Dunbar, the originator.(Paul Laurence Dunbar)

I once referred to accidental Dunbar scholar, understating the fact that I, like many African Americans of my generation, was born in the bed with Paul Laurence Dunbar, born in the bed, as they say, the way that some are born in the bed with gold, with Dunbar as a substantial part of my literary inheritance. My working class high school educated parents shared their love of and loyalty to Paul Laurence Dunbar's poetry and my mother recited his poems to me while I was literally in the cradle.

Dunbar's poetry, especially his dialect verse, was frequently performed from memory by other members of the community on numerous celebratory occasions, especially at Embry AME Church. Though my mother admonished me to give equal time to Dunbar's standard English verse, I took as my favorite the dialect poem "In the Morning," probably because it reminded me of mornings at 5508 Richmond Avenue. This early "hometraining" was later reinforced in graduate school by Professor Charles T. Davis's lectures on Dunbar and by his reading of some of Dunbar's classic poems. Yet I, like many others during the 1970s and '80s, passively accepted the fact that Dunbar was out of favor and that his poems were out of print.

As a young professor at William and Mary, I continued to lecture on Dunbar in my literature classes and each year I dutifully made copies of the poems for teaching purposes. But then one day while standing over the copier, I realized that I and my students deserved better, so I closed my tattered copy of The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar and began a project of reclamation. The result, as we now know, is The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, reviewed in American Literature as "the largest collection of Dunbar's poetry yet published ..." and "including some poems from earlier volumes that were omitted from the 1913 volume" as well as "poems published in periodicals but never collected, and some previously unpublished poems from the Paul Laurence Dunbar Collection of the Ohio Historical Society" (832). This labor of love produced a work distinct from the original, including an appendix of all known variants of Dunbar poems, a useable text for teaching and research, readily available at a reasonable price. So in that sense, there was nothing accidental; it was as if Charles stood on one side and Daddy on the other saying, "Well daughter, now what are you going to do?"

In recognizing the centenary of the 33-year span that might be fairly called "the Dunbar Era," we stand on the shoulders of literary giants Benjamin Brawley, J. Saunders Redding, Darwin Turner, Arna Bontemps, Addison Gayle, Jay Martin, Gossie Hudson, Peter Revell, and yes, even William Dean Howells, among others who have left their indelible if sometimes controversial, marks on Dunbar scholarship. And we say, "Thank you," to these who went before, because Mr. Dunbar, who understood and appreciated John Keats's concept of "negative capability," would want it that way. If, as Gene Jarrett so rightly observes, William Dean Howells ignored the local color-possibilities of Dunbar's "Humor and Dialect" verse, in favor of the myth of Dunbar's "pure blackness" and racial authenticity, and even if Howells, then known as the dean of American letters, wrote the review of Oak and Ivy without reading all of the poems included, we can still thank him for bringing Dunbar to the attention of a national audience. If Addison Gayle, the author of The Black Aesthetic and a leading theorist of the Black Arts Movement, was misguided in suggesting that Dunbar regarded his dialect poems as Minors and his standard English poems as Majors, we might also thank him for documenting the arc of Dunbar's career and contributing to critical audience development in the general audience biography, Oak and Ivy. No effort, including my own, has been perfect, but each has contributed to the golden legacy of Paul Laurence Dunbar.

His mother's beautiful singing of "Swing Low Sweet, Chariot," his father's stories of brave black Union soldiers, his reading of Italian and English sonnets, his ideas about romantic love and friendship, dialect works by Irwin Russell and others whose writings degraded blacks, the condescending criticism from Mr. Howells, his future wife's criticism of his vaudeville shows: these are some of the influences, both positive and negative, that shaped every aspect of Paul Laurence Dunbar's life and work. And within the scope of all of Dunbar's aspirations, his successes and failings, as well as our own, there underlies that romantic ideal, as Keats wrote in a letter to his brothers, of "Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason" (193).

My continuing argument is that we must keep Dunbar at the center of our critical discourse about his work, and that we take care to remain capable of being in "uncertainty, Mystery and doubt," while accepting the possibility that Dunbar might often have been in uncertainty and doubt about his own work. As it turns out, he had many such doubts, which become most…