Paul Laurence Dunbar was one of the first influential poets in the movement that would become the Harlem Renaissance. Older than some of his peers within that group, he published his first poems in 1889, in the Dayton Herald, also serving as class president and class poet despite being the only black student in his grade level. He initially wanted to become an attorney, but his mother did not have enough money to send him off to university, so he started looking for work in his downtown, Dayton, Ohio, but found that there were few openings for black applicants. He found work as an elevator operator, so he was able to pursue his writing during down time, which he used to generate short stories, articles and poems – including some in the dialect form that would make him famous (Poetry Foundation, n.d.). He addressed the Western Association of Writers in 1892, which brought him into a network with James Newton Matthews and James Whitcomb Riley, whose support motivated him to publish his first poetry collection, called Oak and Ivy, containing both dialect poems and works in standard English. In 1903, he published the collection Lyrics of Love and Laughter, which cemented his standing as the premier black poet in the United States. In 1906, when he passed away at the young age of 33, he still had this standing, but later critics would question his use of stereotype and unwillingness to be more of an activist against racism, although his stature has increased again in recent years (Poetry Foundation, n.d.).
Langston Hughes came into his artistic maturity a couple of decades after Dunbar, with the elder poetry’s legacy having opened the door for other blacks to enter the arts and find success in a career. While Dunbar had worked without much in the way of peer support, Hughes was just one of a collection of black intellectuals who brought the Harlem Renaissance into reality. Early, his works contained a great deal of dialect and received some of the same criticism that Dunbar’s work had received for apparently giving into the same racist stereotypes, but what was really at work was a conscious choice by Hughes to find identification points “with plain black people – not because it required less effort and sophistication, but precisely because he saw more truth and profound significance in doing so” (Poetry Foundation, n.d.). While Dunbar paved the way for black poets, there is still no black poet or writer who has done such a faithful job in recording the frustrations and other nuances of black life. While James Baldwin provided a more visceral work in Invisible Man, Hughes is the chronicler, not the dystopian. He worked many different types of jobs: truck farmer, waiter, cook, nightclub doorman and sailor, and this experience gave him exposure to a lot of different walks of life and allowed him to identify with the plight of many different people. While Dunbar’s work fluctuated between caricature (used sarcastically to expose an anger than many readers ended up missing) and dissidence, Hughes’ work simply shows the reader what is going on for the black people that he sees in the world around him and describes for his audience. This difference is what made Hughes’ work so consistently popular, while Dunbar’s popularity has ebbed and flowed depending on the critics.
Dunbar’s poem “We Wear the Mask” contains the outrage of a person forced to live an accommodating life while boiling with frustration on the inside. He notes that the black person has to “wear the mask that grins and lies” (1) because it is the debt that blacks “pay to human guile” (3). At the same time, on the inside there are “torn and bleeding hearts” (4), only showing outwardly in the “mouth with myriad subtleties” (5). The upshot for this is that, for Dunbar, life is an angry, frustrating experience that forces him to repress his anger and frustration, compels him to act as though nothing is wrong even as he grows up in a town that allows him to serve as its high school class president and serve as that class’ poetic voice but will not allow him to work for a newspaper or a restaurant, instead consigning him to the menial job of operating an elevator.
Hughes’ poem “Theme for English B” describes a similar experience – getting along as a young black man in his society. Like Dunbar, Hughes’ speaker is “the only colored student in [his] class” (10), and on that first night of class, the assignment is to “go home and write a page tonight” (1-2) with the only admonition that the students “let that page come out of [them]” (3) in order to render it authentic. So he writes about how being black will lead to differences, despite the fact that he likes the same things as the white people in his class. He asks the question, “So will my page be colored that I write? Being me, it will not be white. But it will be a part of you, instructor” (25-30). Despite the fact that blacks and whites often want to remain separate, Hughes points out that they are part of one country, like it or not, despite the fact that his white instructor is “somewhat more free” (40). So these two poets from the Harlem Renaissance have somewhat different takes on an experience that remains, in many important ways, largely similar for blacks and whites in our own time.
References
Dunbar, P.L. (1896). We wear the mask. Poetry Foundation. Retrieved from:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44203
Hughes, L. (1951). Theme for English B. Poetry Foundation. Retrieved from:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/47880
Poetry Foundation (n.d.). Langston Hughes. Retrieved from:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/langston-hughes
Poetry Foundation (n.d.). Paul Laurence Dunbar. Retrieved from:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/paul-laurence-dunbar
