PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR

With the introduction to
“Lyrics of lowly life”

BY

W. D. HOWELLS

NEW YORK

Dodd, mead and company
1922

Copyright 1895, 1896, 1897, 1898, 1901, 1902, 1903, 1904, 1905 by the Century Co.

Copyright 1897, 1898, 1901, 1902, 1903, 1904, 1905 by the Curtis publishing Co.

Copyright 1898
by the Outlook Co.

Copyright 1898
by J. B. Walker

Copyright 1903
by W. H. Gannett

Copyright 1896, 1899, 1903, 1905, 1913
by Dodd, mead and company

PRINTED IN U. S. A.

DEDICATIONS

LYRICS OF LOWLY LIFE

TO

MY MOTHER

LYRICS OF THE HEARTHSIDE

TO

ALICE

LYRICS OF LOVE AND LAUGHTER

TO

MISS CATHERINE IMPEY

LYRICS OF SUNSHINE AND SHADOW

TO

Mrs. Frank Conover
with thanks for her long belief

INTRODUCTION TO LYRICS OF LOWLY LIFE

I think I should scarcely trouble the reader with a special appeal in behalf of this book, if it had not specially appealed to me for reasons apart from the author’s race, origin, and condition.  The world is too old now, and I find myself too much of its mood, to care for the work of a poet because he is black, because his father and mother were slaves, because he was, before and after he began to write poems, an elevator-boy.  These facts would certainly attract me to him as a man, if I knew him to have a literary ambition, but when it came to his literary art, I must judge it irrespective of these facts, and enjoy or endure it for what it was in itself.

It seems to me that this was my experience with the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar when I found it in another form, and in justice to him I cannot wish that it should be otherwise with his readers here.  Still, it will legitimately interest those who like to know the causes, or, if these may not be known, the sources, of things, to learn that the father and mother of the first poet of his race in our language were negroes without admixture of white blood.