent from African kings
to the girl featured in The Ballad of the Brown Girl as well as
the submerged pride exhibited by the waiter in the poem
"Atlantic City Waiter" whose graceful movement resulted
from "Ten thousand years on jungle clues." Probably the
best-known illustration of the Pan-African impulse in
Cullen's poetry is found in "Heritage," where the narrator
realizes that although he must suppress his African heritage,
he cannot ultimately surrender his black heart and mind to
white civilization. "Heritage," like most of the Negritude
poems of the Harlem Renaissance and like political
expression such as Marcus Garvey's popular back-to-Africa
movement, powerfully suggests the duality of the black
psyche—the simultaneous allegiance to America and rage at
her racial inequities Four similar themes recur in Cullen's
poems, expressing other forms of racial bias. These include a
kind of black chauvinism that prevailed at the time and that
Cullen portrayed in both The Ballad of the Brown Girl and
The Black Christ, when in those works he judged that the
passion of blacks was better than that of whites. Likewise,
the poem "Near White" exemplifies the author's admonition
against miscegenation, and in "To a Brown Boy" Cullen
propounds a racially motivated affinity toward death as a
preferred escape from racial frustration and outrage.
Another poem, "For a Lady I Know," presents a satirical
view of whites obliviously mistreating their black
counterparts as it depicts blacks in heaven doing their
"celestial chores" so that upper-class whites can remain in
their heavenly beds. Using a sixth motif, Cullen exhibits a
direct expression of irrepressible anger at racial unfairness.
His outcry is more muted than that of some other Harlem
Renaissance poets—Hughes, for example, and Claude McKay
—but that is a matter of Cullen's innate and learned gentility.
Those who overlook Cullen's strong indictment of racism in
American society miss the main thrust of his work. His
poetry throbs with anger as in "Incident" when he recalls his
personal response to being called "nigger" on a Baltimore
bus, or in the selection "Yet Do I Marvel," in which Cullen
identifies what he regards as God's most astonishing miscue
that he could "make a poet black, and bid him sing!" In
addition to his own personal experiences, Cullen also focuses
on public events. For instance, in "Scottsboro, Too, Is Worth
Its Song," he upbraids American poets, who had championed
the cause of white anarchists in the controversial Sacco-
Vanzetti trials, for not defending the nine black youths
indicted on charges of raping two white girls in a freight car
passing through Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931. In The Book
of American Negro Poetry, author James Weldon Johnson
explained with acute sympathy Cullen's compulsion to write
poetry that seems to fly in the face of his declarations against
poetry of race. Johnson wrote: "Strangely, it is because
Cullen revolts against ... racial limitations—technical and
spiritual—that the best of his poetry is motivated by race. He
is always seeking to free himself and his art from these
bonds. He never entirely escapes, but from the very fret and
chafe he brings forth poetry that contains the quintessence of
race consciousness." Cullen, then, was a forceful but genteel
protest poet; yet, he was much more. He was also consistent
in his intention to write good traditional poetry for the social
purpose of showing what common sense should have told
white Americans but what they still demanded be proven to
them—that blacks could write poetry and write it as well as
anyone. To that end, much of Cullen's poetry deals with such
universal subjects as faith and doubt, love, and mortality. On
the subject of religion, Cullen waywardly progressed from
uncertainty to Christian acceptance. Early on he was given to
irony and even defiance in moments of youthful skepticism.
In "Heritage," for example, he observes that a black Christ
could command his faith better than the white one. When he
was twenty-four, he provided a third-person description of
himself in which he commented that his "chief problem has
been that of reconciling a Christian upbringing with a pagan
inclination. His life so far has not convinced him that the
problem is insoluble." But before very long, his grandmother
Porter's influence and that of the Cullen rectory won out.
Outrage over racial injustice notwithstanding, he had fairly
well controlled the "pagan inclination" in favor of Christian
orthodoxy by 1929, when he published The Black Christ, and
Other Poems. In the opening of the book's narrative title
poem, the protagonist sings of embracing God in spite of
certain earthly obstacles that he summarizes as "my
country's shame." The speaker's brother has been beaten to
death by a white lynch mob for an innocent relationship with
a white woman; the narrator's resentment toward a savior
who allows such evil to occur is overcome by his mother's
proclamation of her unshakable faith, and any residue of
doubt disappears when the murdered brother is resurrected.
At the end the family is left to prosper in its piety.
Furthermore, among the few previously unpublished poems
that Cullen selected for inclusion in the posthumously
published collection On These I Stand is one that confirms
his continuing religious commitment as a way to cope with
the injustices and disappointments of his life. Written during
World War I, "Christus natus est" asserts that amid all the
tragedy of war "The manger still / Outshines the throne" and
that "Christ must and will / Come to his own." To
understand Cullen's treatment of love it is necessary first to
examine the effete—weak or effeminate—quality of many of
his love poems. David Levering Lewis, in When Harlem Was
in Vogue, asserted that "impotence and death run through
[Cullen's] poetry like dark threads, entangling his most
affirmative lines." In general, Cullen's love poetry is clearly
characterized not only by misgivings about women but also
by a distrust of the emotion of heterosexual love. His
"Medusa" and "The Cat," both contained in The Medea, and
Some Poems, illustrate this vision of male-female
relationships. In Cullen's version of the ancient myth, it is
not the hideousness of Medusa that blinds the men who gaze
upon her, but rather her beauty. So great is the destructive
power of the attractive female that the narrator in "The Cat"
imagines in the animal "A woman with thine eyes, satanic
beast / Profound and cold as scythes to mow me down."
Male lovers, on the other hand are often portrayed as sickly
with apprehension that a relationship is about to be ended
either by a fickle partner or by death. In "If Love Be
Staunch," for example, the speaker warns that love lasts no
longer than "water stays in a sieve" and in "The Love Tree"
Cullen portrays love as a crucifixion whereby future lovers
may realize that "'Twas break of heart that made the love tree
grow." What Lewis identified in Cullen's love poems as a
"corroding suspicion of life cursed from birth" may have
resulted from Cullen's alleged homosexuality. Cullen's
treatment of death in his writing was shaped by his early
encounters with the deaths of his parents, brother, and
grandmother, as well as by a premonition of his own
premature demise. Running through his poems are a sense
of the brevity of life and a romantic craving for the surcease
of death. In "Nocturne" and "Works to My Love," death is
readily accepted as a natural element of life. "Threnody for a
Brown Girl" and "In the Midst of Life" portray even warmer
feelings towards death as a welcome escape. And in poems
such as "Only the Polished Skeleton" death is gratefully
anticipated to bring relief from racial oppression: A stripped
skeleton has no race; it can but "measure the worth of all it
so despised." Looking forward to death, Cullen meanwhile
accepted sleep as an effective surrogate. In the poem "Sleep"
he portrays slumber as "lovelier" and "kinder" than any
alternative. It is both a feline killer and gentle nourisher that
suckles the sleeper: "though the suck be short 'tis good." In
April, 1943, less than three years before he died of uremic
poisoning, Cullen related in "Dear Friends and Gentle
Hearts" that "blessedly this breath departs." After 1929
Cullen's production of verse dropped off dramatically. It was
limited to his translation of Euripides' play Medea, which
appeared along with some new poems in his 1935 collection
The Medea, and Some Poems and later with half a dozen
previously unpublished pieces that were included in his
posthumously published collection, On These I Stand. A
complexity of reasons contributed to the dimming of his
poetic star. The Harlem Renaissance required a white
audience to sustain it, and as whites became preoccupied
with their own tenuous situation during the Great
Depression, they lost interest in the Afro-American arts.
Also, Cullen's idealism about building a bridge of poetry
between the races had been sorely tested by the time the
1920s ended. Moreover, he seemed affected by legitimate
doubts concerning his growth as a poet. In "Self Criticism"
he reflected whether he would go on singing a "failing note
still vainly clinging / To the throat of the stricken swan."
While his supporters continued to defend him on racial
rather than literary grounds, his detractors gradually
increased in numbers with the publication of each successive
collection of his poetry. Harry Alan Potamkin, in a 1927 New
Republic review of Copper Sun, found that Cullen had not
really progressed since Color and that the poet had
"capitalized on the fact of race." The reviewer concluded, in
fact, that Cullen's poetry "begins and ends with a epithet
skill." With the appearance of The Black Christ, and Other
Poems in 1929, Nation's Granville Hicks joined the chorus of
critics expressing reservations and remarked that "in
general, Mr. Cullen's talents do not seem to be developing as
one might wish." For a combination of causes, then,
beginning in the early 1930s Cullen largely curtailed his
poetic output and channeled his creative energy into other
genres. He wrote a novel, One Way to Heaven, published in
1932, but its poor critical reception made it his only novel.
The book reveals a flair for satire in its secondary plot, which
centers around the Harlem salon of the irrepressible hostess
Constancia Brandon; one particularly effective episode
features a white intellectual bigot who is invited to read his
tract, "The Menace of the Negro to Our American
Civilization," to an audience of mainly black intellectuals.
The novel itself, however, suffers from a fatal structural flaw.
Cullen never successfully integrated the secondary plot—a
takeoff on his own experience in Harlem intellectual circles—
with the major story line, a melodrama in which itinerant
con man Sam Lucas undergoes a fake religious conversion to
edge his way into a Harlem congregation; marries and then
cheats on his sweet young wife; and finally, on his death bed
undergoes a change of heart. The characters in the main plot
are generally based on stereotypes common in black-
American folklore—the fast-talking trickster and the
sagacious saintly old aunt, for example. Although Cullen
displays some compassion toward them and a good deal of
good-natured wit in dealing with the satirical figures, the two
plots never adequately come together. As Rudolph Fisher
said in a New York Herald Tribune review of One Way to
Heaven, it was as if Cullen were "exhibiting a lovely pastel
and cartoon on the same frame." When thirty-one-year-old
Cullen turned to teaching in 1934, he was determined to find
some way other than literature to contribute to social
change, but he did not abandon writing entirely. In 1935 he
published his version of Medea (with the speeches and
choral passages curiously attenuated) and collaborated with
Harry Hamilton on "Heaven's My Home," a dramatic
adaptation of One Way to Heaven. The play, which was
never published, is actually more contrived than Cullen's
novel, but unlike the original work, "Heaven's My Home"
manages to integrate the two plots by introducing a sexual
relationship between the protagonists Lucas and Brandon.
Toward the end of his life, in the 1940s, Cullen was relatively
successful as a dramatist. With another collaborator, Owen
Dodson, he worked on several projects, including "The Third
Fourth of July," a one-act play printed in Theatre Arts in
August, 1946. During this period Cullen rejected a
professorship at Fisk University and instead remained in
New York to work with Arna Bontemps on a dramatic
version of his novel God Sends Sunday. Cullen, who
suggested the adaptation, made this endeavor the center of
his life, but the enterprise caused him much grief. By 1945
the play had become the musical "St. Louis Woman," and
celebrated performer Lena Horne was expected to star in its
Broadway and Hollywood productions. Then disaster struck.
Walter White of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) argued that the
play, set in the black ghetto of St. Louis and featuring lower-
class and seedy characters, was demeaning to blacks. Cullen
was blamed for revealing the seamy side of black life, the
very thing he had warned other black writers not to do. Many
of Cullen's friends refused to defend him; some joined the
attack, which was patently unjust. Admittedly, greed and
criminality figure in the play, which focuses on the struggle
between overbearing salon keeper-gambler Bigelow Brown
and diminutive jockey Lil Augie for the affections of Della
Greene, a hard-nosed and soft-hearted beauty. But as Cullen
argued, the play really deals with human virtues—honor,
love, decency, and loyalty. The controversy rounding it wore
on, however, until 1946. In March of that year, "St. Louis
Woman" finally premiered on Broadway, featuring songs by
Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen such as "Come Rain, Come
Shine" and making singer Pearl Bailey a star. Unfortunately,
Cullen had died almost three months earlier and was to be
remembered primarily for the poems he had written in his
twenties when he was one of Harlem's brightest luminaries.
The limitations of Cullen's poetry such as its archaic and
imitative ring, its occasional verbosity, and its tendency to
sacrifice sense for conventional prosody restricted his
literary status to that of a minor poet with a real lyrical gift.
But he was not guilty of the obsequious acceptance of white
values for which 1960s black power poets such as Don Lee
were to dismiss him. Cullen never compromised his integrity
as a black man to gain advantage for himself. His primary
goal was to bring America closer to racial harmony through
his own art and that of his peers and ultimately to achieve
complete and colorblind artistic freedom. As he defiantly
proclaimed in "To Certain Critics" (published in The Black
Christ), though some might call him a traitor to blacks, his
program was too universal to be contained: "Never shall the
clan / Confine my singing to its ways / Beyond the ways of
man." Probably more than any other writer of the Harlem
Renaissance, Cullen carried out the intentions of black
American intellectual leaders such as W. E. B. DuBois and
James Weldon Johnson. These men had nothing but the
highest praise for Cullen, for he was brilliantly practicing
what they advocated, and he came close to embodying Alain
Locke's "New Negro." "In a time," DuBois wrote in a 1928
Crisis essay, "when it is vogue to make much of the Negro's
aptitude for clownishness or to depict him objectively as a
serio-comic figure, it is a fine and praiseworthy act for Mr.
Cullen to show through the interpretation of his own
subjectivity the inner workings of the Negro soul and mind."
Johnson was pleased with Cullen's decision not to recognize
"any limitation to 'racial' themes and forms." In Cullen's wish
not to be "a negro poet," Johnson insisted, the writer was
"not only within his right: he is right." As these authorities
attest, to read Countee Cullen's work is to hear a voice as
representative of the Harlem Renaissance as it is possible to
find.

CAREER
Poet, columnist, editor, novelist, playwright, children's writer, and educator.
Assistant editor and author of monthly column "The Dark Tower" for Opportunity:
Journal of Negro Life, 1926-28; traveled back and forth between France and the
United States, 1928-34; Frederick Douglass Junior High School, New York City,
teacher of English, French, and creative writing, 1934-45.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
POETRY
◦ Color (includes Heritage, Atlantic City Waiter, Near White, To a Brown Boy, For
a Lady I Know, Yet Do I Marvel, Incident, The Shroud of Color, Oh, for a
Little While Be Kind, Brown Boy to Brown Girl, and Pagan Prayer), Harper,
1925, reprinted, Arno Press, 1969.
◦ Copper Sun (includes If Love Be Staunch, The Love Tree, Nocturne, Threnody
 for a Brown Girl, and To Lovers of Earth: Fair Warning), decorations by
Charles Cullen, Harper, 1927.
◦ (Editor) Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets, decorations by
Aaron Douglas, Harper, 1927, reprinted, 1974.
◦ The Black Christ, and Other Poems (includes The Black Christ, Song of Praise,
Works to My Love, In the Midst of Life, Self Criticism, To Certain Critics,
and The Wish), decorations by Charles Cullen, Harper, 1929, reprinted,
University Microfilms, 1973.
◦ The Medea, and Some Poems (includes translation of Euripides' play Medea,
Scottsboro, Too, Is Worth Its Song, Medusa, The Cat, Only the Polished
Skeleton, Sleep, After a Visit, and To France), Harper, 1935.
◦ On These I Stand: An Anthology of the Best Poems of Countee Cullen
(includes Dear Friends and Gentle Hearts, Christus natus est, and some
previously unpublished poems), Harper, 1947.
◦ My Soul's High Song: The Collected Writings of Countee Cullen, Voice of the
Harlem Renaissance, edited, introduction by Gerald Early, Doubleday
(New York, NY), 1991.
OTHER
◦ The Ballad of the Brown Girl: An Old Ballad Retold, illustrations and
decorations by Charles Cullen, Harper, 1927.
◦ One Way to Heaven (novel), Harper, 1932, reprinted, AMS Press, 1975 (also
see below).
◦ The Lost Zoo (a Rhyme for the Young, but Not Too Young), illustrations by
Charles Sebree, Harper, 1940, new edition, with illustrations by Joseph
Low, Follett, 1969, new edition illustrated by Brian Pinkney, Burdett
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1992.
◦ My Lives and How I Lost Them (juvenile; autobiography of fictional character
Christopher Cat), drawings by Robert Reid Macguire, Harper, 1942, new
edition, with illustrations by Rainey Bennett, Follett, 1971.
◦ (With Owen Dodson) The Third Fourth of July (one-act play), published in
Theatre Arts, 1946.
◦ (With Arna Bontemps) St. Louis Woman (musical adaptation of Bontemps's
novel God Sends Sunday; first produced at Martin Beck Theater in New
York City, March 30, 1946), published in Black Theatre, edited by Lindsay
Patterson, Dodd, 1971.
Also author of unpublished plays, including Let the Day Perish (with Waters
Turpin), The Spirit of Peace, and Heaven's My Home (an adaptation, with Harry
Hamilton, of Cullen's novel, One Way to Heaven), and of book reviews. Author of
introduction to The House of Vanity by Frank Ankenbrand and Isaac Benjamin,
Leibman Press, 1928. Contributor to America as Americans See It, edited by
Fred J. Ringel, Harcourt, 1932. Contributor to Crisis, Phylon, Bookman, Harper's,
American Mercury, Century, Nation, Poetry, and other periodicals.

FURTHER READING
BOOKS
◦ Baker, Houston A., Jr., A Many-Colored Coat of Dreams: The Poetry of
Countee Cullen, Broadside Press, 1974.
◦ Bone, Robert, The Negro Novel in America, Yale University Press, 1965.
◦ Bontemps, Arna, ed., The Harlem Renaissance Remembered, Dodd, Mead, &
Co., 1972.
◦ Bronz, Stephen H., Roots of Racial Consciousness; The 1920s: Three Harlem
Renaissance Authors, Libra, 1964.
◦ Davis, Arthur P., From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers, 1900-1960,
Howard University Press, 1974.
◦ Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale, Volume 4: American Writers in Paris:
1920-1939, 1980, Volume 48: American Poets: 1880-1945, Second
Series, 1986, Volume 51: Afro-American Writers from the Harlem
Renaissance to 1940, 1987.
◦ Ferguson, Blanche E., Countee Cullen and the Negro Renaissance, Dodd,
1966.
◦ Huggins, Nathan Irvin, Harlem Renaissance, Oxford, 1971.
◦ Johnson, James Weldon, The Book of American Negro Poetry, Harcourt, 1922,
revised edition, 1931, Harbrace, 1959.
◦ Johnson, Black Manhattan, Knopf, 1930.
◦ Kramer, Victor A., The Harlem Renaissance Re-examined, AMS Press, 1987.
◦ Lee, Don L., Dynamite Voices I: Black Voices of the 1960s, Broadside Press,
1971.
◦ Littlejohn, David, Black on White: A Critical Survey of Writing by American
Negroes, Viking, 1966.
◦ Lewis, David Levering, When Harlem Was in Vogue, Knopf, 1981.
◦ Locke, Alain, Four Negro Poets, Albert & Charles Boni, 1925.
◦ Locke, The New Negro, An Interpretation, Albert & Charles Boni, 1925.
◦ Margolies, Edward, Native Sons: A Critical Study of Twentieth-Century Negro
American Authors, Lippincott, 1968.
◦ Perry, Margaret, A Bio-Bibliography of Countee P. Cullen, 1903-1946,
Greenwood, 1971.
◦ Redding, J. Saunders, To Make a Poet Black, University of North Carolina
Press, 1939.
◦ Rosenblatt, Roger, Black Fiction, Harvard University Press, 1974.
◦ Shucard, Alan, Countee Cullen, Twayne, 1984.
◦ Singh, Amritjit, The Novels of the Harlem Renaissance: Twelve Black Authors,
1923-1933, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976.
◦ Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Volume 4, Gale, 1981.
◦ Wagner, Jean, Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Laurence Dunbar
to Langston Hughes, University of Illinois Press, 1973.
◦ Young, James O., Black Writers of the Thirties, Louisiana State University
Press, 1973.
PERIODICALS
◦ Atlantic Monthly, No. 79, March, 1947.
◦ CLA Journal, September, 1967.
◦ CLA Journal, September, 1969.
◦ CLA Journal, December, 1974.
◦ College Language Association Journal, No. 13, 1970.
◦ Crisis, No. 35, June, 1928.
◦ Critique, No. 11, 1969.
◦ Nation, March 12, 1930.
◦ New Republic, No. 52, 1927.
◦ New York Herald Tribune of Books, February 28, 1932.
◦ Phylon, No. 14, 1953.
Yet Do I Marvel
BY COUNTEE CULLEN
I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!
Paul Laurence Dunbar
1872–1906

Paul Laurence Dunbar is widely acknowledged as the first

important black poet in American literature. He enjoyed his
greatest popularity in the early twentieth century following
the publication of dialectic verse in collections such as
Majors and Minors and Lyrics of Lowly Life. But the
dialectic poems constitute only a small portion of Dunbar's
canon, which is replete with novels, short stories, essays, and
many poems in standard English. In its entirety, Dunbar's
literary body has been acclaimed as an impressive
representation of black life in turn-of-the-century America.
As Dunbar's friend James Weldon Johnson noted in the
preface to his Book of American Poetry: "Paul Laurence
Dunbar stands out as the first poet from the Negro race in
the United States to show a combined mastery over poetic
material and poetic technique, to reveal innate literary
distinction in what he wrote, and to maintain a high level of
performance. He was the first to rise to a height from which
he could take a perspective view of his own race. He was the
first to see objectively its humor, its superstitions, its short-
comings; the first to feel sympathetically its heart-wounds,
its yearnings, its aspirations, and to voice them all in a purely
literary form."

Dunbar began showing literary promise while still in high

school in Dayton, Ohio, where he lived with his widowed
mother. The only black in his class, he became class
president and class poet. By 1889, two years before he
graduated, he had already published poems in the Dayton
Herald and worked as editor of the short-lived Dayton
Tattler, a newspaper for blacks published by classmate
Orville Wright, who later gained fame with brother Wilbur
Wright as inventors of the airplane.

Dunbar aspired to a career in law, but his mother's meager

financial situation precluded his university education. He
consequently sought immediate employment with various
Dayton businesses, including newspapers, only to be rejected
because of his race. He finally settled for work as an elevator
operator, a job that allowed him time to continue writing. At
this time Dunbar produced articles, short stories, and poems,
including several in the black-dialect style that later earned
him fame.

In 1892 Dunbar was invited by one of his former teachers to

address the Western Association of Writers then convening
in Dayton. At the meeting Dunbar befriended James Newton
Matthews, who subsequently praised Dunbar's work in a
letter to an Illinois newspaper. Matthews's letter was
eventually reprinted by newspapers throughout the country
and thus brought Dunbar recognition outside Dayton.
Among the readers of this letter was poet James Whitcomb
Riley, who then familiarized himself with Dunbar's work and
wrote him a commendatory letter. Bolstered by the support
of both Matthews and Riley, Dunbar decided to publish a
collection of his poems. He obtained additional assistance
from Orville Wright and then solicited a Dayton firm, United
Brethren Publishing, that eventually printed the work,
entitled Oak and Ivy, for a modest sum.

In Oak and Ivy Dunbar included his earliest dialect poems

and many works in standard English. Among the latter is one
of his most popular poems, "Sympathy," in which he
expresses, in somber tone, the dismal plight of blacks in
American society. In another standard English poem, "Ode
to Ethiopia," he records the many accomplishments of black
Americans and exhorts his fellow blacks to maintain their
pride despite racial abuse. The popularity of these and other
poems inspired Dunbar to devote himself more fully to
writing.

Shortly after the publication of Oak and Ivy Dunbar was

approached by attorney Charles A. Thatcher, an admirer
sympathetic to Dunbar's college education. Dunbar,
however, was greatly encouraged by sales of Oak and Ivy
and so rejected Thatcher to pursue a literary career. Thatcher
then applied himself to promoting Dunbar in nearby Toledo,
Ohio, and helped him obtain work there reading his poetry at
libraries and literary gatherings. Dunbar also found
unexpected support from psychiatrist Henry A. Tobey, who
helped distribute Oak and Ivy in Toledo and occasionally
sent Dunbar much needed financial aid.

Tobey eventually teamed with Thatcher in publishing

Dunbar's second verse collection, Majors and Minors. In this
book Dunbar produced poems on a variety of themes and in
several styles. He grouped the more ambitious poems, those
written in standard English, under the heading "Majors,"
and he gathered the more superficial, dialect works as
"Minors." Although Dunbar invested himself most fully in
his standard poetry—which bore the influences of such poets
as the English romantics and Americans such as Riley—it
was the dialect verse that found greater favor with his
predominantly white readership, and it was by virtue of
these dialect poems that Dunbar gained increasing fame
throughout the country. Instrumental to Dunbar's growing
popularity was a highly positive, though extremely
patronizing, review by eminent novelist William Dean
Howells. Writing in Harper's Weekly, Howells praised
Dunbar as "the first man of his color to study his race
objectively" and commended the dialect poems as faithful
representations of the black race.

Through Thatcher and Tobey, Dunbar met an agent and

secured more public readings and a publishing contract. He
then published Lyrics of Lowly Life, a poetry collection
derived primarily from verse already featured in Oak and Ivy
and Majors and Minors. This new volume sold impressively
across America and established Dunbar as the nation's
foremost black poet. On the strength of his recent acclaim
Dunbar commenced a six-month reading tour of England.
There he found publishers for a British edition of Lyrics of
Lowly Life and befriended musician Samuel Coleridge-
Taylor, with whom he then collaborated on the operetta
"Dream Lovers."

When Dunbar returned to the United States in 1897 he

obtained a clerkship at the Library of Congress in
Washington, D.C. Soon afterwards he married fellow writer
Alice Ruth Moore. Although his health suffered during the
two years he lived in Washington, the period nonetheless
proved fruitful for Dunbar. In 1898 he published his first
short story collection, Folks From Dixie, in which he
delineated the situation of blacks in both pre-and post-
emancipation United States. Although these tales, unlike
some of his dialect verse, were often harsh examinations of
racial prejudice, Folks From Dixie was well received upon
publication.

Not so Dunbar's first novel, The Uncalled, which recalled

Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter in probing the
spiritual predicament of a minister. Critics largely rejected
The Uncalled as dull and unconvincing in its portrait of
Frederick Brent, a pastor who had, in childhood, been
abandoned by an alcoholic father and then raised by a
zealously devout spinster, Hester Prime (Hawthorne's
protagonist in The Scarlet Letter was named Hester Prynne).
After securing a pastor's post, Brent alienated church-goers
by refusing to reproach an unwed mother. He resigns from
his pastorship and departs for Cincinnati. After further
misadventure—he ends his marriage engagement and
encounters his father, now a wandering preacher—Brent
finds fulfillment and happiness as minister in another
congregation.

At the end of 1898, his health degenerating still further,

Dunbar left the Library of Congress and commenced another
reading tour. He published another verse collection, Lyrics
of the Hearthside, and recovered any status he may have
jeopardized with The Uncalled. In the spring of 1899,
however, his health lapsed sufficiently to threaten his life. Ill
with pneumonia, the already tubercular Dunbar was advised
to rest in the mountains. He therefore moved to the Catskills
in New York State, but he continued to write while
recovering from his ailments.

In 1900, after a brief stay in Colorado, Dunbar returned to

Washington, DC. Shortly before his return he published
another collection of tales, The Strength of Gideon, in which
he continued to recount black life both before and after
slavery. Reviewers at the time favored his pre-emancipation
stories full of humor and sentiment, while ignoring more
volatile accounts of abuse and injustice. More recently these
latter stories have gained greater recognition from critics
eager to substantiate Dunbar's opposition to racism.

Dunbar followed The Strength of Gideon with his second

novel, The Love of Landry, about an ailing woman who
arrives in Colorado for convalescence and finds true
happiness with a cowboy. Like the earlier Uncalled, The Love
of Landry was deemed unconvincing in its presentation of
white characters and was dismissed as inferior to Dunbar's
tales of blacks. Dunbar suffered further critical setback with
his next novel, The Fanatics, about America at the beginning
of the Civil War. Its central characters are from white
families who differ in their North-South sympathies and
spark a dispute in their Ohio community. The Fanatics was a
commercial failure upon publication, and in the ensuing
years it has continued to be regarded as a superficial, largely
uncompelling work. Among the novel's many detractors is
Robert Bone, who wrote in The Negro in America that
Dunbar resorted to "caricature in his treatment of minor
Negro characters" and that his stereotypic portraits of black
characters only served to reinforce prejudice.

The Sport of the Gods, Dunbar's final novel, presents a far

more critical and disturbing portrait of black America. The
work centers on butler Berry Hamilton and his family. After
Berry is wrongly charged with theft by his white employers,
he is sentenced to ten years of prison labor. His remaining
family—wife, son, and daughter—consequently find
themselves targets of abuse in their southern community,
and after being robbed by the local police they head north to
Harlem. There they encounter further hardship and strife:
the son becomes embroiled in the city's seamy nightlife and
succumbs to alcoholism and crime; the naive daughter is
exploited by fellow blacks and begins a questionable dancing
career; and the mother, convinced that her husband's prison
sentence has negated their marriage, weds an abusive
profligate. A happy resolution is achieved only after Berry's
accuser confesses, while dying, that his charge was
fabricated, whereupon Berry is released from prison. He
then travels north and finds his family in disarray. But the
cruel second husband is then, conveniently, murdered, and
the parental Hamiltons are reunited in matrimony.
Although its acclaim was hardly unanimous, The Sport of the
Gods nonetheless earned substantial praise as a powerful
novel of protest. By this time, however, Dunbar was
experiencing considerable turmoil in his own life. Prior to
writing The Sport of the Gods he had suffered another lapse
of poor health, and he compounded his problems by
resorting to alcohol. And after The Sport of the Gods
appeared in 1902, Dunbar's marital situation—always
troublesome—degenerated further due to his continued
reliance on alcohol and to antagonism from his wife's
parents.

Dunbar and his wife separated in 1902, but that separation

only contributed to his continued physical and psychological
decline. The next year, following a nervous breakdown and
another bout of pneumonia, Dunbar managed to assemble
another verse collection, Lyrics of Love and Laughter, and
another short story collection, In Old Plantation Days. With
Lyrics of Love and Laughter he confirmed his reputation as
America's premier black poet. The volume contains both
sentimental and somberly realistic expressions and
depictions of black life, and it features both dialect and
standard English verse. In Old Plantation Days is comprised
of twenty-five stories set on a southern plantation during the
days of slavery. Here Dunbar once again resorted to
caricaturing his own race, portraying black slaves as faithful
and obedient, slow-witted but good-natured workers
appreciative of their benevolent white owners. Dunbar drew
the ire of many critics for his stereotyped characters, and
some of his detractors even alleged that he contributed to
racist concepts while simultaneously disdaining such
thinking.

If In Old Plantation Days was hardly a pioneering work, it

was at least a lucrative publication and one that confirmed
the preferences of much of Dunbar's public. With the short
story collection The Heart of Happy Hollow he presented a
greater variety of perspectives on aspects of black life in
America, and he even included a tale on the moral folly of
lynching. Dunbar followed The Heart of Happy Hollow with
two more poetry collections, Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow
and Howdy, Honey, Howdy, both of which featured works
from previous volumes.

Dunbar's health continued to decline even as he persisted in

producing poems. But his reliance on alcohol to temper his
chronic coughing only exacerbated his illness, and by the
winter of 1905 he was fatally ill. He died on February 9,
1906, at age thirty-three.

In the years immediately following his death, Dunbar's

standing as America's foremost black poet seemed assured,
and his dialect poems were prized as supreme achievements
in black American literature. In the ensuing decades,
however, his reputation was damaged by scholars
questioning the validity of his often stereotypic
characterizations and his apparent unwillingness to sustain
an anti-racist stance. Among his most vehement detractors
from this period was Victor Lawson, whose Dunbar
Critically Examined remains a provocative, if overly
aggressive, study.

More recently Dunbar's stature has increased markedly. He

is once again regarded as America's first great black poet,
and his standard English poems are now, perhaps
surprisingly, prized as his greatest achievements in verse.
Contemporary champions include Addison Gayle, Jr., whose
Oak and Ivy: A Biography of Paul Laurence Dunbar, is
considered a key contribution to Dunbar studies, and black
poet Nikki Giovanni, whose prose contribution to A Singer in
the Dawn: Reinterpretations of Paul Laurence Dunbar,
edited by Jay Martin, hails Dunbar as "a natural resource of
our people." For Giovanni, as for other Dunbar scholars, his
work constitutes both a history and a celebration of black
life. "There is no poet, black or nonblack, who measures his
achievement," she declared. "Even today. He wanted to be a
writer and he wrote."
CAREER
Poet, novelist, and short story writer. Worked as elevator operator; Dayton
Tattler, Dayton, OH, founder and editor, 1889-1890; Indianapolis World,
Indianapolis, IN, temporary editor, 1895; court messenger, 1896; Library of
Congress, Washington DC, assistant clerk, 1897-98. Served as guest editor,
Chicago Tribune, 1903.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
POETRY
◦ Oak and Ivy (also see below), Press of United Brethren Publishing House,
1893.
◦ Majors and Minors (also see below), Hadley & Hadley, 1896.
◦ Lyrics of Lowly Life (includes poems from Oak and Ivy and Majors and Minors),
introduction by William Dean Howells, Dodd, 1896.
◦ Lyrics of the Hearthside, Dodd, 1899.
◦ Poems of Cabin and Field (collection of eight previously published poems),
illustrated by wife, Alice Morse, photographs by Hampton Institute Camera
Club, Dodd, 1899.
◦ Candle-lightin' Time, Dodd, 1901.
◦ Lyrics of Love and Laughter, Dodd, 1903.
◦ When Malindy Sings, Dodd, 1903.
◦ Li'l Gal, Dodd, 1904.
◦ Chris'mus Is a Comin', and Other Poems, Dodd, 1905.
◦ Howdy, Howdy, Howdy, Dodd, 1905.
◦ Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow, Dodd, 1905.
◦ A Plantation Portrait, Dodd, 1905.
◦ Joggin' Erlong, Dodd, 1906.
◦ The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Dodd, 1913.
◦ Speakin' o' Christmas, and Other Christmas and Special Poems, Dodd, 1914.
◦ Little Brown Baby: Poems for Young People, edited and with biographical
sketch by Bertha Rodgers, illustrated by Erick Berry, Dodd, 1940.
◦ I Greet the Dawn: Poems, edited and with an introduction by Ashley Bryan,
Atheneum, 1978.
FICTION
◦ The Uncalled (semi-autobiographical novel), Dodd, 1898.
◦ Folks From Dixie (short stories), Dodd, 1898.
◦ The Love of Landry (novel), Dodd, 1900.
◦ The Strength of Gideon, and Other Stories, illustrated by Edward Windsor
Kemble, Dodd, 1900.
◦ The Fanatics (novel), Dodd, 1901.
◦ The Sport of the Gods (novel), Dodd, 1902, reprinted, with an introduction by
Kenny J. Williams, 1981, published in England as The Jest of Fate: A
Story of Negro Life, Jarrold, 1902.
◦ In Old Plantation Days (short stories), illustrated by B. Martin Justice, Dodd,
1903.
◦ The Heart of the Happy Hollow (short stories), Dodd, 1904.
◦ The Best Stories of Paul Laurence Dunbar, edited and with an introduction by
Benjamin Brawley, Dodd, 1938.
OTHER
◦ Dream Lovers: An Operatic Romance (libretto for operetta with music by
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor), Boosey, 1898.
◦ (Author of lyrics) In Dahomey (stage show), with music by Will Marion Cook,
produced in Boston, then at Buckingham Palace, England, in honor of the
birthday of the Prince of Wales, 1903.
◦ (Contributor) The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative
American Negroes, James Pott, 1903.
◦ (Contributor) Selected Songs Sung by Students of Tuskegee Normal and
Industrial Institute (contains "The Tuskegee Song"), Tuskegee Institute,
1904.
◦ The Life and Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar, edited and with biography by
Lida Keck Wiggins, J. L. Nichols, 1907.
◦ The Letters of Paul and Alice Dunbar: A Private History, two volumes, edited by
Eugene Wesley Metcalf, University Microfilms, 1974.
◦ The Paul Laurence Dunbar Reader, edited by Jay Martin and Gossie H.
 Hudson, Dodd, 1975.
◦ The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, edited and with introduction by
Joanne M. Braxton, University Press of Virginia (Charlottesville), 1993.
◦ Selected Poems, Dover Publications, 1997.
Also author of Uncle Eph's Christmas (one-act musical), produced in 1900.
Author of lyrics to songs such as "Jes Lak White Folk," "Down De Lover's Lane:
Plantation Croon," and "Who Knows." Contributor to newspapers and periodicals,
including Atlantic Monthly, Blue and Gray, Bookman, Chicago News Record,
Century, Dayton Herald, Denver Post, Detroit Free Press, Harper's Weekly,
Independent, Lippincott's, Nation, New York Times, and Saturday Evening Post.
Work represented in anthologies. Author's papers and letters are included in
collections at the Ohio Historical Society, the Schomburg Collection of the New
York Public Library, and the Houghton Library, Harvard University.
FURTHER READING
BOOKS
◦ Alexander, Eleanor, Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow: The Tragic Courtship and
Marriage of Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Alice Ruth Moore: A History of
Love and Violence Among the African American Elite, New York University
Press, 2002.
◦ Best, Felton O., Crossing the Color Line: A Biography of Paul Laurence
Dunbar, Kendall/Hunt Pub. Co. (Dubuque, IA), 1996.
◦ Black Literature Criticism, Gale, 1992.
◦ Brawley, Benjamin, Paul Laurence Dunbar: Poet of His People, University of
North Carolina Press, 1936.
◦ Contemporary Black Biography, Gale, Volume 8, 1995.
◦ Cunningham, Virginia, Paul Laurence Dunbar and His Song, Dodd, 1947.
◦ Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale, Volume 51: Afro-American Writers From
the Harlem Renaissance to 1940, 1987, Volume 54: American Poets,
1880-1945, Third Series, 1987.
◦ Gayle, Addison, Jr., Oak and Ivy: A Biography of Paul Laurence Dunbar,
Anchor/Doubleday, 1971.
◦ Gentry, Tony, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Melrose Square Pub., (Los Angeles),
1993.
◦ Gould, Jean, That Dunbar Boy, Dodd, 1958.
◦ Inge, M. Thomas, Maurice Duke, and Jackson R. Bryer, editors, Black
American Writers: Bibliographical Essays, Volume 1, St. Martin's Press,
1978.
◦ Lawson, Victor, Dunbar Critically Examined, Associated Publishers, 1941.
◦ Martin, Jay, editor, A Singer in the Dawn: Reinterpretations of Paul Laurence
Dunbar, Dodd, 1975.
◦ Metcalf, E. W., Paul Lawrence Dunbar: A Bibliography, Scarecrow Press, 1975.
◦ Poetry Criticism, Gale, Volume 5, 1992.
◦ Revell, Peter, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Twayne, 1979.
◦ Short Story Criticism, Gale, Volume 8, 1991.
◦ Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 2, 1979, Volume 12, 1984.
◦ Wagner, Jean, Black Poets of the United States, University of Illinois Press,
1973, pp. 73-125.
PERIODICALS
◦ A. M. E. Church Review, April, 1902, pp. 320-327.
◦ Denver Daily News, September 24, 1899.
◦ Journal of Negro History, January, 1967, pp. 1-13.
◦ Ohio Historical Quarterly, April, 1958, pp. 95-108.
◦ Texas Quarterly, summer, 1971.
◦ Voice of the Negro, January, 1906, p. 50.

back to top
Sympathy
BY PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR
I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,
And the river flows like a stream of glass;
When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals—
I know what the caged bird feels!

I know why the caged bird beats his wing

Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;
And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting—
I know why he beats his wing!

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,

When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings—
I know why the caged bird sings!
Source: Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2004)
We Wear the Mask
BY PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,

In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries

To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!

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