Midwest Modern Language Association

"Jump Back Honey": Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Rediscovery of American Poetical Traditions
Author(s): Jay Martin
Source: The Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Spring, 1974),
pp. 40-53
Published by: Midwest Modern Language Association
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"Jump Back Honey": Paul Laurence
Dunbar and the Rediscovery of
American Poetical Traditions
By Jay Martin

In A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan, Carlos

Castaneda reports that his teacher advised him "that the most important
aspect of my endeavor was to find some holes. He emphasized the word
holes and said that inside them a sorcerer could find all sorts of mes-
sages and directions."' I make bold to be a kind of sorcerer-critic, or,
less boldly, a sorcerer's apprentice, since I intend to inquire into both
the holes in our ways of apprehending literature and the gaps which are
thus entailed in our understanding of the literary past. If, with patience,
we can properly locate these holes, perhaps we can in turn step into
them and find messages and directions hidden in their recesses.
After all, an inquiry concerning "lost" literature should not merely
consist of enumerations of "lost" works, or analyses of works that are
not "lost." All literature must remain "lost" until the faculty of appre-
hension collaborates in the present with the faculty of expression which
operated in the past.
All knowledge is retrospective and connective, as hermeneuticians,
anthropologists, and indeed all of us in our common sense way know.
For any instance of behavior can be understood only in its connections
with innumerable instances of similar behavior. Only, paradoxically,
after we have assimilated a world can we understand its particulars. In
the case of language we may say that communication occurs only when
the community of that speech is assumed because it is alive for the
listener. When a critic describes a motif or a theme or a complex met-
aphor in Proust, say, it is because he has perceived, and now explores,
a community of speech of which that communication is a particle. But
if the understanding of linguistic communities is the triumph of criti-
cism, the lostness of literature is criticism's test. The notion of lost
literature forces us at once to an exploration of the ontological status of

Jay Martin is professor of English at the University of California-Irvine. In addition to

books on Conrad Aiken and Nathanael West, he is the author of Harvests of Change: Amer-
ican Literature, 1865-1914 (Prentice-Hall, 1967), and is currently at work on a number of
projects on Paul Laurence Dunbar.

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criticism as it is practiced-the critical act as a whole, and the grounds
and intentions of various critical propositions. We know that if we can-
not enlarge or diminish the quality of past works, we can improve the
quality of our perception of them. To announce, "he was lost, and is
found," is to deconstruct old boundaries and draw new maps, to dissolve
what "literature" meant, to put a new world into orbit and to invent a
special discourse for it. As we look back on one writer or another, then,
and try to recapture him out of his lostness by seizing him out of the
abyss and understanding him in our present scrutiny, what we are really
doing is dismissing the critical language which has lost literature for us
and creating a new discourse, which will now preserve our discovery.
Each time we discern a lost literature, we encounter the defects of our
previous critical percepts and bring into being not only a new writer but
a new meaning for the word literature, and, ultimately, a new criticism.
Assuredly criticism is a gamble in interpretation and by the standard of
what our principles of interpretation lose or regain of literature for us
we come to know the odds, and to place our bets, in that tricky enter-
prise.
When a colleague friend of mine, one of most searching critical theor-
ists in the country, heard from another friend that I was working on Dun-
bar he waylaid me one day in the hall outside our departmental offices to
express interest in the project. His initial questions seemed to me to be
unusually askew, and I floundered in answering him until I abruptly real-
ized that he supposed I must be studying William Dunbar, the 15th century
Scottish poet. He had never heard of Paul Laurence Dunbar, I soon learned,
though this black poet had been born in America but a hundred years ear-
lier. Moreover, from 1895, when the American Dunbar was enthusiastic-
ally reviewed by William Dean Howells, until his death in 1906, he was
possibly the most popular poet in America. During the sixty-seven years
since his death, at least one or another of his works has always been in
print. In 1969 alone, twenty-nine editions of Dunbar's books were issued
by several publishers and reprint houses. My learned friend, I know,
was graciously preparing to discuss the merits of one of the Scotch Dun-
bar's theological disquisitions in verse, and it would be ungracious of me
to castigate him for being unfamiliar with "Little Brown Baby" or "The
Haunted Oak." I take him, rather, as exemplary, as I also take Dunbar
to be exemplary of a critical situation-an instance of the condition in
which criticism has lost a writer who was and continues to be enormous-
ly important to many people. What does it mean, to put my central ques-
tion as sharply as I can, when American literary criticism can find noth-
ing to say about a poet who was praised by the leading American critic of
the 19th century, whose works have been singled out for critical treatment

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by a contemporary French critic as essential for the understanding of
black writing, whose kind of poetry has been characterized by a leading
Dutch historian as an almost perfect example of the operation of the Af-
rican sensibility, and whose books continue to sell steadily? The absence
of critical commentary on Dunbar is a hole in which we might find mes-
sages concerning our critical practices as well as notes on new direc-
tions in criticism.
The black novelist Charles Chesnutt remarked in 1902, "My friend, Mr.
Howells,... has remarked several times that there is no color line in lit-
erature. On that point I take issue with him. I am pretty fairly convinced
that the color line runs everywhere so far as the United States is con-
cerned."3 Certainly, since 1900 the color line has been evident in crit-
icism. "White America," Richard Wright observed some years ago,
"never offered... Negro writers any serious criticism. The mere fact
that a Negro could write was astonishing."4 An examination, based on
Clarence Gohde's Bibliographical Guide, of the standard works of Amer-
ican literary history dealing with the period in which Dunbar was Amer-
ica's most prominent poet reveals that he is not so much as mentioned
in Warner Berthoffs The Ferment of Realism, Norman Foerster's Re-
interpretation of American Literature, Harry Hayden Clark's Transitions
in American Literary History, Grant C. Knight's The Critical Period in
American Literature, or Lazar Ziffs The American 1890's. Neither Roy
Harvey Pearce nor Hyatt Waggoner study his poetry in their long works.
Carl Van Doren and Leslie Fiedler are alike, if in nothing else, in ignor-
ing Dunbar. Indeed, in 200,000 words of a book of my own, Harvests of
Change, which studies the period, I neglect Dunbar entirely. When Dun-
bar is omitted from study, it may generally be assumed that lesser black
writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, from James Edwin
Campbell to James Weldon Johnson, are also ignored. Though we be-
lieved that we were surpassing our forebearers in critical keenness and
saw ourselves as revisionists of the genteel or antiquarian spirit of the
traditions they left us, all of us, I and the other critics I have listed, un-
consciously assumed the cultural dispositions that our critical heritage
passed down to us. Quite simply, we operated from the standpoint of
race and seldom, in criticism, attempted to find and create connections
with the systems of human response which we might have found in black
writing during the 19th and 20th centuries. The great power of the his-
torical critic, his sensitivity to past cultural institutions and his power
to introspect their underlying values, fostered a critical blindness.
There is another branch of historical criticism whose sharpness of in-
sight is achieved by being narrowed down to a single perception-that of
the presence in post-Romantic literature of the spirit of modernism.

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 Assuming that "cultural" is equivalent to "artistic culture" and that
artists transnationally form a distinct culture and experience a sepa-
rate history, critics ranging from prophetic visionaries like Harold
Bloom to symbolists like Charles Feidelson and analysts like Richard
Ellmann, assume, as the last two put it in the preface to The Modern
Tradition, that the term modern "designates a distinctive kind of imag-
ination-themes and forms, conditions and modes of creation, that are
interrelated and comprise an imaginative whole." Modernism, they con-
tinue, "strongly implies some sort of historical discontinuity, either a
liberation from inherited patterns or, at another extreme, deprivation
and disinheritance."5 Symbolism is its method, myth its subject, ex-
istentialism its philosophy.
The basis of modernist historicism is clear, and amounts, among
other things, to an identification with the imaginative axis running be-
tween Dublin and Paris and thus to an almost total disregard for the
special manifestations of modernism in American literature. Of the 183
selections in the Ellmann-Feidelson anthology, only eleven American
authors appear, and only three of these are not intimately identified
with Europe through expatriation. The results promised to prove inter-
esting, then, when Ellmann undertook to assemble The Norton Anthology
of Modern Poetry, which is confined to poetry written in English. Not
surprisingly, neither Dunbar nor James Weldon Johnson appear (though
the first selections are from Walt Whitman), and the first black poet
included is Ann Spencer, whose poems have not yet been collected into a
book. The reason for her inclusion is found in the headnote to Ann Spen-
cer's two poems: the modernist critic values her "elliptical" poems in
which tension is foremost and, stylistically, grace and awkwardness are
forced together. Other, later, black writers are included for special
qualities: Jean Toomer ("Blakian," "visionary"); Langston Hughes
("He was interested in the archetypal black... [and] a concocted fig-
ure... somewhat like Yeats's Crazy Jane"); and Nikki Giovanni (who,
"like Blake, gives the universe a human form... the form of her de-
sire").6 As much as they are headnotes, these remarks are ceremonies
of magical initiation by which the modernist critic finds ways of working
some black writers into his anti-historical historicism. But aside from
such acts of critical legerdemain or rites of passage, modernists threat-
en to lose grip upon all literature which does not prominently exhibit a
Kunstwollen involving stress, alienation, archetypicality, contradiction,
self-analysis, and Blakean or Promethean visions.
Generally speaking, then, historical criticism is really a discourse,
illustrated by texts, of what makes literature culturally representative;
while modernist historicism consists of a series of recommendations,

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illustrated by texts, on how to recognize a "modern spirit," which is re-
garded as valuable on its own terms. Formalist criticism, similarly,
consists of an illustrated discourse on what makes texts literary. Arguing
from the doctrines of Transcendental Idealism, the formalist or contex-
tual critic assumes that the imagination constitutes its own reality in a
literature which has a special power of life-bestowing vision and, there-
fore, a unique status in being. Art, as Oscar Wilde well said, never ex-
presses anything except itself; nonetheless, the "constitutive symbols"
that create and shape reality in the linguistic utterance of literature offer
a superior as well as a different kind of knowledge than that which we can
otherwise have: it is, as Murray Krieger has put it, "a special form of
discourse that has a special way of meaning."7 I do not have to point out
to this group that these contextualist doctrines are grounded on a thor-
oughly dualistic view of reality, in which literary works constitute one,
closed, class of reality, and all other human behavior and products of be-
havior another. Ransom's distinction between the faculties of aesthetic
sensibility and reason; Croce's separation of intuition from linguistic
externalization; Vivas's view that the "artistic process" occurs as a
"primary act of the mind" while cognitive, theological or moral acts of
the mind are secondary; and Krieger's distinction between symbol and
sign-such radical dualisms provide the contextualist with the terms and
tones for his defense of the closed, unique character of poetry. What
makes a work literary is the absence in it of reference to any other real-
ity. Literature which rejects cosmic dualism becomes unsuitable for
analysis since it refuses to participate only in the supposed sole reality
of itself. The work must lock itself in the prison house of non-referential
language.
This view has not gone unchallenged, of course. The black poet Ether-
idge Knight takes a special social slant on it in remarking: "The Cauca-
sian has separated the aesthetic dimension from all others, in order that
undesirable conclusions might be avoided. The artist is encouraged to
speak only of the beautiful... When the white aesthetic does permit the
artist to speak of ugliness and evil-and this is the biggest trick in the
whole bag-the ugliness and evil must be a 'universal human condition,'
a flimflam justification for the continuous enslavement of the world's col-
ored peoples. The white aesthetic would tell the Black Artist that all men
have the same problems, that they all try to find their dignity and iden-
tity."8
Knight's implication that contextualism is a racist plot should be re-
garded, I think, as a polemical shot in a clash of conflicting aesthetics.
For all its obvious exaggeration, however, it points toward the indispu-
table fact that alternate critical positions are possible and thus urges us

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to seek them out. Structuralism, I hasten to say, does not appear to me
to be one such alternative. Though there is considerable debate about
how "structure" is to be understood and even whether structuralists
form a "school," if we take the often acknowledged Saussurian methodo-
logical principle of tout se tient as the fountainhead of structuralism, it
is clear that operating on this conviction the anthropologist will see so-
cieties as systems, the linguist will seek language systems, and the lit-
erary theorist will define poetics itself, in Eco's words, as "the projected
elaboration into a form and structuration of the work."9 Structuralism
as usually practiced, then, is a discourse on the methods of differentia-
tion.
But what if we turn structuralism inside out to entertain the possibility
that structure consists not simply of systems, but of the spaces between
systems, of the undifferentiated, the unexhibited, the holes in our reali-
ties? Saussure was wise, perhaps, in speaking only of "system," never
of "structure"; for "system" suggests dynamic interrelations between
form and absence of form, moving galactic systems in which elliptoid or-
bits are defined in vast and unconfined space. The aesthetics of modern
art, where this principle is easier to visualize, have long recognized that
undifferentiated interior space-best utilized in the reclining figures of
Henry Moore; and even unsystematized exterior space-as in Calder mo-
biles-is as significant a feature of structure as its exhibited and confined
features. Indeed, it has recognized that structure may consist of both
undifferentiated interior and exterior space in the same work, as in the
productions of the Action Painters or in the canvases of Sam Francis.
The literary criticisms to which we are accustomed, I am proposing,
have as their object the "form and structuration" of a text-whether that
"true" text be cultural trends, modernist dispositions, archetypal pat-
terns, aesthetic reality, or fundamental structure. The history of criti-
cism for the last fifty years may be summed up in the phrase: "The
dominance of the text."'0 But what criticism must begin to attend to is
an understanding of the interplay between systems-systems of society,
systems of language, systems of existence, systems of meaning and un-
derstanding, systems of personal creativity-and to the space between
systems. Exclusive attention to rules of any possible communication in-
evitably pushes toward a concern with the mechanisms, and an emphasis
on the insularity, of systems, rather than upon their freedom for change
and growth: Certainly, as critics like Eco and Derrida suggest, interpre-
tation must be centered around some structural coordinates; yet, the
center may open outward as well as close the work, it may be, as the
French critic says, "a deficiency... something which makes free play
possible."" Let me make another comparison to the visual arts for

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what I am recommending. The twentieth century tradition of architectural
criticism has moved away from emphasis on line, facade, and decorative
motif, however elegant and complex, shifting first to the concept of mass-
es, then to the notion of interior volume as the focus of structure. From
the dominance of the formed, attention has shifted to the flow of space.
It is as if the critical observer looked through the voids of the splendid
shell and, at last discovered that inside an unconfined life buzzed and
breathed.
I do not propose to tear down that formed facade, for the beauties of
complex structuration have inimitable delights, but only to drive through
its windows, to tear the doors from their jambs, as Whitman said, and to
plunge into the swirl of the unconfined. I hope that you see, too, that fully
to treat the work of Dunbar in the terms I have been proposing might jus-
tify an exposition at a length which would make my remarks to this point
appear to be a mere preamble. Yet I would dare to discuss briefly-and
readers must fill in the voids here-this poet's work in terms of the crit-
ical views I have urged.
Such criticism as exists upon Dunbar has concentrated on a single prob-
lem-the relation between his so-called plantation poems, usually written
in dialect; and his poems in standard English, consisting chiefly of post-
Romantic lyrics and poems of social protest. Let me give a short exam-
ple of Each. First, "Little Brown Baby":
Littlebrownbaby wif spa'klin'eyes,
Come to yo' pappyan' set on his knee.
Whatyou been doin' suh-makin' san' pies?
Look at dat bib-you's ez du'tyez me.
Look at dat mouf-dat's merlasses,I bet;
Come hyeah, Maria,an' wipe off his han's.
Bees gwine to ketchyou an' eat you up yit,
Bein'so stickyan' sweet-goodness lan's!

The other is titled "To the South On Its New Slavery":

What,was it all for naught,those awful years

That drencheda groaningland with blood and tears?
Was it to leave this sly convenienthell,
That brotherfightinghis own brotherfell?...
Is it for this we all have felt the flame-
This newerbondageand this deepershame?12

Dunbar himself acknowledge the split in his work by arranging such po-
ems into separate sections in some of his volumes. Separate, but not
equal, most of his recent critics have argued; for they regard his dialect
verse-so Addison Gayle, Jr. put it-as a sellout to the national mentality,

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a literature designed to appeal to and confirm racist stereotypes.'3 If
any of his work is valuable, they say, it is the work of protest in which
he freed himself momentarily from his role as "yes man" and spoke
out, albeit schizophrenically, against American racism. This understand-
ing of Dunbar's divided being has a psychological foundation to be sure,
in W.E.B. Du Bois's famous description of the "two souls in one body"
of the American black man, as well as a personal basis in Dunbar's com-
plaints to James Weldon Johnson that editors were chiefly interested in
his dialect poetry.14
Yet it ignores the fact that Dunbar also often insisted on his affection
for the dialect pieces. "I write them because I must," he told one inter-
viewer; dialect, he told another, was his "natural speech."15 I believe
that our fascination with tension in literature and in experience, our cul-
tural interest in clash and conflict, has moved critics in the wrong direc-
tion in emphasizing the contradictions in Dunbar, and I would propose
that we understand Dunbar's work not through its individual texts, or in
terms of the contradictions between one text and another, but as ecriture,
a body of writing which has a certain meaning as a whole and in which
each text calls upon all of his other texts for a part of its meaning. Em-
pirical as well as theoretical reasons suggest the validity of this ap-
roach to Dunbar. His short stories, for instance-there are about a hun-
dred of them-are designed, like Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fiction-to
cohere into a whole. Any one of Dunbar's texts is merely a fold in the
fabric of his work. What, then, are the consequences for understanding
of Dunbar if we accept the whole of his poetry as in fact expressing the
structure of his experience? In the poem "To the South On Its New Slav-
ery" Dunbar speaks of the post-Emancipation situation of the slave dur-
ing his time-a time when lynchings were on the increase and racial con-
flict was intensifying not only in the Southern but also in the Northern
parts of the country; when industrial conflicts based on race, and the
degradation of black citizens in urban centers were already evident. The
black man of his time, Dunbar says, has neither "freedom's nor a slave's
delight." Here he accurately names the terms which his poetry treats.
Freedom is the central word, but the lexicon of his experience contains
no words for it. The black man, and Dunbar-making himself a Repre-
sentative Man in the Emersonian sense through his poetry-is polarized
between slavery and protest. He cannot, and would not, return to the ser-
vile and child-like position of dependency upon dominant authoritarianism.
At best he can only futilely oppose, through negative protest, the imposition
of new forms of slavery upon him. He must find what comfort he can,
therefore, in fantasies of the delights of dependency, released from rights
and responsibilities; or from protests against the imposition upon him

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 of responsibilities without rights. Only the released id or the circum-
scribed ego are possible sources for personality.
What is impossible to imagine is that the personality should be ruled
by ego and have freedom as its object. The structure of Dunbar's poetry,
I said, is the structure of his experience. And what his experience con-
tains, for himself, and for the black citizen whom he was seeking to rep-
resent, was a defect at its center- the deficiency of slavery and the at-
tack upon the ego. In his book, Le Mecanisme cerebral de la pensee (a
great lost work of psychoanalysis, by the way), Nicolas Kostyleff defines
poetic creativity as consisting of the stimulation of chains of verbal as-
sociation in the mind, which continue through innumerable links until ex-
hausted or until deflected by what Laurence Kubie calls "the neurotic
distortion of the creative process."'6 Dunbar's poetic system is an in-
stance of the deflection of the verbal-motor mechanisms of association
by social neurosis. Whenever his associations move from childlike de-
pendence toward adult freedom, they break. Whenever they go from nega-
tive protest to celebrations of achieved freedom, they are shattered.
True, he can write such poems of positive assertion as "Ode to Ethio-
pia," but to do so he must avoid American space and American time. If,
as Merleau-Ponty insists, "thinking tends toward expression as its ful-
fillment,"'7 in Dunbar's poetry as in Dunbar's life, the fulfillment is
blocked, and his work must assume the form of la parole dans la pensee
-speech confined to thought, unspeakable speech. The form of Dunbar's
poetry is the human form maimed. It is what Marx beautifully called
"The sensuous expression of estranged human life."'8 Imagine a Moore
statue in which the chest has a hole at its center and from which the
heart has been plucked. Such a being, could it speak, would lisp in the
easy numbers of childhood speech or speak in the magisterial tone of
complaint.
Yet, I suggest, for Dunbar this void in head and heart was the subject.
There may be, the philosopher Peter Caws says, "unspeakable facts" in
society and "unspeakable thoughts" in men.19 Dunbar dares to imagine
the unspeakable, the freedom which would silence the voices of dependen-
cy and protest. His subject is the absence of freedom's voice, as the sys-
tem of his world and work is the void left by freedom's absence.
Dunbar was a highly literate writer, well acquainted with the English
literary tradition. His favorite poet, he said many times, was Robert
Herrick, whose concern with the growth and freedom of the English peas-
antry helped to point the way for Dunbar's representation of the working-
class black. He also read Latin, French and German. Whether or not he
read Schelling I do not know, but he certainly studied 19th century liber-
tarian philosophy. In any event, Schelling's conviction that "the beginning

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and end of all philosophy is-Freedom," and his announcement that "the
time has come to proclaim to a nobler humanity the freedom of the spir-
it, and no longer to have patience with men's tearful regrets for their
lost chains,"20 seem to me to summarize what for Dunbar, a black
man in the 19th century, had yet to remain unspeakable, though not un-
imaginable.
Many biographical facts could be adduced to show that for Dunbar this
structuration of his world was, if mostly a direct intuitive response to
the black man's condition, yet also partly conscious in him. A linguistic
analysis of the sounds and sound-patterns of his dialect poems shows that
these are far from being scientific transcriptions of black speech, but
instead reflect very closely the sounds which appear earliest in the
child's language learning. Moreover the subjects of these poems are
closely allied with an oral stage of development. Here Dunbar uncon-
sciously equated the child's dependency with the slave's. Moreover, in
several newspaper articles and interviews he complained that the black
man in America was obliged to speak in either the language of servility
or of negative protest, and he memorialized figures like Douglass and
allied himself with spokesmen like Du Bois who dared to speak directly
of freedom. Moreover, in a handful of poems he spoke elliptically of the
void of freedom. "We Wear the Mask," as I interpret it, is a very clear,
if masked, effort to define the existence of the hole in experience-a
statement that behind the "grins and lies" of servility is an agony of
protest in "tortured souls" and behind that the space of freedom which,
were it filled, would put an end to both:
We wearthe mask that grinsand lies,
It hides our cheeksand shadesour eyes,-
This debt we pay to humanguile;
With torn and bleedingheartswe smile,
And mouthwith myriadsubtleties.
Why should the world be overwise,
In countingall our tearsand sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wearthe mask.2'
Or, consider "Right's Security," which comes close to claiming a gain
for perception in the lack of freedom-the sense that minorities sustain
the sense of men, the conviction of freedom:
Right armsand armors,too, that man
Who will not compromisewith wrong;
Thoughsingle, he must front the throng,
And wage the battlehardand long.
Minorities,since time began,
Have shown the betterside of man.22

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Here, as in such other central poems as "The Paradox" and "The River
of Ruin," Dunbar suggests that behind the masks of servility and pro-
test was freedom-undifferentiated, inarticulable, and as yet unformed.
It is easy, in these terms, to understand the paradox of Dunbar's
steady popularity and critical neglect. Information and field theory con-
cepts have merely highlighted the obvious fact that learning occurs, as
I put it earlier, to the extent that the gap between communication and
community is diminished. Moreover, since learning is retrospective,
we perceive only what we already know some aspect of. The "field" or
"community" of Dunbar's communication is in the experience of "nei-
ther freedom's nor a slave's delight," and thus requires readers whose
experience can find messages in the holes left between these. The struc-
ture is the system of experience in history, which makes possible the
collaboration of an author's projection of a text with a reader's partici-
pation in it, its forms and its voids alike. Dunbar's continuing audience
has always consisted of such readers, while he has been lost to critics
for two reasons. Our critical heritage had ignored him for reasons
which pertained to the white perception of black writing in the 19th cen-
tury; and the dominance of the idea of text or differentiated structure in
literary criticism has drawn us away from the recognition of the sys-
tems of the unspeakable.
If we understand Dunbar's writing in this way, however, we not only
find one poet who was lost, but we begin to see emerging, I think, the
outlines of a definable tradition in American writing which itself has
been lost because we have not known how to read it. We have taught our-
selves how to understand traditions of alienation, the grotesque, the cos-
mic visionary, the holy fool, the dying and reborn god, the opposing self,
the existential encounter and the alienated man of sensibility. Not less
grand than these, but certainly less grandiose, is the unconfined and
finally, perhaps, unachievable and, so, ever undifferentiated tradition of
the human search for freedom. This is a search for the sake of the in-
dividual, but not stressing individualism; it is a civic literature and a
literature for citizens. Its principles emerge from the Declaration of
Independence on native grounds, as well as from Schelling, Mill, Rous-
seau, and others. Proudhon summed up this civic tradition as an indis-
putable matter. "No long discussion is necessary," he said, "to dem-
onstrate that the power of denying a man his thought, his will, his per-
sonality, is a power of life and death, and that to make a man a slave is
to assassinate him."23 The concern to represent systems of freedom
betrays the fact that the ultimate preoccupation of this tradition is with
the fulfillment of human nature-possible only through freedom, and ex-
pressible most conclusively, as the Cartesians argued, through language.

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I call this tradition, after Dilthey's phrase, "Human Studies,"24 for
the works written in it are poems of the act not of the mind but of the
Human Being. Finding this tradition in Dunbar suggests that, after him,
we are likely to find many black poets in the same tradition, both as the
consequence of the influence of Dunbar and also as the continuation of
the conditions he experienced and first accurately represented for his
people in literature. I see it continued in the weary blues of Langston
Hughes, in Calvin Hernton, Gwendolyn Brooks, Dudley Randall, Robert
Hayden, and Nikki Giovanni. There is a direct line from Dunbar through
these; recently, indeed, Miss Giovanni wrote me that she regards Dun-
bar as the natural, inexhaustible resource of their people. But it is not
by any means solely a black tradition. It takes philosophical form in the
work of William James, aesthetic form in Henry James's prefaces, and
dark speculative shape in such late works of Mark Twain as What Is
Man? Which Was the Dream? and No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger. It
appears again, for instance, in Charles Olson's Maximus poems, trig-
gered by his recurring concerns with the Civil War and with the Portu-
guese fishermen of Gloucester. We should not be surprised, either, to
find that a large number of women writers have made the civic theme
theirs. Indeed, comments by two women writers sum up the tradition in
decisive fashion. In criticizing the totalizing, archetypal approach to
human fiction, the anthropologist Ruth Benedict insisted, as an alternate
explanation, on the free operations of the "unconfined... human imagina-
tion."25 If we may take Benedict's remark as a methodological prin-
ciple, Diane Wakoski's description of her poetic activity conveys from
a personal angle, the human sense of the tradition I have been describing.
"It so happens," she says, "that my speciality-in an odd sense-is
being a human being."26So it is for all of them.
And so it is for many of us today, who are experiencing a revival of a
sense of freedom's void-freedoms unthinkable and unspeakable except
that our poets will think and at last speak them for us. As for the critic,
he must speak them too, making his work more human by making it
more free, knowing that to change and grow and revise, to evolve and
revolve is the peculiar fate and fortune of man. Call me Don Juan, I am
almost tempted to say, in order to suggest the role I have assumed here
as critic and sorcerer in diving through the holes of our lost literature
to cut the anchors on our critical crafts and set them afloat again. But,
after all, I prefer to take the refrain from Paul Laurence Dunbar's "A
Negro Love Song" as my own refrain. Only by turning back to our lost
traditions, and seeing their meaning more clearly, can we go forward in-
to the new freedoms whose advancing edge of the undefined will help to
keep us human. Jump back, honey, jump back!

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 ' Carlos Castaneda, A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan (New York,
1971), p. 221.
2See William Dean Howells, "Introduction," Paul Laurence Dunbar, Lyrics of Lowly
Life (New York, 1896), pp. xiii-xx; Jean Wagner, Black Poets of the United States from
Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes, trans. Kenneth Douglas (Urbana, Ill., 1973); and
Janheinz Jahn, Muntu: An Outline of the New African Culture, trans. Marjorie Green (New
York, 1961).
3Chesnutt quoted in Helen M. Chesnutt, Charles Waddell Chesnutt: Pioneer of the Color
Line (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1952), p. 177.
4Richard Wright, "Blueprint for Negro Writing," the Black Aesthetic, ed. Addison
Gayle, Jr. (Garden City, N.Y., 1972), p. 315.
5 The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature, ed. Richard Ellman and

Charles Feidelson, Jr. (New York, 1965), pp. v-vi.

6 The Norton
Anthology of Modern Poetry, ed. Richard Ellmann (New York, 1973), pp.
276, 542, 633, 1381.
7 Murray Krieger, The Play and the Place of Criticism (Baltimore, 1967), p. 197.
8Etheridge Knight, "Statement on Poetics," The New Black Poetry, ed. Clarence Major
(New York, 1969), pp. 141-42.
9 Umberto Eco, L'OEuvre ouverte (Paris, 1965), p. 11. See Guy de Mellac, "The Poetics
of the Open Form," Books Abroad (1971), 31-36.
101 have in mind a remark by Alexander Gelley, summarizing Derrida, in "Form as
Force," Diacritics, 2 (1972), 11.
" See the discussion appended to Jacques Derrida's "Structure, Sign, and Play in the
Discourse of the Human Sciences," in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of
Man: The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore,
1971), p. 268.
12 Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Complete Poems (New York, 1913), pp. 134, 218.
13Addison
Gayle, Jr., Oak and Ivy: A Biography of Paul Laurence Dunbar (Garden City,
N.Y., 1971).
'4W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago, 1903); James Weldon Johnson,
Along This Way (New York, 1933).
15Dunbar, clippings of newspaper interviews in a Dunbar scrapbook, the Paul Laurence
Dunbar Collection of the Ohio Historical Society.
16N. Kostyleff, Le Mecanisme cerebral de la pensee (Paris, 1914), pp. 195-96.
17Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La Phenomenologie de la perception (Paris, 1945), p. 206.
18 Karl Marx,
quoted in "Introductions," by Charles Newman and George Abbott White,
eds., Literature in Revolution (New York, 1972), p. 6.
' "Projections and Restrictions," Diacritics, 3 (1973), 19.
20
Friedrich Schelling, Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom (1809),
trans. James Gutmann (Chicago, 1936); quoted in Noam Chomsky, "Language and Free-
dom," in Literature in Revolution, p. 140.
21
Dunbar, Complete Poems, p. 71.

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 22Ibid.,
p. 75.
23
Proudhon, quoted in Chomsky, "Language and Freedom," in Literature in Revolution,
p. 32.
24Wilhelm Dilthey, "The Rise of Hermeneutics," trans. Frederic Jameson, New Literary
History, 3 (1972), 231: "Human studies have indeed the advantage over the natural sciences
that their object is not sensory appearance as such, no mere reflection of reality within
consciousness, but is rather first and foremost an inner reality, a coherence experienced
from within."
25 Ruth Benedict asks
why scholars should have labored so persistently "under the incu-
bus of theories explaining seven-headed monsters and flaming swords as survivals of
primordial conditions, allegories of the sun and moon or of the sex act, or etiological
philosophizing, and have ignored the unconfined roles of the human imagination in the cre-
ation of mythology"?
26Diane Wakoski, "The Poet Places Herself," Falcon, 2 (1971), 51.

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