Realist Poetry and Paul Laurence Dunbar's Majors and Minors

Abstract

Focusing on the previously unanalyzed structure of Paul Laurence Dunbar's 1895 poetry collection, Majors and Minors, this article argues that the division of poems between the two sections of the book performs, in the first section, an autocritique of idealist poetic conventions as impediments to addressing a living bodily reality, and announces, in the second section, a move toward a realist depiction of everyday life structured by socio-historical forces. This practice of realism in poetry is characterized by a focus on the individual as historical agent, a relocation of the spiritual from the religious to the everyday, an insistence on the value and creativity of dialect, and a racial indeterminacy that evades the kind of racist essentialism of which Dunbar and dialect poetry more generally have been accused. In this sense, this examination of Dunbar's realism takes up Elizabeth Renker's project of rediscovering nineteenth-century American poetry's contribution to realism but does so to refocus that project on poems that strive to depict historical forces in concrete terms. In turn, the claim that Dunbar's dialect poems are realist has a number of implications for theories of realism and their selective prose tradition.