Student Presentation #1: John on Paul Laurence Dunbar

[*Instructor's Note: All students in the class are required to give a presentation on a topic related to course material and then compose a blog post based on their topic. This is the first student presentation of the semester.]

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Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Negro Dialect 

Much of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s work was considered rather new because of his use of the “Negro dialect.”  With the world now knowing writing icons and pioneers such as Faulkner and Joyce, who experimented with usage and grammar to the point of near absurdity, this sort of writing is nothing too outlandish; however, in order to understand why it was so ground-breaking at the time, you must look at the diversity of nineteenth century poetry.  I begin with British Romanticism, in which the poetry is noticeably symbolic, speaking in large terms about metaphysical ideas.  As with Shelley’s “Ozymandias” he draws from the historical character of Ramses II to illustrate his notion of the temporality of earthly things.  The last whole idea, a mere three lines, reads:

Nothing beside remains: round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Shelley utilizes a very advanced vocabulary and to even appreciate what he is writing about, one has to have a sense of the history surrounding the poem.

            Moving forward to the end of the nineteenth century, there is a great shift. American poet, Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Richard Cory” opens with a description of the title character:

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,

We people on the pavement looked at him:

He was a gentleman from sole to crown,

Clean favored, and imperially slim. 

As an example of a ballad, this poem speaks with a much more colloquial language and serves more of a story-telling function. Moreover, anyone could read the poem without knowing any of the history behind the terms in order to understand the poem.

            Dunbar’s poetry takes its cue from the latter style.  It is based around the more concrete and colloquial.  Rather than focusing on the remote and lofty ideas which Shelley espouses, Dunbar speaks on an earthly, human basis. Yet, Dunbar brings in a new dimension to this.  Rather than simply writing in a casual, day-to-day vocabulary, he translated roughly half of his poems into what was generalized as the black vernacular, or “Negro dialect.”  This use of common language can be seen in “A Negro Love Song,” the first stanza of which contains the lines:

Hel' huh han' an' sque'z it tight,

Jump back, honey, jump back.

Hyeahd huh sigh a little sigh.   

This can be contrasted to the more standard style exhibited in his “Dreams,” which opens:

Dream on, for dreams are sweet:

Do not awaken!

Dream on, and at thy feet

Pomegranates shall be shaken.

These two poems allow for a good comparison.  “Dreams,” written in a more common mode, expresses Dunbar’s thoughts similarly to how Robinson expresses his own.

            When the shift of style and content across the 19^th Century is viewed this way, the newness of Dunbar’s style really stands out in stark contrast.  Shelley wrote his poems with formal language, historical references, and weighty references.  The later poetry expresses a much more fictional, almost story-like quality that can easily be picked up and understood by any reader without much difficulty.  Dunbar took this a step further in a number of his poems by expressing the thought in what was generalized as being the way in which black people spoke.  Although Dunbar detested the stereotyping of African American culture this way, it gave his poetry a distinctive attribute that helped to immortalize him as an icon of pre-Harlem Renaissance literature.