Intimate intercessions in the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar.

... Then Br'er Adams, a white-haired patriarch, knelt and "took up the cross." --"Anner 'Lizer's Stumblin' Block" (Dunbar, Best Stories)

Much of the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar reveals the intimate intercessions of a tormented poet, figuratively "taking up the cross." Dunbar's meteoric rise as the most famous black writer in the world at the end of the nineteenth century, his prolific offerings over a short 14-year career (1892-1906), his ambivalence about the branding of his own poetic genius, his precarious stardom in a society that insisted on "separate-but-equal" race relations, and his tragic, unfulfilled personal life represent the subject matter of many intimate intercessions with which the poet wrestled emotionally and spiritually.

Named for the Apostle Paul, the Biblical figure who helped to establish the Christian church, Dunbar took seriously his parents' charge to be a great man who would carry the word to his people. Like Paul, Dunbar suffered as the chosen expounder of his own gospel, the African American literary tradition. Though he experimented with many literary traditions and read extensively the works of Tennyson, Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley, and Poe, among others, he was painfully aware that his own work inspired a debate on the merits of his standard English works as opposed to his more popular dialect pieces that appeared to some too close to the minstrel and plantation traditions. Sterling Brown, in his book Negro Poetry and Drama (1937), considered Dunbar a highly gifted man who "took up the Negro peasant as a clown, and made him a likeable person." Brown recognized that Dunbar benefited from a heritage of folk sense that poured out in "flashes of unforced gay humor," "well-turned folk phrases," and "virtuoso rhythms." However, Brown believed that Dunbar was too strongly influenced by the local color poetry of Irwin Russell and the plantation formula of Thomas Nelson Page, and consequently compromised his interpretation of folk life by omitting mention of the hardships that were undoubtedly a part of it. On the other side of the debate, according to Herbert Woodward Martin and Ronald Primeau in the…