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An impressive number of respected critics of Afro-American literature--including D. W. Culp, Benjamin Brawley, Sterling A. Brown, Joan R. Sherman, and Louis Rubin--rank Albery Allson Whitman as one of the most important black poets between Phillis Wheatley and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Of the black poets who were his near contemporaries, only Frances Ellen Watkins Harper approached him in productivity. In the second half of the nineteenth century Harper had the larger audience, principally because Harper, an accomplished and peripatetic elocutionist and lecturer, declaimed her poetry from hundreds of platforms throughout the eastern and southern United States. Whitman also recited his own poetry before numerous audiences. Neither Harper nor any other black poet before Dunbar, unless it was George Moses Horton, seems to have been so much a born poet as Whitman. His verse tends toward the sensuous in sound and imagery, and Whitman resembles Edgar Allen Poe, rather than Walt Whitman, in his allegiance to traditional aesthetics and in his philosophy of composition.
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