On Selected Poems

I love this collection of poems—it has works from every book of poetry that Dunbar put out, although selected so this text isn’t just all of his works. From Dunbar’s earliest poetry, I read all of them. His middle years, I read every other or every third. By the end of it, I was just sampling them here and there. As other commenters mention, Dunbar’s dialect poetry is where he really shines, but his poems in Standard American English are all excellent.

At first, I was having some trouble with finding the rhythm in his dialect poems, given that I don’t speak in the way these poems are written. But, I found two great resources for those trying to get a sense of it. The first is a website put together by the University of Southern Florida with numerous works of Dunbar’s poetry and, more importantly, includes audio recordings of someone writing them. The second is a glossary of dialect terms put together by the University of Dayton, in Dunbar’s hometown.

While “Sympathy,” which had a line that gave the title to Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is good, I thought many of Dunbar’s poems were much more powerful. A few of my favorites are:

• An Ante-Bellum Sermon
• A Banjo Song
• Changing Time
• Chrismus on the Plantation
• The Colored Soldiers
• The Lawyers’ Ways