The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar by Paul Laurence Dunbar
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Available online at Project Gutenberg

As the title suggests, this is all the published poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar. With a career pre-dating the Harlem Renaissance, during which lyric poetry ruled the roost, Dunbar may not be as well-known today as several of the African American poets who came later, but it’s not for being any less masterful.

The collection includes a wide variety of lyric forms from simple quatrains to intermediate length poems of several pages. The content and tones also vary, and there is often a sense of whimsy in the poems that goes beyond just being lyrical in form. Dunbar wrote both in dialect and in standard English. He was a big fan of James Whitcomb Riley’s dialectal work, as a poem in Riley’s honor attests. The dialect poems are easy enough to follow and are a pleasure to read. Dunbar was by no means limited to dialectal writing; he also wrote in Standard English cleverly, and the juxtaposition of his very “proper” poems and the dialectal ones shows a great range.

I’d highly recommend this collection for poetry readers, particularly those who enjoy lyric and dialectal poems.

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