If I were a bear, And a big bear too, I shouldn’t much care If it froze or snew; I shouldn’t much mind If it snowed or friz— I’d be all fur-lined With a coat like his!
For I’d have fur boots and a brown fur wrap, And brown fur knickers and a big fur cap. I’d have a fur muffle-ruff to cover my jaws, And brown fur mittens on my big brown paws. With a big brown furry-down up to my head, I’d sleep all the winter in a big fur bed.
About this Poem
“Furry Bear” appears in A. A. Milne’s collection of children’s verse Now We Are Six (E. P. Dutton & Co., 1927), illustrated by E. H. Shephard. In Three Cheers for Pooh: A Celebration of the Best Bear in All the World (Egmont, 2001), writer and radio broadcaster Brian Sibley remarks, “A. A. Milne told a friend that his son’s encounter at London Zoo with the American black bear, Winnie, had inspired him to write a couple of poems and, possibly, even a story. True or not, Now We Are Six, published in 1927, contained ‘Furry Bear,’ a verse in which the poet imagines what it would be like to be a bear.” Describing the poem’s accompanying illustration, Sibley later writes, “Thanks to E. H. Shepherd, [Winnie the Pooh] is discovered coming face to face with his famous namesake at the London Zoo in the illustrations to a remarkably Poohish ‘Hum,’ entitled ‘Furry Bear.’”
About the Poet
Alan Alexander Milne, born on January 18, 1882, in Kilburn, London, was a children’s writer, poet, playwright, and novelist. He is best known for his character Winnie-the-Pooh, whose first appearance by that name was in the children’s book Winnie-the-Pooh (Methuen, 1926). He died on January 31, 1956.
I’ve crashed a party with an infinity pool and several nude men: a Fire Island home at the back of a walkway long enough to outlast a pop song’s bridge and some chorus, flanked by phragmites on either side, tall and same-faced, so all but reed bulk hides out from the exterior. Myself included, close to everyone here has a body of one approximate build. What would it say if I stay? Comfort’s not so comfy here, but I stay and try to have a good time: periodic beach guest, mainly through favors from men whose wealth eclipses mine and most of humankind. I know firsthand why queers come to this place, obliterate coherence, take, go, take, till we’ve consumed enough to leave. Someone riding the stiffest substance cocktail he can muster GROANS he’s got to pee and can’t, his functions stalled in the twist and now. What he can still swing is a smile. Excess soaks the sundecks and each redwood inch of the mini villa with a sweet-hot stickiness. There’s much more to take in, with nowhere to go.
About this Poem
“Cherry Grove and the Fire Island Pines—historic, adjoining gay communities on Fire Island—are beautiful, easy to reach from New York City, a blast if you’re with trusted friends, and a hotbed of race and class conflict. The ferries stop operating overnight, so you’re stuck once the last one leaves. One time, while discussing rental price-gouging in the Pines and suggesting that the safety Fire Island offers queer people should be accessible to all income levels, a gay man told me, ‘It’s Long Island, not insulin.’ I’m interested in what we willingly permit for the sake of our own enjoyment.” —Kyle Carrero Lopez
About the Poet
Kyle Carrero Lopez is the author of MUSCLE MEMORY ([PANK] Books, 2022), winner of the 2020 [PANK] Books Contest. He co-founded LEGACY, a Brooklyn-based production collective by and for Black queer artists. Lopez is a 2022 Tin House Scholar.
AS oftentimes the too resplendent sun Hurries the pallid and reluctant moon Back to her sombre cave, ere she hath won A single ballad from the nightingale, So doth thy Beauty make my lips to fail, And all my sweetest singing out of tune.
And as at dawn across the level mead On wings impetuous some wind will come, And with its too harsh kisses break the reed Which was its only instrument of song, So my too stormy passions work me wrong, And for excess of Love my Love is dumb.
But surely unto Thee mine eyes did show Why I am silent, and my lute unstrung; Else it were better we should part, and go, Thou to some lips of sweeter melody, And I to nurse the barren memory Of unkissed kisses, and songs never sung.
About the Poem
“Silentium Amoris” is Latin for “The Silence of Love,” a suiting title for the love of nature and the nature of love, but also the unsaid love. It also pairs well with the other Latin titles from The Fourth Movement, all which center around the theme of love and its beauty and costs.
“Silentium Amoris” is heartfelt and simply beautiful. Wilde is the voice of a lover who is confessing to the one he loves. (A quick note: some who have analyzed the poem refer to the love as that of a woman, but as most of you probably know, it is most likely another man that he writes this poem about. After, the title says it is the silence of love, and Wilde was famous for his quote from his trial for being homosexual describing his sexuality as “the love that dare not speak its name.”) He wishes to sing to his love whose beauty is enough to make him dumb. He finds he cannot sing the songs that he could sing so sweetly, and he notices he cannot even speak, “his lips fail him.”
However, he tells his love that he must have understood by looking into his eyes, the reason for his silence and his “unstrung lute.” If he didn’t, he would rather part ways with him for that would mean he could not read his eyes and judge how speechless his presence made him.
His love could then go to some man who would not stammer or lose his words or his tune while singing to him while he would nurse the memory he had of his love, dreaming of “unkissed kisses.”
This poem portrays two very strong emotions- love and self-respect. Although he loves this man, he would rather he left to be with another man than stay with Wilde if he did not reciprocate.
About the Poet
Oscar Wilde was an Anglo-Irish playwright, novelist, poet, and critic. He is regarded as one of the greatest playwrights of the Victorian Era. In his lifetime he wrote nine plays, one novel, and numerous poems, short stories, and essays.
Wilde was a proponent of the Aesthetic movement, which emphasized aesthetic values more than moral or social themes. This doctrine is most clearly summarized in the phrase “art for art’s sake.”
Besides literary accomplishments, he is also famous, or perhaps infamous, for his wit, flamboyance, and affairs with men. He was tried and imprisoned for his homosexual relationship (then considered a crime) with the son of an aristocrat.
In 1891, Wilde began an affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, nicknamed “Bosie,” who became both the love of his life and his downfall. Wilde had been married, but the marriage ended in 1893.
In April 1895, Oscar sued Bosie’s father for libel as the Marquis of Queensberry had accused him of homosexuality. Oscar’s case was unsuccessful, and he was himself arrested and tried for gross indecency. He was sentenced to two years of hard labor for the crime of sodomy. During his time in prison he wrote De Profundis, a dramatic monologue and autobiography, which was addressed to Bosie.
Upon his release in 1897, he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol, revealing his concern for inhumane prison conditions. He spent the rest of his life wandering Europe, staying with friends and living in cheap hotels. He died of cerebral meningitis on November 30, 1900, penniless, in a cheap Paris hotel.
The browns, the olives, and the yellows died, And were swept up to heaven; where they glowed Each dawn and set of sun till Christmastide, And when the land lay pale for them, pale-snowed, Fell back, and down the snow-drifts flamed and flowed.
From off your face, into the winds of winter, The sun-brown and the summer-gold are blowing; But they shall gleam with spiritual glinter, When paler beauty on your brows falls snowing, And through those snows my looks shall be soft-going.
About this Poem
“Winter Song,” unpublished at the time of Wilfred Owen’s death, was first collected in The Poems of Wilfred Owen (Chatto & Windus, 1931). In “Wilfred Owen’s Influence on Three Generations of Poets,” published in The Modern Review, vol. 242, no. 3 (September 1978), Sasi Bhusan Das, former director of the Institute of English in Calcutta, writes, “[T]he idea of spiritual rebirth in Owen’s ‘Winter Song’ is confirmed by the next few lines of its first stanza: ‘And when the land lay pale for them, pale-snowed, / Fell back, and down the snow-drifts flamed and flowed.’ [. . .] It will be further noted that in his ‘Winter Song’ Owen also sings of a symbolic spring [. . .] in the same manner as [T. S.] Eliot in the opening passage of ‘Little Gidding’ does of the ‘Midwinter spring.’ Thus, in a sense, Owen’s ‘Winter Song,’ like Eliot’s passage, is a song of ‘Midwinter spring’ which is ‘sempiternal’ for it is not in ‘time’s covenant’ but ‘suspended in time.’” Jon Stallworthy, professor emeritus at the University of Oxford, notes in his titular biography of Owen that the poem is one of two “addressed to Arthur Newboult, the seven-year-old son of Edinburgh friends.”
About the Poet
On March 18, 1893, Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was born in Shropshire, England. After the death of his grandfather in 1897, the Owen family moved to Birkenhead, where Owen was educated at the Birkenhead Institute. After another move in 1906, he continued his studies at the technical school in Shrewsbury. Interested in the arts at a young age, Owen began writing poetry as a teenager.
In 1911, Owen matriculated at London University, but after failing to receive a scholarship, he spent a year as a lay assistant to a vicar in Oxfordshire. In 1913, he went on to teach in France at the Berlitz School of English, where he met the poet Laurent Tailhade. He returned from France in 1915 and enlisted in the Artists Rifles. After training in England, Owen was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment in 1916.
Owen was wounded in combat in 1917 and, diagnosed with shell shock, was evacuated to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh. There, he met another patient, poet Siegfried Sassoon, who served as a mentor and introduced him to well-known literary figures such as Robert Graves and H. G. Wells.
It was at this time Owen wrote many of his most important poems, including “Anthem for Doomed Youth” and “Dulce et Decorum Est.” His poetry often graphically illustrated the horrors of warfare, the physical landscapes that surrounded him, and the human body in relation to those landscapes. His verse stands in stark contrast to the patriotic poems of war written by earlier poets of Great Britain, such as Rupert Brooke. A gay man, Owen also often celebrated male beauty and comradery in his poems.
Owen rejoined his regiment in Scarborough in June 1918, and, in August, he returned to France. In October he was awarded the Military Cross for bravery at Amiens. He was killed on November 4, 1918, while attempting to lead his men across the Sambre-Oise canal at Ors. He was twenty-five years old. The news reached his parents on November 11, Armistice Day.
While few of Owen’s poems appeared in print during his lifetime, TheCollectedPoems of Wilfred Owen (New Directions, 1963), with an introduction by Sassoon, was first published in December 1920 and reissued several times. Owen has since become one of the most admired poets of World War I. A review of Owen’s poems published on December 29, 1920, just two years after his death, read, “Others have shown the disenchantment of war, have unlegended [sic] the roselight and romance of it, but none with such compassion for the disenchanted nor such sternly just and justly stern judgment on the idyllisers.”
About Owen’s post-war audience, the writer Geoff Dyer said,
To a nation stunned by grief, the prophetic lag of posthumous publication made it seem that Owen was speaking from the other side of the grave. Memorials were one sign of the shadow cast by the dead over England in the twenties; another was a surge of interest in spiritualism. Owen was the medium through whom the missing spoke.
Old Time has turned another page Of eternity and truth; He reads with a warning voice to age, And whispers a lesson to youth. A year has fled o’er heart and head Since last the yule log burnt; And we have a task to closely ask, What the bosom and brain have learnt? Oh! let us hope that our sands have run With wisdom’s precious grains; Oh! may we find that our hands have done Some work of glorious pains. Then a welcome and cheer to the merry new year, While the holly gleams above us; With a pardon for the foes who hate, And a prayer for those who love us.
We may have seen some loved ones pass To the land of hallow’d rest; We may miss the glow of an honest brow And the warmth of a friendly breast: But if we nursed them while on earth, With hearts all true and kind, Will their spirits blame the sinless mirth Of those true hearts left behind? No, no! it were not well or wise To mourn with endless pain; There’s a better world beyond the skies, Where the good shall meet again. Then a welcome and cheer to the merry new year, While the holly gleams above us; With a pardon for the foes who hate, And a prayer for those who love us.
Have our days rolled on serenely free From sorrow’s dim alloy? Do we still possess the gifts that bless And fill our souls with joy? Are the creatures dear still clinging near? Do we hear loved voices come? Do we gaze on eyes whose glances shed A halo round our home? Oh, if we do, let thanks be pour’d To Him who hath spared and given, And forget not o’er the festive board The mercies held from heaven. Then a welcome and cheer to the merry new year, While the holly gleams above us; With a pardon for the foes who hate, And a prayer for those who love us.
About the Poet
Eliza Cook was born on December 24, 1818, in London, England. Self-educated as a child, she began writing poems at the age of fifteen and published her first poetry collection, Lays of a Wild Harp: A Collection of Metrical Pieces (John Bennett, 1835), two years later.
Cook also published poems in magazines such as Metropolitan Magazine, New Monthly Magazine, and Weekly Dispatch, which published her most popular poem, “The Old Arm-Chair.” In 1838, Cook published her second collection, Melaia and Other Poems, which was well received in both England and America. It was reissued in 1844.
Known as a poet of the working class, Cook wrote poems that advocated for political freedom for women and addressed questions of class and social justice. Despite her popularity, she was criticized for the ways in which she bucked gender conventions in both her writing and her life; Cook wore male clothing and had a relationship with American actress Charlotte Cushman, to whom she addressed a number of her poems.
In 1849, Cook started a penny-biweekly called Eliza Cook’s Journal, which contained poems, reviews, and social essays written mostly by her for a female audience. She continued the publication until 1854. Plagued by bad health in the last years of her life, Cook published little; she died on September 23, 1889, in Wimbledon, England.
Too many cracks precede the spectacular breaking. Each
story begins in a different dark- ness. And light: think how it catches
on any surface (pane or hinge or keyhole) and
out of night (out of nothing), all at once: a window,
a door. It’s a metaphor (and then it isn’t), darkness.
When I dream again it’s the old kitchen—I
open the oven and sound, like ropes of heat, drifts
out; a shimmering. Familiar and confusing. Uncanny,
and then unmistakable: our voices, recorded. Playback
and loop, now—every aching word we whispered here.
About this Poem
“I’m fascinated by the ways in which secrets are kept and revealed in families, how sometimes what can’t be acknowledged doesn’t drop out of sight so much as it becomes ambient, atmospheric. Coming to recognize the truth, then, is like a trick the eye plays: suddenly it is possible to see what was always there, unrecognized, and the world becomes newly tangible and remarkably uncertain at once, charged with the ordinary strangeness of a dream.”
—Nancy Kuhl
I think all families have their secrets. I know mine has numerous ones: I’m gay, my niece is transgendered, several members have had affairs on their spouses, and the list goes on, probably more than I know. So, when I read this poem, it seemed appropriate for this time of year. It’s the holiday season when everyone keeps their secrets as bottled up as possible. Sometimes, the secrets come out in whispers, sometimes in dribbles, sometimes with shouts, and sometimes not at all. Secrets can tear a family apart even though most believe keeping the secrets can keep the family together. Some secrets are worth keeping for self-preservation, but mostly, they are just a lie of omission.
There were a lot of pictures I could have used for this post: a family gathered around a holiday table, someone looking out a window with his image reflecting off the windowpane, “any surface (pane or / hinge or keyhole,” a guy sleeping, “ When I dream again,” or a guy opening an oven, “open the oven and sound.” However, I thought that someone looking at their reflection in a mirror was “ a metaphor / (and then it isn’t).” Because when we look in the mirror, we see our ourselves, and hopefully, we see who we know we are, not the secrets that we keep.
About the Poet
Nancy Kuhl is the author of several collections, most recently On Hysteria (Shearsman Books, 2022) and Granite (A Published Event, 2021). She lives in Black Rock, Connecticut.
I am the Dark Cavalier; I am the Last Lover: My arms shall welcome you when other arms are tired; I stand to wait for you, patient in the darkness, Offering forgetfulness of all that you desired.
I ask no merriment, no pretense of gladness, I can love heavy lids and lips without their rose; Though you are sorrowful you will not weary me; I will not go from you when all the tired world goes.
I am the Dark Cavalier; I am the Last Lover; I promise faithfulness no other lips may keep; Safe in my bridal place, comforted by darkness, You shall lie happily, smiling in your sleep.
About this Poem
“The Dark Cavalier” appears in Margaret Widdemer’s collection The Old Road to Paradise (Henry Holt and Company, 1918). Oft republished and heavily anthologized, the poem is recognized as one of Widdemer’s best. Poet Margery Swett Mansfield, in a review of Widdemer’s work published in Poetry magazine, vol. 33, no. 5 (Feb 1929), calls it “Margaret Widdemer at her emotional best [. . .].” In The Literary Digest, vol. 57, no. 6 (May 11, 1918), the editors claim that Widdemer “has seldom done a finer piece of work than when she wrote this haunting lyric [. . .].” Finally, in a biographical note at the end of The Second Book of Modern Verse (Houghton Mifflin, 1920), critic, editor, and poet Jessie Belle Rittenhouse writes, “She is a poet of much delicacy, and several of her poems, notably ‘The Dark Cavalier’ in this volume, are among the best lyric work of the period.”
About the Poet
Margaret Widdemer, born on September 30, 1884, in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, was a poet, novelist, and children’s writer. She was the author of several titles, including the collection The Old Road to Paradise (Henry Holt and Company, 1918), which won the 1919 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in a split decision with Carl Sandburg’s Cornhuskers (Henry Holt and Company, 1918). She died on July 14, 1978.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on December 9, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
I debated using the picture above because it’s more explicit than I usually use, but I decided it fit the poem too perfectly and was artistic enough to not be too explicit.
Why not a meadow? Why not a little clearing and a stream to wade in? Why not take our pants off, a little respite from our partners who couldn’t see us, who’d never see us no matter what we did? What we did was wrong, the way we did it. It was miraculous, it took hold long after we trudged back to our spouses. So many years harboring a secret. Thank you for telling me about growing up in Queens, daddy’s milk truck skittering about Northern Boulevard looking for your favorite ice cream. And the darkness: how shades were drawn, how your mother would never recover from your father. How many of us have been stymied by those early dramas until we married them? So many years, so many hungry years after. Thank you for the apricots in the mail, thank you more for appearing at my door with so little time left: no going back to field our regrets. Old as we are, you are here and now, why not a meadow and a clearing?
About this Poem
“This poem was inspired by the pleasure of a long, deep friendship. Unmediated intimacy, with its concomitant trust and pleasure in another person, is a rare and treasured gift—even more so if it survives our histories and passionate mistakes. The poem aspires to give texture to that journey, to those feelings.”—Ira Sadoff
About the Poet
Ira Sadoff was born in Brooklyn, New York, on March 7, 1945, of Russian-Jewish ancestry. He earned a BA in industrial and labor relations from Cornell University in 1966 and an MFA from the University of Oregon in 1968.
In 1975, Sadoff published his first collection of poetry, Settling Down (Houghton Mifflin). Since then, he has published several poetry collections, most recently Country, Living (2020), True Faith (2012), and Barter (2003), which delves into his personal past, specifically concerning love and bereavement, as well as the historical and global past, referencing Beethoven, Vietnam, and the fall of Communism. Other recent collections include Grazing (1998), which included poems that were awarded the American Poetry Review’s Leonard Shestack Prize, the Pushcart Poetry Prize, and the George Bogin Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America; Emotional Traffic(1989); A Northern Calendar (1981), which charts the arrival and passage of the seasons; and Palm Reading in Winter (1978).
About Sadoff’s work, the poet Gerald Stern has said, “Nowhere else in American poetry do I come across a passion, a cunning, and a joy greater than his. And a deadly accuracy. I see him as one of the supreme poets of his generation.” On awarding Sadoff the Bogin Memorial Prize, the poet Alan Shapiro said,
Beyond the energetic syntax and the astonishing range of idiom and tone, what I so admire in these poems is the just yet always unpredictable weaving together of individual and collective life, the insightful, almost seamless integration of personal experience in all its unredemptive [sic] anguish with the heterogeneous realities of American culture.
Sadoff is also the author of three works of prose, most recently History Matters: Contemporary Poetry on the Margins of American Culture (2009), which, through the work of poets like Czesław Miłosz and Frank O’Hara, argues that poets live and write within history; An Ira Sadoff Reader: Selected Poetry and Prose (1992), a collection of stories, poems, and essays about contemporary poetry; and Uncoupling (1982), a novel.
Sadoff is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 1973, he was a fellow at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and in 1974, he was the Alan Collins Fellow in Poetry and Prose at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. His poetry has been widely anthologized, most recently in The Best American Poetry Series, in 2008.
Sadoff has served as poetry editor of the Antioch Review, and was cofounder of the Seneca Review. He has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and in the MFA programs at the University of Virginia and Warren Wilson College. He previously served as the Arthur Jeremiah Roberts Professor of English at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.
Stars and people and daffodils won’t last forever. Hands down, forever will succumb to a single sensation, one last heaven, one last shudder lost voice carried over the winds of the body, the canyons of the hands in a shower, snow or warm? Last ashes of satisfaction dance above an open mouth, teeth like light in an emptied room, the wet music of the tongue. Somebody will find the edge to all of humanity’s joy, a flood, a punctuation will flood her with its certainty, or them, or us, all at once, and that lonely breach will ripple through, on and out, with indefatigable atoms. Those asking hands never to slow their speeding ship one last starry daffodil excess will blow its soft dunes, that lost voice, back, over everything that ever came before. Until emptied out. And if you slow, if you slowly reach across your own body until you feel it, too, even now? You can come to an end, even now. It lasts, wanting to.
About this Poem
“I often wonder about pleasure and how we talk about it, and about what happens in the silences beyond that is more alluring still. Those things are marked by the limits of our imagination, which it is the work of poetry to understand and expand. I wrote ‘The Last Orgasm’ in the spillover energy from a prose project on the sublime. In some ways, this poem serves as a meditation on the sublime edge between what we can witness and what we cannot bear to. It is also simply a love poem.”—Tobias Wray
About the Poet
Tobias Wray is a writer, teacher, and arts organizer.
Poems, reviews, and other writing appear widely in literary journals, including on Verse Daily, Poem-a-Day, Impossible Archetype, The Arkansas International, Hunger Mountain, and The Georgia Review. His work has also been anthologized in Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology (Autumn House Press) and elsewhere.
An assistant professor at the University of Central Oklahoma where he directs UCO’s Creative Writing Programs, his interests range from experimental poetics to queer and speculative literatures to literary translation. He served as director of undergraduate and graduate creative writing programs at the University of Idaho until 2021. He was a poetry editor for Cream City Review and, until 2017, helped to coordinate Eat Local :: Read Local, a program that partners restaurants with poets from Milwaukee and Madison, Wisconsin.
He is a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow.
The sun hath shed its kindly light, Our harvesting is gladly o’er Our fields have felt no killing blight, Our bins are filled with goodly store.
From pestilence, fire, flood, and sword We have been spared by thy decree, And now with humble hearts, O Lord, We come to pay our thanks to thee.
We feel that had our merits been The measure of thy gifts to us, We erring children, born of sin, Might not now be rejoicing thus.
No deed of our hath brought us grace; When thou were nigh our sight was dull, We hid in trembling from thy face, But thou, O God, wert merciful.
Thy mighty hand o’er all the land Hath still been open to bestow Those blessings which our wants demand From heaven, whence all blessings flow.
Thou hast, with ever watchful eye, Looked down on us with holy care, And from thy storehouse in the sky Hast scattered plenty everywhere.
Then lift we up our songs of praise To thee, O Father, good and kind; To thee we consecrate our days; Be thine the temple of each mind.
With incense sweet our thanks ascend; Before thy works our powers pall; Though we should strive years without end, We could not thank thee for them all.
About this Poem “A Thanksgiving Poem” by Paul Laurence Dunbar is a heartfelt expression of gratitude and devotion to God. The poem rejoices in the bountiful harvest and acknowledges divine protection from calamities. It reflects on human imperfection and the recognition that their blessings are a result of God’s grace and mercy, not their merits. Dunbar emphasizes divine providence and the vastness of God’s blessings. The poem invokes feelings of reverence, awe, and gratitude, inspiring readers to embrace a spirit of thanksgiving and humility in the face of divine abundance.
About this Poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, one of the first African American poets to gain national recognition, was born on June 27, 1872, in Dayton, Ohio. By the age of fourteen, Dunbar had poems published in the Dayton Herald. While attending Dayton Central High School, where he was the only student of color, Dunbar further distinguished himself by publishing in the high school newspaper, and then by serving as its editor-in-chief. He was also president of the school’s literary society and was class poet. In his free time, he read the works of the Romantic poets, including John Keats and William Wordsworth, as well as the works of the American poets John Greenleaf Whittier and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Later that year, Dunbar moved to Chicago, hoping to find work at the first World’s Fair. He befriended Frederick Douglass, who found him a job as a clerk, and also arranged for Dunbar to read a selection of his poems at the exposition. Douglass said of Dunbar that he was “the most promising young colored man in America.” By 1895, Dunbar’s poems began appearing in major national newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times. With the help of friends, he published his second collection, Majors and Minors (Hadley & Hadley, 1895). The poems that were written in standard English were called “majors,” while those in dialect were termed “minors.” Although the “major” poems outnumber those written in dialect, it was the dialect poems that brought Dunbar the most attention. The noted novelist and critic William Dean Howells gave a favorable review to the poems in Harper’s Weekly.
Howells’s recognition helped Dunbar gain national and international acclaim, and, in 1897, he embarked on a six-month reading tour of England. He also produced a new collection, Lyrics of Lowly Life (Dodd, Mead and Co., 1896). Upon returning to America, Dunbar received a clerkship at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Shortly thereafter, he married the writer Alice Ruth Moore. While living in Washington, Dunbar published a short story collection, Folks from Dixie (Dodd, Mead and Co., 1898); a novel entitled The Uncalled (Dodd, Mead and Co., 1898); and two more collections of poems—Lyrics of the Hearthside (Dodd, Mead and Co., 1899) and Poems of Cabin and Field (Dodd, Mead and Co., 1899). He also contributed lyrics to a number of musical reviews.
In 1898, Dunbar’s health deteriorated; he believed the dust in the library contributed to his tuberculosis. He left his job to dedicate himself full time to writing and giving readings. Over the next five years, he would produce three more novels and three short story collections. Dunbar separated from Alice Dunbar in 1902 and, soon thereafter, he suffered a nervous breakdown and a bout of pneumonia. Although ill, Dunbar continued to write poems. His collections from this time include Lyrics of Love and Laughter (Dodd, Mead and Co., 1903); Howdy, Howdy, Howdy (Dodd, Mead and Co., 1905); and Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow (Dodd, Mead and Co., 1903). These books confirmed his position as America’s premier Black poet. Dunbar’s steadily deteriorating health caused him to return to his mother’s home in Dayton, Ohio, where he died on February 9, 1906, at the age of thirty-three.
Joe
The Closet Professor 