It may be said that none of these poets strike a deep native strain or
sound a distinctively original note, either in matter or form. That is
true; but the same thing may be said of all the American poets down to the
writers of the present generation, with the exception of Poe and Walt
Whitman. The thing in which these black poets are mostly excelled by their
contemporaries is mere technique.


Paul Laurence Dunbar stands out as the first poet from the Negro race in
the United States to show a combined mastery over poetic material and
poetic technique, to reveal innate literary distinction in what he wrote,
and to maintain a high level of performance. He was the first to rise to a
height from which he could take a perspective view of his own race. He was
the first to see objectively its humor, its superstitions, its
shortcomings; the first to feel sympathetically its heart-wounds, its
yearnings, its aspirations, and to voice them all in a purely literary
form.

Dunbar's fame rests chiefly on his poems in Negro dialect. This appraisal
of him is, no doubt, fair; for in these dialect poems he not only carried
his art to the highest point of perfection, but he made a contribution to
American literature unlike what any one else had made, a contribution
which, perhaps, no one else could have made. Of course, Negro dialect
poetry was written before Dunbar wrote, most of it by white writers; but
the fact stands out that Dunbar was the first to use it as a medium for
the true interpretation of Negro character and psychology. And, yet,
dialect poetry does not constitute the whole or even the bulk of Dunbar's
work. In addition to a large number of poems of a very high order done in
literary English, he was the author of four novels and several volumes of
short stories.