POEMS OF DUNBAR ***
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[Illustration: Paul Lawrence Dunbar]
THE COMPLETE POEMS
OF
PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR
WITH THE INTRODUCTION TO "LYRICS OF LOWLY LIFE"
BY
W. D. HOWELLS
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 1922
Copyright 1895, 1896, 1897, 1898, 1901, 1902, 1903, 1904, 1905 BY THE CENTURY CO.
Copyright 1897, 1898, 1901, 1902, 1903, 1904, 1905 BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING CO.
Copyright 1898 BY THE OUTLOOK CO.
Copyright 1898 BY J. B. WALKER
Copyright 1903 BY W. H. GANNETT
Copyright 1896, 1899, 1903, 1905, 1913 BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
PRINTED IN U. S. A.
DEDICATIONS
LYRICS OF LOWLY LIFE
TO
MY MOTHER
LYRICS OF THE HEARTHSIDE
TO
ALICE
LYRICS OF LOVE AND LAUGHTER
TO
MISS CATHERINE IMPEY
LYRICS OF SUNSHINE AND SHADOW
TO
MRS. FRANK CONOVER WITH THANKS FOR HER LONG BELIEF
INTRODUCTION TO LYRICS OF LOWLY LIFE
I think I should scarcely trouble the reader with a special appeal in behalf of this book, if it had not specially appealed to me for reasons apart from the author's race, origin, and condition. The world is too old now, and I find myself too much of its mood, to care for the work of a poet because he is black, because his father and mother were slaves, because he was, before and after he began to write poems, an elevator-boy. These facts would certainly attract me to him as a man, if I knew him to have a literary ambition, but when it came to his literary art, I must judge it irrespective of these facts, and enjoy or endure it for what it was in itself.
It seems to me that this was my experience with the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar when I found it in another form, and in justice to him I cannot wish that it should be otherwise with his readers here. Still, it will legitimately interest those who like to know the causes, or, if these may not be known, the sources, of things, to learn that the father and mother of the first poet of his race in our language were negroes without admixture of white blood. The father escaped from slavery in Kentucky to freedom in Canada, while there was still no hope of freedom otherwise; but the mother was freed by the events of the civil war, and came North to Ohio, where their son was born at Dayton, and grew up with such chances and mischances for mental training as everywhere befall the children of the poor. He has told me that his father picked up the trade of a plasterer, and when he had taught himself to read, loved chiefly to read history. The boy's mother shared his passion for literature, with a special love of poetry, and after the father died she struggled on in more than the poverty she had shared with him. She could value the faculty which her son showed first in prose sketches and attempts at fiction, and she was proud of the praise and kindness they won him among the people of the town, where he has never been without the warmest and kindest friends.
