Page:Negro poets and their poems (IA negropoetstheirp00kerl).pdf/240



reader of these pages may ask: “But where is the Negro’s humorous verse! Here is the pathos, where is the comedy of Negro life?” It may also be asked where the dialect verse is, and the dramatic narratives and character pieces that made Dunbar famous.

The present-day Negro poets do not, as has been asserted, spurn dialect. Many of them have given a portion of their pages to character pieces in dialect, humorous in effect. Whether those who have excluded such pieces from their books have done so on principle or not I cannot say. In general, however, these writers are too deeply earnest for dialect verse, and the “broken tongue” is too suggestive of broken bodies and servile souls. But by those who have employed dialect its uses and effects have been well understood. Dialect, as is proven by Burns, Lowell, Riley, Dunbar, often gets nearer the heart than the language of the schools is able to do, and for home-spun philosophy, for mother-wit, for folk-lore, and for racial humor, for whatever is quaint and peculiar and native in any people, it is the only proper medium. Poets of the finest art from Theocritus to