Go There To Know There

                                  photo from  this site. The Poet He sang of life, serenely sweet, With, now and then, a deeper note. From some high peak, nigh yet remote, He voiced the world's absorbing beat. He sang of love when the earth was young And Love, itself, was in his lays But ah, the world, it turned to praise A jingle in a broken tongue Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), was born in Dayton, Ohio to parents who at the time, were newly freed slaves. Dunbar expressed a prodigious ability for poetry at the tender age of six. He grew up to excel in secondary school, becoming class president and editing the school newspaper. Later, he began publishing with the help of high school classmates, Orville and Wilbur Wright, who later helped to fund Dunbar's own press, The Dayton Tattler ( 1 ). Dunbar's first book of poetry, Oak and Ivy , publishe...

Born in Washington, D.C. in 1894 to Nathan Toomer and Nina Pinchback, Toomer spent his formative years oscillating between all-black and all-white schools: an experience that informed his resistance to any particular, racial background. His maternal grandfather, P.B.S. Pinchback was the first African American governor of Louisiana; however Toomer himself preferred to think of himself and his lineage, merely as American . During his young adulthood between 1914 and 1917, Toomer attended several institutions of higher learning, in which he studied physical fitness, social science, and history, but he never attained a degree. Following his education, Toomer went on to publish short stories. But it was his experience as a Georgia school principal that would help to shape his attitudes on race, and prompt him to identify himself as an African American. His 1923 publication, Cane was heralded as one of the most important novels of the Harlem Renaissance--and of the Lost Generatio...