Paul Lawrence Dunbar had the benefit of a parent who had escaped from slavery
on the Underground Railroad, gone to Canada, then returned to the United States
and donned the Union uniform and fought in the Civil War and a mother who,
though not particularly well educated prized education. And that background of
militancy and learning certainly --he took those things in with his mother's
milk, as it were. I think his mother was a much greater influence upon him
than his father, however. But, in any case, he shares that ambition to succeed
through talent that is so characteristic of at least one tier of the African
American community. And, of course, it helps that he's a genius. It's no
easier for him, but, on the other hand, it's more certain that he's going to
try. And so he does quite spectacularly. He is part of that Washington
community, for example, we were talking about. He has a position at the
Library of Congress, a plum of a job for those times at that place. His wife
doesn't quite like the position for some reason. He gives it up and tries to
make his living as a poet, which must have been quite an insane risk for a
black man in 1900 with very little behind him except the recognition of William
Dean Howells by that time, that he could actually make a living as a poet. But
he doesn't do such a bad job.
He represents the best of what is possible and from what I do know of Dunbar
his tragedy isn't that he's a poet in a philistine culture. Poet's don't do
well in America. They never have. But it's that Dunbar is being appreciated
as the wrong kind of poet. His life is short. He's dead by 1906 and before he
dies, he says, "I believe that man," speaking of Howells, "did me no favor at
all. He fixed an identity for me,"that he increasingly came to resent. And
so in his poetry and in his writings, his novel, the autobiographical novel,
The Uncalled, the protagonist is a white protagonist who is to
represent him, so that there is a schizophrenia in Dunbar that, curiously
enough, Dubois, though I suppose he did not specifically have Dunbar in mind --
at least he says so -- Dubois identifies and underscores in the book three
years later in 1902, The Souls of Black Folk, when he talks about the
divided self, that desetting division within the soul of the African American,
an American negro, two warring bodies and two warring souls in one body. And
certainly Dunbar exemplified that kind of polarity
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