Dawn

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1912

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Literary Context

Although by contemporary standards William Dean Howells, in his otherwise commendatory review of the collection in which “Dawn” first appeared, comes across as unforgivingly patronizing, politically incorrect, and more than a bit racist when he describes the strength of Dunbar’s poetry as “white thinking and white feeling in a black man,” Howells’s intended compliment speaks to the heart of Dunbar’s position in the American literary canon. Was he the local colored poet who, like other regionalists of his era, captured in verse the patois of plantation slaves and backwoods blacks of the postbellum Midwest? Or was he, as he thought of himself, America’s Keats or Wordsworth 2.0, crafting elegant lines of lyrical poetry about nature, love, mortality, and art, revealing a mastery of the often tricky prosody of the British Romantics?

Remarkably, across his 20 years of prolific production, Dunbar managed to make both literary contexts part of his oeuvre. The tension between the two voices (underscored by the Major, Minor categories of the collection) came to be a profoundly unsettling element of Dunbar’s celebrity—he wrestled with the dilemma that his dialect poems made him financially secure, but he wanted his legacy to be the elegant and structured poems in the Romantic tradition. His deliberate use of both literary contexts suggests his range, versatility, and skill. His so-called “Minor” poems, introduced with touching sympathy and unpretentious affection, use both humor and irony to delve into the joys and sorrows of the African American culture; his so-called “Major” poems revealed a mastery of traditional poetic materials and conventional poetic techniques, as well as his familiarity with how a poem should look and sound.

Historical Context

Paul Laurence Dunbar’s position in the history of American poetry is defined by the year of his birth: 1872—less than 10 years after the end of the American Civil War. Both his parents were freed slaves, and Dunbar was raised by a mother who took every opportunity to remind her precocious bookworm son about the South’s anti-literacy laws. In the Deep South before Reconstruction, teaching slaves to read and write was a crime worthy of mandatory imprisonment. That dilemma opens the question of how Dunbar as a Black man and a Black poet fit into his historical timelines. Dunbar was born too late to be a compelling 19th-century Victorian poet with that generation’s staid and unquestioning sense of using poetry to elegantly, eloquently offer wisdom to Readers (always a capital R) who came to the Poet (always a capital P) for insight on how to live a moral and spiritually vital life. He was born too early, however, to be part of the avant-garde movement eventually known as Modernism with its daring, angry willingness to upend all assumptions about how a poem looks, sounds, and the poem’s very subjects. In short, Dunbar was too old to be a Longfellow, too young to be an Ezra Pound, and too Black to be either.

Dunbar’s most prolific years coincide with a kind of power vacuum in American poetry. Longfellow died in 1882, when Dunbar was 10. Dunbar came of age at a time when no one read the poetry of the two seminal figures who later defined 19th century American poetry: Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. What complicated Dunbar’s historical positioning, however, was his race. Few African Americans could expect interest from major publishing houses or even the newspapers and magazines that catered to the middle class. African American poets sought publication in a handful of Northern periodicals owned by Blacks and sold to a mainly Black readership. Although there was a market for Dunbar’s dialect verse, there was not the same level of interest in the poems he regarded as his finest efforts—works that reflected the careful and supple lines of the great British Romantics but were, by definition, not Black enough. The dilemma haunted Dunbar’s legacy: Indeed, the generation of academics born after the Black literature boom of the 1960s and 70s raised a question difficult to resolve: Was Dunbar the whitest poet Black America ever produced or the Blackest poet white America ever produced?