Thesis on "Paul Lawrence Dunbar Is Acknowledged for Being"

Thesis 6 pages (1630 words) Sources: 1+ Style: MLA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Paul Lawrence Dunbar is acknowledged for being one of the first significant African-American writers in the American Literature canon. His poetry, essays, and novels, published in the early twentieth century, gained attention worldwide because of their powerful message. His poetry received a considerable amount of attention because of its dialectic verse. Overall, Dunbar's literature is significant because it articulates a certain voice of the times. It is also important because Dunbar was rising to popularity against incredible probabilities. His success is a testament to the value of his work. The ability to see things from a different perspective and put that perspective into words is what paved the road to success for Dunbar. His poem, "We Wear the Mask" demonstrates Dunbar's ability to cross racial lines and find a common denominator for all men.

Dunbar was born to a underprivileged family but he was able to attend high school in Dayton, Ohio. These are the years when Dunbar began writing. While Dunbar did not live in the south, he did experience slavery indirectly because his mother who was a slave. He was the only African-American in his senior class and was editor in chief of the high school newspaper and president of the Philomathean Society, a literary club at his school. He graduated in 1891 and read one of poems at his graduation ceremony. It should be noted that he was already receiving attention for his poetry before he graduated, however, with some being published in the Dayton newspaper in 1888. He was also recognized for his "ambition in founding the Dayton Tattler, a black newspaper printed by his friend and classmate Orville Wright" (Laryea). While this publication folded within a years, it is worth noting that Dunbar possessed the desire to achieve and become an impressive voice in his writing community. Dunbar was asked to "compose and deliver a welcome message" (Rauch) at the Western Association of Writers met in Dayton in 1892.

In addition, he read one of his poems and was so very well received that the poem he read was published in other newspapers.

Dunbar was always looking for opportunities where he could express himself and bring attention to issues he felt were important. According to Rauch, it was his desire to "relate to the great social and political forces of his age. He sought jobs that would permit him to function as a man among men and also provide for the financial needs of his mother, who had supported him by taking in laundry from white people" (Rauch). After graduating, Dunbar works as an elevator operator in the Callahan Building. He never wasted a moment of his time, as Laryea notes that during slow times on the job, Dunbar would read his favorite poets in "Between calls, he wrote poems and articles that were published in several midwestern newspapers, although he received little or no pay for them" (Laryea). "Not only was Dunbar writing poems at this time but he began writing short stories. For six dollars, he sold his first story, "The Tenderfoot," a Western tale, to the Kellogg Newspaper Company, a syndicate firm. "Little Billy," another Western, soon followed. Neither tale added to his reputation, nor did they appear later in his volumes of short stories. Dunbar became convinced that he could get published, however, and that if his works were good enough, he might profit financially" (Laryea). Dunbar learned the literary lessons of Joel Chandler Harris and in 1896, his poetry "took first place in Negro literature" (Spiller 749). Dunbar brought the stamp of his "persuasive personality... that enriched that branch of nineteenth century literature which relates to the old-time Southern Negro" (855) to his work but that certainly did not comprise all of Dunbar's work.

James Giles notes the "complexity of his overall achievement demands a close examination" (Giles) because most of his poetry is written in dialect rather than "standard English" (Giles) and his collection of stories cannot be confined to the topic of plantation life. Dunbar was a "master craftsman not only in his use of dialect but in his standard English poems and in much of his fiction" (Laryea). "He captured the humor, pathos, and hopeful spirit of a resolute and struggling people in and out of slavery. His skillful handling of rhythm, satire, narrative, and irony places him among the best poets this country has produced" (Laryea).

According to Giles, Dunbar's literature can be divided into four categories, the "plantation tall tale; didactic stories warning his readers against certain vices; fiction decrying overt and brutal southern social repression; and protest fiction aimed at more covert northern racism" (Giles). This description allows us to see the scope of Dunbar's talent. Art imitates life and Dunbar's work illustrates just how true this adage is.

Dunbar experienced popularity that was impressive during his life. Doris Laryea claims:

Booker T. Washington called him the 'Poet Laureate of the Negro race,' and William Dean Howells lauded him as a Negro dialect poet who studied the Afro-American 'objectively and represented him as he found him to be, with humor, with sympathy, and yet with what the reader must instinctively feel to be entire truthfulness.' (Laryea)

Honesty combined with a sense of imagination is what makes Dunbar's pieces of literature so impressive. In fact, it was that imagination that helped Dunbar rise to "literary fame despite nearly insurmountable obstacles" (Laryea). He became an extensively read poet in less than a decade and, considering the time in which he lived, this event is nothing less than a "remarkable phenomenon, especially because of the adverse racial atmosphere in which he lived and wrote" (Laryea). It was just this atmosphere that propelled him into popularity, however. Laryea observes, "Few American poets before him attracted such a wide, diversified group of readers and held them for such a long, unbroken period of time. He lifted the black oral tradition to the height of art and looked at his people objectively and with pride" (Laryea). Dunbar felt compelled to express the plight of man and through his personal experience and knowledge that included the plight of the African-American during a time of increasing tension.

His most powerful poem, "We Wear the Mask," we see this tension emerge. Keeling observes that the poem is "subversive, acting against the Platation Tradition they seemed to mimic" (Keeling 26). If we read the poem understanding that the mask is a mask, "we can locate the limits of its construction" Keeling 27) and "discover the kind of suffering and frustration" (Keeling 27) that Dunbar is attempting to express. "Irony incorporates the voice of a blue poet with the pastoral voice of the poems to create a potentially dramatic effect" (Keeling 31). The poetic form, in Keeling's opinion, "subverts the speaker's narrative" (31) and this form is significant because what we hear when we read the poem is the poet speaking to a "silent yet identifiable listener" (31). This "relation" (31) between the poet and the listener is important because it forces us to consider different perspectives. The different perspectives allow us to examine the true meaning of the poem.

On the surface, the poem may seem to be about African-Americans, but it actually encompasses much more. The real meaning of the poem explores the many masks we all wear in front of other individuals. It is a mask that "grins and lies" (Dunbar 1) and it "shades our eyes" (2) from any real truth that might exist about our true humanity. The mask is meant to disguise any pain and suffering we might feel because we are so good a hiding our "torn and bleeding hearts" (4) when we put on the mask. The poet is expressing the notion that we, as a society, would rather present a false appearance rather than show our… READ MORE

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