Dunbar's Georgics

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“Work and Wait Unwearying”: Dunbar’s Georgics margaret ronda

AUL LAURENCE DUNBAR’S LEGACY AS A POET HAS BEEN LARGELY P determined by the critical debates about his dialect poetry. he persistent emphasis on dialect originates in William Dean Howells’s description, in his introduction to Dunbar’s 1896 Lyrics of Lowly Life, of the poet’s dialect verse as the marker of his “artistic completeness.” Dunbar’s dialect poems, Howells argues, illuminate the “precious diference of temperament between the races” and offer unique “divinations and reports of what passes in the hearts and minds of a lowly people” (xvii–xviii). Howells’s pronouncement on the aesthetic merit of Dunbar’s poetry reverberates across a century of criticism that debates the capacity of dialect to graph racial diference.1 Whether inluenced by New Negro tenets, Black Arts politics, or poststructuralist or new historicist reading practices, however, Dunbar’s critical readers oten share Howells’s verdict that dialect poetry represents Dunbar’s most notable achievement, even if they do not share Howell’s patronizing rhetoric.2 hese critics’ methodologi- cally divergent readings all regard linguistic diference, codiied in dialect’s orthography and rhythms, as the key measure of racialized expression in Dunbar’s poetics. hey force his poetry into the neatly dichotomous categories “standard” and “dialect” and foreground the literary coding of racial authenticity as his poetry’s essential stake.3 However instructive these dialect debates have proved, they have necessarily circumscribed critical approaches to Dunbar’s various MARGARET RONDA, an assistant pro- body of work. While racial performance, as Gavin Jones’s Strange fessor of English at Rutgers University, Talk cogently argues, is a central dimension of in de siècle Ameri- New Brunswick, teaches modern and contemporary American poetry. She can culture, its pervasiveness in critical discourse on Dunbar has is at work on a book manuscript titled overshadowed his perhaps more powerful considerations of every- “Remainders: Poetry at Nature’s End.” day racial constraint. In this essay, I argue that such constraint is

vividly present in Dunbar’s portrayals of la- cive means of restricting black mobility and bor and that these georgic meditations rep- extracting compulsory labor, these poems resent his most incisive thinking about the disarticulate manual labor from discourses hardships of African American life in the of racial self- improvement and emancipation. post- Reconstruction era. In Dunbar’s dialect At the same time, Dunbar’s georgics assert and standard- En glish poetry, labor is the irst the sympathetic humanity and blamelessness principle, the common necessity, of life itself. of African Americans in the face of virulent As Dunbar puts it in “he Seedling,” “Every institutional racism. child must share life’s labor / Just as well as To shift critical emphasis from perfor- every man.” he master trope of labor bears mance to work is to turn from questions of a racial inlection in Dunbar’s work: labor as authenticity, accommodation, and subver- suffering without redemption remains the sion to different representational issues in lot of a burdened few. For African Ameri- Dunbar’s writing: those of necessity and con- cans at century’s end, life is work—diicult, straint. By foregrounding its georgic strain, I necessary, and often without reward. The argue that Dunbar’s poetry deemphasizes ro- overarching theme of many Dunbar poems mantic portrayals of poetic enslavement or re- echoes a key passage in Vergil’s Georgics: “Ev- sistance in favor of an examination of labor’s erything / was toil, relentless toil, urged on tragic, nonredemptive nature. While capitalist by need” (1.145–46). Georgic poems deine la- modernity is deined above all by the transi- bor as grounded in lack, as necessary for bare tion from slave labor to “free” labor—to a sys- survival, and as hostage to larger forces that tem in which workers own and sell their labor threaten to undermine its progress—themes power—Dunbar’s poetry illustrates a mode of that echo throughout Dunbar’s verse.4 labor that its neither category. he problem Dunbar’s sustained emphasis on the of occupying this nebulous middle ground be- work of life responds to the labor-centered tween modes of production, where the laborer racial problems of his historical moment: the is neither free nor enslaved, is at the heart emergent forms of conscripted labor and the of these georgics, which depict the African enduring reduction, both discursively and American subject as consigned to an inferior materially, of African Americans to laborers position by forces of economic modernization. rather than citizens. His georgics articulate If the georgic encodes confrontations between an imaginative “turning South,” to borrow transhistorical understandings of work (as ef- a phrase from Houston Baker, Jr., present- fort, burden, foundation of civilization) and ing the hard agrarian work characteristic of labor’s historically specific determinations, the rural Black Belt as the image of African Dunbar’s georgics reveal the material efects American life at the turn of the century (26). of the uneven modernization of racialized la- I focus here on georgics from Lyrics of Lowly bor in the post-Reconstruction era. Life, Dunbar’s irst commercially published book and a text relecting larger debates over “The Shadow of a Deep Disappointment” African American productivity as a precon- dition for participation in national life. In Georgic derives from the Greek terms for its images of labor without respite or recom- “earth” or “field” and “work,” and georgic pense, Lyrics of Lowly Life represents Dun- poetry attends to manual and particularly bar’s most sustained response to the agrarian agricultural labor, taking the laborer as its myth of racial freedom achieved through ag- central protagonist (Lilly 20). Georgic poetry, ricultural work. Written in the context of Jim from its roots in Hesiod and Vergil forward, Crow laws, vagrancy statutes, and other coer- “argue[s] against . . . the idealism of a natu- 127.4 ] Margaret Ronda 865 ral spontaneity,” of imagination or earthly these polarities than to illuminate how they bounty, and instead insists on the need for operate in a speciic historical context. In the sustained and correctly applied efort (Put- case of Dunbar’s poetry, his georgics examine nam 152). Work is compulsory and diicult, what W. E. B. DuBois calls the “double- aimed undertaken in the face of potential failure, struggle of the black artisan” in the postbel- and valued for the hard- won knowledge it lum years—“on the one hand to escape white yields. In Vergil’s Georgics, the master text of contempt for a nation of mere hewers of wood this mode, the ravages of disease and blight, and drawers of water, and on the other hand the unknowable whims of the gods, the vicis- to plough and nail and dig for a poverty- situdes of political turmoil, and the ruinous stricken horde”—a struggle that necessarily power of storms shadow the everyday labors ends in disappointed failure, despite the la- of the farmer. he achievements of manual ef- borer’s earnest eforts (6). fort are continually threatened by the entropy Dunbar’s invocation of georgic themes of natural and historical forces. In a georgic, is not sui generis but emerges from a long- the farmer inhabits a diminished world where standing, if little acknowledged, georgic tra- hard work and the knowledge that this work dition in American literature. As Timothy generates guarantee neither rest nor reward. Sweet points out in his American Georgics: The georgic mode thus contains what Economy and Environment in Early American Anthony Low calls a “double vision” of labor Literature, georgic has largely been subsumed as at once a “curse and a blessing” (11). Work into pastoral in American literary criticism, alone, in a georgic poem, has the potential to such that the inheritance of georgic is rechan- civilize the self, master the chaotic forces of neled into broader interpretations of envi- nature, and stabilize society. Yet labor is also ronmental literature or what Leo Marx calls the sign of the reduced nature of human life, “complex pastoral” (Sweet 2–3).5 Yet the two its everyday sufering, and stands for the need modes are distinct, as Joseph Addison’s 1697 for discipline to combat the entropic forces “Essay on the Georgics” points out. Addison that threaten survival. In their attention to characterizes pastoral and georgic as diver- the dual nature of work, georgics illuminate gent “class[es]” of poetry: where the pastoral the polarities evident in the etymologies of employs a deliberately simplified or rustic labor and work. Hannah Arendt points out style that imitates its shepherd protagonists, in he Human Condition, “All the European the georgic offers “instructions” in its de- words for ‘labor’ . . . signify pain and efort scriptions of rural life, expressing “moral and are also used for pangs of birth. Labor duties” and “philosophical speculations” has the same etymological root as labare (“to through its representations of the processes stumble under a burden”); ponos [Greek] of everyday work. Georgic didacticism oc- and Arbeit [German] have the same etymo- cupies a simultaneously narrow and broad logical roots as ‘poverty’” (48). Yet labor also frame of reference, conveying what Addison carries the positive meaning of industry that calls the “rules of practice” of agrarian labor produces worthy ends (“Labour”). The ety- and inquiring into their connection to larger mology of work similarly stresses necessity historical forces such as the nation- state, im- and painfulness, as well as the moral quality perial expansion, and global commerce (155). of efort and the achievement of the artifact With critics such as William Dowling, Larry produced (“Work”). his dialectic of pain and Kutchen, and Juan Christian Pellicer, Sweet gain, dehumanizing burden and humanizing has charted a signiicant georgic presence in virtue, grounds georgic poetry’s examination American literature of the eighteenth through of human exertion, working less to resolve mid–nineteenth centuries that draws on the 866 “Work and Wait Unwearying”: Dunbar’s Georgics [ PMLA

topoi of eighteenth- century British georgics— My days are never days of ease; the ideology of improvement and the “moral I till my ground and prune my trees. obligation” of labor—to laud the civic virtues When ripened gold is all the plain, of nation building (10). While this agrarian- I put my sickle to the grain. nationalist georgic mode, associated with the I labor hard, and toil and sweat, While others dream within the dell. poetry of Timothy Dwight, Philip Freneau, and Joel Barlow and the prose of J. Hector These lines from “The Poet and His Song” St. John de Crèvecoeur, Thomas Jefferson, represent diligent efort at the furthest remove and James Fenimore Cooper, fades by the from pastoral idyll. Describing the speaker mid–nineteenth century as the development as the georgic agricola tilling the earth and of a diferentiated national economy renders pruning trees, Dunbar portrays everyday life a unifying agrarian ideal outdated, georgic’s in antipastoral terms as the site of ceaseless characteristic theme of necessary labor per- work. His speaker’s “days are never days of sists across nineteenth-century American lit- ease” but are grounded in material necessity. erature. In the postbellum era, the georgic—as What others view as scenic beauty—the “rip- what Kurt Heinzelman calls a “protean dis- ened gold” of wheat in the ield—is for Dun- cursive form” rooted in but not limited to bar’s narrator merely an occasion for renewed poetry—becomes a medium for relections on efort, marking his labor as specialized obli- uneven modernization, national reuniication, gation rather than universal condition. his and the decline of agrarianism (184). Georgic work can be destroyed by capricious forces: representations of the material processes and “Sometimes a blight upon the tree / Takes all social contradictions of labor emerge in works my fruit away from me.” he governing mood by Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Henry of these poems is disappointment. Wadsworth Longfellow, Rebecca Harding hat these poems turn to explorations of Davis, Charles W. Chesnutt, Stephen Crane, work as the locus of racial disappointment Edwin Markham, and Frank Norris, among should not be surprising, since the fate of others. In Lyrics of Lowly Life, the agrarian black Americans in the postbellum period tropes and didactic orientation central to the was defined above all by their social con- georgic illuminate the unfreedoms of the Jim stitution vis-à- vis labor. In the brief heyday Crow South for African Americans. of Reconstruction, the free labor of African A host of poems in Lyrics of Lowly Life Americans appeared to be the key not sim- center on fragile endeavors that fail to achieve ply to their integration into American life but durable success. While critics have tended to also to the modernization of the South. As focus on Dunbar’s tropes of enslavement (the one northern congressman declared, “[T] he caged bird of “Sympathy”) or racial perfor- whole land will revive under the magic touch mance (the mask of “We Wear the Mask”), of free labor” (Kolchin 215). Labor was the igures of laborers toiling against enormous defining element of blacks’ newfound sta- odds populate Lyrics of Lowly Life. Dunbar tus as enfranchised citizens in postbellum uses these figures to encourage persever- America: it was “by the sweat of their brow” ance—“keep a- pluggin’ away,” one poem that they would justify their right to full par- exhorts (“Keep”)—and to mourn failed at- ticipation in civic and social life. Yet by the tempts, as in “He Had His Dream”: “He la- turn of the century this vision of black labor bored hard and failed at last, / His sails too producing a renaissance for southern society weak to bear the blast.” But above all, Dunbar had vanished from American life. As Da- represents life as labor suffused with diffi- vid Brion Davis argues, the “continuities of culty, uncertainty, and pain: plantation agriculture from slavery to ten- 127.4 ] Margaret Ronda 867 ant farming” in the South were maintained blacks were condemned to what Dunbar calls, through exploitative practices designed to re- in a 1903 essay, the “new and more dastardly duce mobility and ensure a docile work force form of slavery”—peonage and sharecrop- (276). The nominally free labor of African ping—which served, along with the terrifying Americans thus continued to be subjugated violence of lynching, as “fresh degradation of and controlled through a variety of extralegal an already degraded race” (“Fourth of July”). means.6 Meanwhile, blacks became a conve- hus, as Saidiya Hartman suggests, “the toil- nient scapegoat for southern economic blight ing igure, the bent back” of the black laborer and the failures of integrated government.7 may be seen as a master image of the racial By the 1890s not only southern but also politics of the era, conjuring the indistin- northern whites began to regard southern guishability between slavery and freedom and blacks as fundamentally unwilling to work. the indebted nature of work for a generation As the New York Times editorialized in 1890, of African Americans (135). “[T]he great trouble in the South has always The metonymic reduction of African been the idleness and consequent worthless- Americans to the “productions of [their] ness of a large part of the negro population” hands,” which makes claims to personhood, (qtd. in Richardson 205). This narrative’s equality, and citizenship contingent on the most well- known proponent was Booker T. capacity to labor for the national good, is the Washington, whose 1895 “Atlanta Compro- backdrop for Dunbar’s pessimistic georgic mise” speech called for blacks to “cast down mode in Lyrics of Lowly Life. His poem “Dis- your bucket where you are,” arguing that the appointed,” for example, offers what Hart- current generation has forgotten how to labor man might call a “scene of subjection” in its in their premature yearning for full equal- portrayal of an old man whose work leads ity (219). Washington’s speech cemented the only to suffering. This eighteen- line poem in de siècle conception that African Ameri- depicts an old man engaged in subsistence cans had earned their status as incomplete agrarian production. He takes palpable plea- citizens and were thus fated to labor toward sure in his work, “toiling in joy from dew to freedom from the lowest social rung: “it is dew.” At irst the weather cooperates with his at the bottom of life we must begin, and not labors, allowing a “ine” orchard to grow and at the top,” Washington declared. African inducing him to “quiet [his] thrity fears.” But American labor, in his argument, remains la- a storm soon gathers, destroying his careful bor for another, the undertaking of marginal eforts. he old man, “with a cry from his soul drudge work that whites refuse: as Washing- despairing, / . . . bowed . . . down to the earth ton assured his white audience, “[African and wept.” As he lies prostrate before his ru- Americans] will buy your surplus land, make ined labor, “a voice cried aloud from the driv- blossom the waste places in your ields.” Black ing rain; / ‘Arise, old man, and plant again!’” workers begin in deicit, toiling in the “waste From the poem’s beginning, Dunbar places” to earn the right to equality—an stresses the vulnerability of the old man, who equality that will be granted on the basis of has no fruits stored and whose advanced age a proven “loyalty” and “devotion,” struggled marks the uncertainty of his endeavor, begun for rather than “artificially forc[ed]” (221). not in the prime of life but close to his “failing his narrative of uplit through manual labor years.” The fragility of his efforts is height- substituted laborer for citizen, framing full ened by his premonitory “fears” and under- participation in the public sphere not as an scored by his dependence on the whims of inalienable right but as a future transaction sun and rain. his atmosphere of uncertainty purchased through present labor. Southern and the destruction that ensues echo the 868 “Work and Wait Unwearying”: Dunbar’s Georgics [ PMLA

scenes of ruined labor in georgic poems from mined, by natural forces beyond his command Vergil through James Thomson and Oliver and by an external voice of absolute power. Goldsmith—scenes that reinforce the “dou- his directive reveals him as a igure laboring ble vision” of labor as civilizing and objecti- under the aegis of an authority not his own. fying. Dunbar characterizes the old man by By closing the poem with this order, Dunbar the diligence of his labor, the care with which gestures toward the persistence of slavery’s ex- he “planted and dug and tended” his orchard. ternally bound labor. he protagonist’s labor Such activity signals what Karl Marx calls is not simply subject to the arbitrary moods of human “species-life,” the “life-engendering weather and seasonal change; it is fundamen- life” of productive labor (Economic and tally unfree in its answerability to another’s Philosophic Manuscripts 76). he “joy” with orders. By the end of the poem, the old man which the old man undertakes his task recalls is dispossessed twice over: irst his earnest ef- Marx’s description of “passion” as “the es- forts are unmade by a storm, then these eforts sential force of man energetically bent on its are revealed never to have been a sign of his object” (136). hrough his portrayal of the old free agency. he revelation of “Disappointed” man’s energetic willingness to labor, Dunbar is that hard labor grants neither freedom nor characterizes him as a civilized cultivator ca- a viable life but a burdened knowledge akin to pable of guiding his endeavors to fruition. Yet DuBois’s concept of double consciousness. his work provides no guarantee of freedom or his account of the continuing proxim- durable achievement. It is instead susceptible ity of laborer and slave gestures toward what to forces beyond the old man’s control, as eas- Hartman calls the “nonevent of emancipa- ily destroyed as it is carefully produced. hus, tion” ater the Civil War, when a range of co- labor is the measure both of the protagonist’s ercive practices, from vagrancy statutes and humanity, creative potential, and animating debt peonage to pervasive white violence, ren- passion and of his exposure to victimization. dered illusory the principles of equality under By framing the laborer as a representative hu- the law and free ownership of labor (116). he man figure subjugated not only despite but plantation system was reinvented by these also through his hard work, Dunbar separates forms of conscripted labor and restricted efort from achievement in “Disappointed.” In mobility, producing in effect the “same so- the face of widespread claims of black idleness cial relations—the surveillance, restrictions and admonitions to work toward equality, on movement, and control over leisure- time Dunbar asserts the value of his agrarian pro- behavior—that had characterized slavery” tagonist as an able laborer but claims that the (Davis 276). Yet Dunbar also points toward man’s willingness to labor—and that labor it- the difference between slavery and postbel- self—will not guarantee his freedom. lum forms of subjection. The commanding The revelation, common to georgic po- voice of “Disappointed” is not traceable to ems, that the farmer’s vigilance does not as- a representative figure of racial oppression, sure success and that the only certainty is such as a slave owner or southern white racist, unceasing efort gains a distinctive historical but instead is invisible and inexorable. While valence in Dunbar’s closing couplet. Emerging Dunbar’s poem “A Corn- Song,” which almost from the “driving rain” is an injunction, god- directly precedes “Disappointed” in Lyrics of like in its omniscient authority, commanding Lowly Life, hinges on the interplay between a the old man to “arise” and “plant again.” he slave owner and slaves singing at the end of introduction of an authoritative statement a hard day in the ields—a song that graphs ordering the old man to labor provokes a the absolute and visible power differential startling revelation: his work is doubly deter- that separates them—here the ambiguity of 127.4 ] Margaret Ronda 869 the speaking voice captures a new indetermi- W. J. Cash’s 1941 he Mind of the South, Baker nacy of unfreedom. he protagonist of “Dis- argues that “for the Black American majority appointed” can neither name nor view the of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, source of the command ordering him to labor, the mind of the South was critical to black yet he is no less bound to follow its imperative. personality, cultural, economic, and political Whereas in “A Corn- Song” Dunbar charac- formation” (24). Not only did the vast major- terizes slavery as a tragic but orderly system, ity of African Americans in the 1890s live in in which slaves’ lives follow a predictable di- the South, Baker claims, but the national ra- urnal cycle of labor and rest and in which sor- cial imaginary was largely determined by its row is temporarily relieved by the communal institutions and values. Dunbar’s georgic reg- expression of song, here the protagonist is ister in Lyrics of Lowly Life speaks to the de- stripped to bare life, possessing neither shelter termining impact of this “mind of the South” nor a community with which to share his con- and the limitations it poses for racial progress. dition. Solitary and exposed to the elements, In their antipastoral reframing of the political the old man represents a brutal new form of economy of the Black Belt, these poems pro- racial dispossession and poses a rebuke to the vide a thoroughly pessimistic portrait of the ideologies of emancipation through labor. agrarian life for African Americans. Dunbar “turns South” in his georgic poems to identify the problem of modernity Negative Modernity in the Black Belt for African Americans as rooted, in part, in Dunbar’s georgic register in poems such as the enduring racialized form of labor link- “Disappointed” appears resolutely antimod- ing them to agrarian modes of production. ern, rooting its explorations of black life in These poems point to the ways the African rural, agrarian terms that refuse any hint of American subject at the turn of the century the cosmopolitan, urban, or industrial. he remains unassimilable to discourses of eco- poems’ antimodernism has oten been read as nomic modernization, appearing instead as a sign of Dunbar’s naïveté as a poet and social the rural, untrained, servile southern laborer thinker, and his traicking in nostalgic plan- inexorably bound to the earth and the slave tation myths and tales of southern rural work past. Agrarian productivity is untethered is seen, Sterling Brown puts it, as a “cruel mis- from virtuous progress and is instead deined reading of history” (Negro Poetry 33). Darwin in terms of negation: sensory deprivation, Turner writes, “Provincially, [Dunbar] as- unmet bodily need, and social lack. hrough sumed the good life for the uneducated to be such negative deinitions, Dunbar responds the life . . . of a sharecropper for a benevolent to discourses like Washington’s “Atlanta Southern aristocrat,” thus “naïvely ofer[ing] Compromise” speech that located the pos- an agrarian myth” in his writing (3–4). Crit- sibility of racial progress in the local eco- ics have emphasized the fact that Dunbar nomic relations developed between southern was not himself from the South: though he whites and blacks and in the emancipatory was the child of former slaves, he grew up in potential of what Washington calls “common Dayton, Ohio, and lived a more urban exis- labour” (221). Dunbar’s georgics offer por- tence than his poems relect. Yet we can read traits in negative of Washington’s industrial- his recurrent focus on the rural economy of agricultural training regime with its capitalist the South in Lyrics of Lowly Life less as nos- model of progress- oriented labor.8 talgia for plantation life than as a meditation Indeed, placing Dunbar’s georgics in Lyr- on what Baker calls the “southern cast of ics of Lowly Life alongside his noniction writ- national racial formation” (23). Drawing on ings on the South reveals the extent to which 870 “Work and Wait Unwearying”: Dunbar’s Georgics [ PMLA

Dunbar presents a philosophical alternative to the South bears only the continuing obliga- Washington’s optimistic rhetoric of capital- tions of an inescapable history of oppression ist progress. While DuBois is Washington’s that cannot be transformed, only abandoned. better-known antagonist, Dunbar—in essays In the light of this profound doubt penned years before DuBois’s 1903 he Souls of about the viability of southern life for Afri- Black Folk—anticipates DuBois’s objections to can Americans, the argumentative impact of Washington’s project of industrial-agricultural Dunbar’s georgics becomes apparent. Chroni- education and betrays a thoroughgoing skep- cling the lingering efects of slavery and the ticism about the future of southern life for residual status of the black subject in in de African Americans.9 Dunbar most forcefully siècle America, “The Deserted Plantation” demurs from Washington’s uplit philosophy is perhaps the most powerful index of the in his 1899 essay “he Hapless Southern Ne- South’s uneven modernity. It is also the most gro,” which depicts the inaccessibility of eco- controversial poem of Dunbar’s oeuvre: a nomic progress and social enfranchisement monologue in dialect of a former slave return- for the southern black laborer. Here Dunbar ing to his old plantation and mourning its narrates a story of journeying into the deep ruin. Critics have tended either to read “he South and “looking into the condition of the Deserted Plantation” as partaking in planta- people themselves” (43)—a narrative that tion ideology or to praise it for its covert resis- DuBois also rehearses in his portrait of rural tance to racist stereotypes. Jean Wagner and Georgia in The Souls of Black Folk and that, Kenneth Douglas, for example, argue that a generation later, Jean Toomer will take up this poem espouses a “southern- style ideol- in Cane (1923). Preiguring DuBois’s chapter ogy” by traicking in the notion that the war “On the Black Belt,” which describes the “for- “destroyed the genuine happiness that the lorn and forsaken” land of former plantations Negroes had enjoyed under the old dispen- now populated by sharecroppers (96), “The sation, turning them into rootless creatures Hapless Southern Negro” portrays a scene of who instinctively make their way back to the abject poverty: a “one-roomed shanty made home, even though it is ruined, of those who of unhewn logs” housing “two families num- had been their real friends.” he poem’s use of bering altogether twelve or more people” (43). dialect, as a “minstrel” idiom that deepens the Such destitute conditions are common, Dun- stereotype of the “happy slave,” only makes its bar points out, for the “poor black men in the portrayal more objectionable (87–88). Joanne far South” with their “little cabins and narrow Braxton, by contrast, asserts that the poem mortgaged land” (44). He asks, “What can we exemplifies the “double voice” of Dunbar’s hope from such a condition, . . . either in the dialect poetry, which allows Dunbar to “speak way of industrial or moral advancement?” to two distinct audiences at once”: to ofer a His answer: the South represents a complete reassuring image to white readers while al- dead end for African Americans, because the lowing black readers to “relish . . . the means history of dehumanization—“the destruc- by which their ancestors retained their hu- tion of [their] manhood”—is entrenched in its manity and their psychic wholeness to survive economic and social infrastructure (44). he their enslavement” (xxvi–xxviii). Braxton’s solution Dunbar proposes is dramatic and reading exemplifies a common interpretive prescient: a mass African American migra- move that sees Dunbar’s dialect poetry as per- tion, not to northern cities but to the “great forming a “masked” critique of white racism, and generous West,” where, he argues, racial invisible to white readers but legible to black inequality is less pervasive. If the West pre- audiences.10 Yet even Braxton agrees that “he sents a possible future for African Americans, Deserted Plantation” is in the end an unfor- 127.4 ] Margaret Ronda 871 tunate production, a “sentimental and some a georgic inversion, an image of the unmak what oversimplified poem that must have ing of cultivation, to present the plantation appealed to white southerners who wanted to as obsolescent remnant of a nolonger viable see blacks back in their place” (xxvii). past. “Weeds” have overtaken the “co’n” in “de A closer look at “The Deserted Plan ta furrers” (furrows), and birdsong stands in for tion”’s portrayal of a suspended igure who nowlost human voices. In this scene of inef remains, like the abandoned plantation itself, fable “stillness,” the solitary speaker confronts an unassimilable residue of another time re his former life by discovering its traces trans veals an agenda neither accommodationist igured by “decay.” In the hush of the deserted nor covertly subversive. The poem instead plantation, the speaker recognizes his own reckons with the impossible predicament of loss of livelihood and community. Turning the socalled free African American in the from the overgrown ields to the empty build New South, who can neither return to old ings, the speaker sees not only the end of the forms of economic survival, however brutal, slave mode of production but also the loss of nor ind durable means of subsistence. Insist the entire lifeworld, the familial network and ing on the speaker’s humanity and limitless slave culture that once existed here: he notes isolation, “he Deserted Plantation” openly the silence where a “banjo’s voice,” “hymn,” challenges New South uplift ideologies and and “co’ n song” once rang out and where the racist stereotypes about black idleness. Its sounds of children illed the air. Listing the oldplantation setting lays bare the speaker’s names of kin—“Whah’s ole Uncle Mordecai lack of options, instead of serving as nostal an’ Uncle Aaron? / Whah’s Aunt Doshy, Sam, gic throwback to the “good old days.” In this an’ Kit, an’ all the rest?”—and remembering way, the poem’s georgic poetics provides a di their evening songs and dances in the “ole agnostic frame, one that is ultimately tragic cabin,” the speaker reckons with their absence rather than accommodationist or subver and his total isolation. “Gone!” he exclaims, sive and thereby highlights the continuing “not one o’ dem is lef’ to tell de story” (21–25). determination of a racially oppressive past. he speaker will “tend” the plantation alone, The diagnostic temperament of “The De as he puts it in the poem’s closing lines, “’Twell serted Plantation” foregrounds initude, not de othah Mastah thinks it’s time to end it, / redemptive possibility, and poses the speak An’ calls me to my qua’ters in de sky” (35–36). er’s situation as a problem without a clear Dunbar’s portrait of a subject cast adrit solution. he poem’s antiprogressive, tragic from economic progress adapts Goldsmith’s stance—characteristic of georgic poetics, with 1770 British georgic, “he Deserted Village,” its emphasis on conditions of necessity—does to a new scene of historical change.11 In “he not directly appeal for social change but in Deserted Village,” as in “he Deserted Plan stead points to the ways such change, prom tation,” a speaker describes his return to a ised by racial emancipation and economic landscape of memory, now transformed to modernization, has failed to materialize. “shapeless ruin,” where weeds have overtaken A solitary speaker returns to his old the once tended ields and “the sounds of pop plantation, now abandoned in the war’s ater ulation fail” (lines 47, 125). The speakers in math. he plantation’s deserted implements both poems mourn the absence of those who of farming, like the discarded plowshares had once populated the area, now “poor exiles” in Vergil’s Georgics, signify an entire way of wandering elsewhere, and ind themselves ut life that has been forsaken: “Oh, de grubbin’ terly “solitary” (Goldsmith 365, 77). Both po hoe’s arustin’ in de co’nah, / An’ de plow’s a ems invert images of georgic cultivation to tumblin’ down in de fiel’.” Dunbar employs launch a larger critique: the lack of a viable 872 “Work and Wait Unwearying”: Dunbar’s Georgics [ PMLA

future in these blighted landscapes reflects freedom—and the unceasing solitary work it political and economic failure. For Goldsmith, entails. His tending of the plantation embodies this failure is the disastrous policy of enclo- futile, nontransformational labor that will nei- sure, which he argues is not only an ineicient ther restore the community whose absence he use of land and a cause of intensifying social mourns nor return the plantation to economic inequality but also a symptom of a dangerous sustainability. His labor’s futility is conirmed swerve in Britain’s economic priorities and in the poem’s final lines, which name death social values. “he Deserted Village” evokes as his only foreseeable prospect. In this way, the history of primitive accumulation, the ex- Dunbar’s speaker represents a forcefully nega- propriation of agricultural laborers and their tive relation to historical progress—a relation transformation into a landless proletariat de- that is igured not in romantic terms of resis- ined in opposition to global “Trade” and com- tance or refusal but as a residual existence that modity capitalism. By adapting Goldsmith’s cannot be integrated into a changing present. poem to the postbellum plantation, Dunbar Dunbar’s georgic laborers embody a draws on Goldsmith’s portrait of the villagers’ form of labor that is neither enslaved nor free dispossession and unassimilability into a mod- in Karl Marx’s sense of owning one’s labor ernizing economy to depict a parallel case in power to sell on the market.12 here appears an American context, portraying the speaker to be no viable market where these igures can and his lost kin as victims of historical forces. exchange their labor for wages; their work is he failure Dunbar’s deserted plantation vivi- at once solitary and alienated, postslavery and ies is not the collapse of the slave economy but yet unintegrated into a capitalist market econ- the new forms of alienation the collapse pro- omy. While Dunbar’s portrayals of the solitary duces and the lack of sustainable social struc- agrarian could read as willfully anachronistic tures emerging in place of this economy. fables, placing them alongside Goldsmith’s he diferences between Dunbar’s poem poem reveals their historical stakes. Dunbar’s and “he Deserted Village” are also instruc- protagonists can be identified as the unas- tive. If Goldsmith’s speaker longs for the gen- similated or redundant workers who make up eral ambience of village life in Auburn, the capitalism’s surplus population—in Marx’s grief of Dunbar’s speaker is painfully speciic, terms, the lumpen proletariat or “reserve as he laments the absence of “all dat loved me army of the unemployed” (Capital 794). But an’ dat I loved in de pas’” (32). The planta- as Michael Denning has recently pointed out, tion’s dissolution represents the breakdown these categories, which center on wage labor of a lifeworld that aforded comfort, however as the norm, do not adequately capture the tenuous, in its network of relations. Without conditions of what Denning calls “wageless these relations, the speaker of “he Deserted life”—being “disposable in the eyes of state Plantation” is irrevocably deserted. And by and market” (80). he animating paradox of closing with the speaker’s intention to remain Dunbar’s georgics is that his characters are sion the plantation, Dunbar revises Goldsmith’s multaneously wageless and laborers, dispos- escape-clause ending, which provides a solu- able and yet bound to their task. hey dwell in tion of sorts for his displaced villagers in the the interstices of familiar modern categories, “distant climes” of America (341). In Dunbar’s neither citizen nor wage laborer. hey there- poem, there are no “new-found worlds” where fore speak to the postbellum entrenchment the speaker can begin anew, like those Gold- of a liminal form of labor balanced between smith’s villagers hope to discover abroad (372). the slave economy’s totalized oppression and Dunbar’s speaker has only one option: the de- modern capitalism’s exploitation, a condition caying southern plantation—the old site of un- defined by segregation, immobility, disen- 127.4 ] Margaret Ronda 873 franchisement, dispossession, wagelessness, of poetry, they play their most prominent and arbitrary violence. he poems in Lyrics of role in Lyrics of Lowly Life. A biographical Lowly Life illustrate a socioeconomic transi- explanation for their early prominence is that tion in postbellum America that positioned Dunbar’s georgics mirror his own experience African Americans as nonmodern laborers of toiling in obscurity as an elevator operator rather than liberal citizens. and bathroom attendant while writing his irst Dunbar’s georgics, then, ofer a strikingly poetry. His letters from the early to mid 1890s negative vision of work under conditions of relentlessly catalog what he calls “the diicul- racial oppression. Closest to Marxist theories ties under which I labor” (“To Dr. James New- of labor in their emphasis on alienation and ton Matthews”). In the georgic’s negotiation of objectiication, these poems remain skeptical the struggle of agrarian labor, Dunbar might of the measurability of labor’s value, point- have discovered analogues to his own diicult ing to the unproductive ends of productive material circumstances—circumstances that acts. hey forward what Antonio Negri calls altered with the publication of Lyrics of Lowly a “negative ontology of labor” in their in- Life, whose popularity eventually allowed sistence that “labor works without an end,” Dunbar to earn his living as a writer and lec- providing a plot that runs counter to capital- turer.13 Dunbar’s more cosmopolitan, profes- ist economic language of value, measure, ex- sional post-Lyrics existence, which distanced change, and progress; to the ideology of the him from the exigent manual labor of “lowly work ethic and virtuous wealth; and to racial- life,” is revealed in the changing commitments uplit narratives centered on productive labor of his later poetry. His subsequent books pre- (11). While Dunbar’s georgics value the hu- sent poems of praise and protest that relect a manity of their laborers, the poems pointedly poet’s increasing consciousness of his public refuse to redeem labor, delineating instead the role as racial representative. ways it disappoints. In them, work exhausts he reappearance of the georgic in these or refuses measure; it is a site of arbitrary later texts signals an ever-widening repre- imposition rather than rational exchange, of sentational distance from the southern black human susceptibility rather than agency. In laborer. Departing from his earlier work’s their ultimate refusal of what Arendt calls the interest in the psychological complexities of “gloriication of labor” central to Enlighten- the laborer’s plight, Dunbar’s “To the South, ment theories of the subject (93), to capitalist on Its New Slavery,” from the 1903 collection economic theory, and to Jefersonian agrari- Lyrics of Love and Laughter, reveals a poet anism, Dunbar’s poems return us to the sense aiming to shape public discourse by directly of deprivation and objectification endemic appealing to the South to restore its lost dig- to human labor. hey highlight the minimal nity. In a sentimental plea, Dunbar calls on quality of manual labor, its association with “Mother South” to “heed my pleading now” bare survival, material frailty, and sufering. and “take . . . thy dusky children to thy saving Dunbar’s georgic laborers, returning to the breast.” Dunbar emerges here as an indignant land and its ceaseless labor without hope for public igure fully empowered to chasten the redemption, evoke a racialized form of pre- South for its “unsanctioned crime” of “new carious life at the turn of the century. slavery.” By presenting himself as spokes- man for the “hopeless” southern sharecropper, Dunbar introduces a new division of Georgic Ends labor into this georgic, becoming the poet- While georgic themes sporadically appear professional whose work is to represent the throughout Dunbar’s subsequent collections invisible laborer and to confront southerners 874 “Work and Wait Unwearying”: Dunbar’s Georgics [ PMLA

about their moral turpitude. His turn toward southern blacks to their outer limit. To read the South as the poem’s subject, personiied Cane’s modern grotesques, published twenty- as a neglectful but ultimately benevolent ma- seven years ater Lyrics of Lowly Life, is to dis- ternal igure, suggests a shit toward a register cover the outcome of the trajectory Dunbar’s at once more confrontational and more con- representations chart from sympathetic, bur- ciliatory than the resignation of his Lyrics of dened laborer to alienated body at the verge of Lowly Life georgics. In the end, Dunbar ar- extinction, as well as the endpoint of the geor- gues, the grave conditions faced by southern gic critique of racial barbarism in the South. blacks “cannot last”; the “warrior queen” will In the decades ater Dunbar’s and DuBois’s realize her error and “come to [her] own.” searing portraits of the everyday terrors of “To the South” simultaneously heightens post- Reconstruction life, laboring conditions the didactic rhetoric of the Lyrics of Lowly Life declined even more dramatically for the rural georgics and diminishes the polarities of labor southern black. he globalization of the cotton that marked these earlier representations. his industry in the 1920s, along with dwindling shift figures the black laborer as historical demand, endangered cotton production in the victim rather than disempowered agent. De- South and reduced many black sharecroppers scribing the wageless laborer as “a bondsman to deeper servitude and even starvation.14 In whom the greed of men has made / Almost the face of such depredations, Toomer’s georgic too brutish to deplore his plight,” Dunbar grotesques capture the annihilating quality of turns him into a voiceless, suffering body agrarian labor, as in “Harvest Song”: instead of a sympathetic protagonist. This iguration of the southern black as embody- I am a reaper whose muscles set at sundown. All ing death in life, entirely depleted of human my oats are cradled. joys and reduced to bare “sighs” and “moans,” But I am too chilled, and too fatigued to bind hews closely to the depiction, in the collec- them. And I hunger. tion’s following poem, “The Haunted Oak,” I crack a grain between my teeth. I do not taste it. of a lynching victim. he georgic’s endpoint I have been in the ields all day. My throat is dry. in Dunbar’s work, where its logic is carried to I hunger. representational extremes, might be discover- able in this turn from laborer to victim, from Over the course of the poem, Toomer multi- toiling body to lynched body, as the deining plies the forms of “hunger” the speaker ex- igure of the South’s negative modernity. periences. He is not only thirsty and hungry What happens to this racialized georgic but also “blind” and “deaf” and completely mode after Dunbar? A generation later, it cut of from others. “Harvest Song” and the resurfaces in Toomer’s modernist investiga- other georgics of Cane present agrarian labor tions of the declining South and its exhausted as progressive decivilization—work that, as “black reapers” in Cane. With its impres- Joan Dayan puts it, “degrade[s] a body into sionistic style, graphic violence, and frank mere matter” and draws it to death’s edge expressions of sexuality, Cane may appear an (155). Toomer’s reapers conspicuously fail unlikely inheritor of Dunbar’s conventional to become civilized through manual labor, verse. Yet alongside this text’s spectacles of sex while lacking even the sympathetic and he- and blood is a series of agrarian grotesques, roic qualities on which Dunbar’s early geor- exaggerated and disfigured portraits of the gics insist. Numbed and traumatized, they everyday dehumanization of black agrarian are defined in all senses by privation, akin laborers that extend Dunbar’s georgic investi- to the “brutish” laborer of Dunbar’s “To the gations of the unfreedom of manual labor for South,” who cannot even “deplore his plight.” 127.4 ] Margaret Ronda 875

Amid what Alain Locke calls the “light lable ends. Dunbar’s poem “Keep A-Pluggin’ from medieval America to modern” that Away,” from Lyrics of Lowly Life, poignantly characterized the Great Migration, Cane underscores this possibility. Cataloging vari- narrates the endgame of a once- dominant ous hostile forces, from swelling storms and mode of production and its accompanying treacherous hills to “sneers” that must be racial ideology (6). In the depleted figures “swallow[ed]” and “lots of pain to bear,” Dun- of “Harvest Song,” we glimpse “the mind of bar repeats his “humble little motto”: “Keep the South” in its declension—a declension a- pluggin’ away.” Dunbar exhorts himself and that Toomer neither celebrates nor mourns. his reader to persist with ceaseless work in the The georgics of Cane reflect a New Negro– face of adversity, framing work as a kind of era dissatisfaction with the moralistic regis- waiting, an efort that defers achievement to ter of Dunbar’s in de siècle representations, an unknown future. Despite its optimistic as- a refusal to elegize their laboring igures or sertions that “there will come a brighter day,” discover any redeeming trait in their work. the poem closes with a reminder to “Work Instead, the exhaustion of Toomer’s reapers and wait unwearying / Keep a- pluggin’ away,” relects a larger representational exhaustion lines that soberly convey the need for “unwea- with the georgic’s tropes. Rejecting any im- rying” fortitude when unending, potentially ages of progress, continuity, or futurity in unrewarded labor lies ahead. To “work and favor of images of immediate lack and un- wait unwearying” is the impossible impera- certain survival, Cane’s georgics are almost tive faced by African Americans in Dunbar’s parodies of Robert Frost’s richly alive mow- generation—an imperative Toomer’s georgics ers in A Boy’s Will (1913) and other georgic reveal to be bankrupt. More than simply in- images of enduring agrarian relations to the vert pastoral conventions or present didac- natural world’s cycles—but parodies “without tic narratives of agrarian life, georgic poems the laughter,” as Kenneth Burke might have it such as Dunbar’s and Toomer’s point toward (153).15 In Cane’s portraits of the insuiciency the historical conditions under which the vita and dehumanization of agrarian labor for activa fails to sustain or improve material cir- southern blacks, we can see the waning of the cumstances. hus, while georgics may appear georgic as a viable literary mode for African anachronistic or even irrelevant to contempo- American writers in the twentieth century.16 rary readers more attuned to lyric soliloquy or In turn, Dunbar’s and Toomer’s poems, linguistic experiment, the questions they pose with their rebuke to discourses of salvational about the equivocal freedoms of labor and po- labor, highlight the alternative that the geor- etry’s task in representing them haunt us still. gic mode presents to more-familiar concep- tions of work derived from Enlightenment humanism and modern capitalism. With its portrayals of labor’s constitutive negativity as NOTES well as its generative power, the georgic might be regarded as a repository for explorations 1. Early estimations of Dunbar’s work reflect his own sense of dialect’s limitations as a “jingle in a bro- of the productive impulse that fail to mea- ken tongue” (“Poet”). James Weldon Johnson, in the sure up—or, as in the case of these African 1922 preface to his anthology Book of American Negro American georgics, that prove to be beyond Poetry, argues that while Dunbar’s dialect poetry made a measure. Georgic poems point to the problem distinctive “contribution to American literature,” dialect of labor’s value in a modernizing society and as a means of poetic expression is inadequate: dialect “is an instrument with but two stops: pathos and humor” to the unsettling possibility that work may (xxxiii, xl). Johnson’s judgment on dialect’s insuiciency be an action without meaningful or calcu- became a critical commonplace by the 1960s and 1970s, 876 “Work and Wait Unwearying”: Dunbar’s Georgics [ PMLA

when the desire for a black poetry of overt protest led to ing economy, cheerful and eicient laborers, and a politi- readings of Dunbar as an apolitical accommodationist cal system that was the model of disinterested republican or a tragic igure “chained” by dialect verse. By the late virtue, they saw greed, corruption, ignorance, crudeness, twentieth century, however, critics inluenced by post- and lethargy” (230). On northern perceptions of the po- structuralist theories of performativity and deconstruc- litical and economic failures of the postbellum South, see tive diférance sought to recover Dunbar’s dialect poems Richardson. as instances of subversive double consciousness and dis- 8. Hsu points out that Washington’s localist rhetoric tinctively black textuality. Notable examples of readings draws on “transatlantic scenarios [that] simultaneously that view Dunbar’s dialect as “signifying” or subversive register and disavow the international scope of the New performance include Blount, “Preacherly Text”; Keeling; South as a region transformed in accordance with capital and Gates. Most recently, historicist readings by Nurhus- circulation” (193). Hsu’s argument illuminates the vari- sein; Cohen; Scott- Childress; and Carr have traced the ous “scales” of Washington’s rhetorical investment in varied cultural inheritances in Dunbar’s dialect, using capitalist logics, from the local to the transnational; Dun- his poetry to elaborate a more complex portrait of dia- bar’s localist poetics, by contrast, reveals the painful lack lect as a popular multiracial genre in turn- of- the- century of mobility and access to resources characteristic of the American literature. All these readings foreground dia- New South that Washington’s capitalist-uplit discourse lect as the most salient dimension of Dunbar’s poetry. downplays. 2. In an anthology of essays on Dunbar’s work published 9. In fact, DuBois congratulated Washington on his in 2010, We Wear the Mask: Paul Laurence Dunbar and the “Atlanta Compromise” speech as a “phenomenal success” Politics of Representative Reality, the editor’s introduc- and “a word itly spoken,” and he did not publicly break tion lauds Dunbar’s creation of “two distinct voices in his from Washington’s philosophy until the early 1900s works—the traditional English of the conventional poet and (57; Juguo). Dunbar’s essay “Our New Madness,” first the renowned, redolent dialect of African Americans”—as published in the Independent in August 1898, directly his most enduring achievement (Harrell, Introd. ix). addresses the limitations of Washington’s Tuskegee pro- 3. Recent articles have begun to broaden critical dis- gram, arguing that while Washington’s “ability and hon- cussion to include dimensions of Dunbar’s poetry beyond esty of purpose” cannot be doubted, “I do fear that this his use of dialect—e.g., Ampadu’s discussion of Dunbar’s earnest man is not doing either himself or his race full praise poems, Balestrini’s work on Dunbar’s war poetry, justice in his public utterances. He says we must have in- Gabbin’s essay on the prayer form in Dunbar’s poetry, dustrial training, and the world quotes him . . . as saying and Blount’s writing on Dunbar and African American we must not have anything else” (182). elegy (“Paul Laurence Dunbar”). 10. Jones; Keeling; and Peabody share this critical 4. Goodman points to the “network of image and tendency. echo that consistently deines labor as fundamentally re- 11. While there is no direct biographical evidence that parative or restitutive, precarious, and subject to lapse” Dunbar read Goldsmith’s poem, its popularity and per- in the Georgics (113). vasive inluence on prior generations of American writers 5. One key example of the subsumption of georgic make it a probability. It is also likely that Dunbar would into pastoral is Buell’s deinition of pastoral as “refer- have been familiar with the anthologized early American ring broadly to all literature that celebrates an ethos of georgics that respond to “he Deserted Village,” such as rurality or nature or wilderness over against an ethos of Dwight’s Greenield Hill and Freneau’s “he American metropolitanism” (439). Sweet argues that the “blur[ring] Village.” We might regard Dunbar’s “he Deserted Plan- of the distinction between pastoral and georgic” raises tation” as carrying on a literary tradition of American the “question of identifying various ethoi speciic to these responses to Goldsmith’s poem. On the American recep- domains which are not coextensive” (3–4). On the “com- tion and inluence of “he Deserted Village,” see Lutz. plex pastoral,” see Leo Marx. 12. In volume 1 of Capital, Marx deines free labor in 6. Wacquant describes the new “peculiar institution” these terms: “Labour- power can appear upon the market of racial oppression emergent in the postbellum South, as a commodity, only if, and so far as, its possessor, the produced by the “need to secure anew the labour of for- individual whose labour- power it is, ofers it for sale, or mer slaves, without whom the region’s economy would sells it, as a commodity. In order that he may be able to collapse,” and characterized by “the generalization of do this, he must have it at his disposal, must be the un- sharecropping and debt peonage,” vagrancy laws, and the trammelled owner of his capacity for labour, i.e., of his persistent threat of vigilante violence (45–46). Dunbar person. He and the owner of money meet in the market, himself, in his essay “Is Higher Education for the Negro and deal with each other as on the basis of equal rights, Hopeless?,” describes the high rates of black incarcera- with this difference alone, that one is buyer, the other tion in the turn- of- the- century South (47). seller; both, therefore, equal in the eyes of the law” (167). 7. Kolchin writes that even by the late 1870s, “when 13. Dunbar wrote to Howells in September 1896, ater free-labor advocates looked south, instead of a lourish- Lyrics of Lowly Life was published with Howells’s lauda- 127.4 ] Margaret Ronda 877 tory introduction, “You may be pleased to know that my Collins, Michael. “Risk, Envy and Fear in Sterling Brown’s afairs have very materially changed for the better, and en- Georgics.” Callaloo 21.4 (1998): 950–67. JSTOR. Web. tirely through your agency” (“To William Dean Howells”). 23 July 2012. 14. Grubbs describes the declining conditions of Davis, David Brion. Slavery and Human Progress. New southern cotton production in the 1920s. York: Oxford UP, 1984. Print. 15. Webb discusses Toomer’s rewriting of Frost’s Dayan, Joan. Haiti, History, and the Gods. Berkeley: U of “Mowing.” California P, 1995. Print. 16. While Cane carries Dunbar’s investigations of un- Denning, Michael. “Wageless Life.” New Let Review 66 even modernity and nontransformational labor to their (2010): 79–97. Web. 23 July 2012. logical extremes, Sterling Brown’s 1932 book of poems Dowling, William. Poetry and Ideology in Revolutionary Southern Road might be regarded as the historical ter- Connecticut. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1990. Print. minus for the georgic mode attuned to the racial ideolo- Du Bois, W. E. B. he Souls of Black Folk. 1903. New York: gies of southern agrarian labor. For a reading of Brown’s Penguin, 1989. Print. poetry as georgic, see Collins. Dunbar, Paul Laurence. he Collected Poetry of Paul Lau- rence Dunbar. Ed. Joanne Braxton. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1993. Print. WORKS CITED ———. “A Corn-Song.” Dunbar, Collected Poetry 59. ———. “he Deserted Plantation.” Dunbar, Collected Po- Addison, Joseph. “An Essay on Virgil’s Georgics.” 1697. etry 67–68. he Works of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison. ———. “Disappointed.” Dunbar, Collected Poetry 60. Ed. Henry G. Bohn. Vol. 1. London: Bell, 1883. 154– ———. “he Fourth of July and Race Outrages.” Dunbar, 61. Print. Paul Laurence Dunbar Reader 50–51. Ampadu, Lena. “The Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar ———. “he Hapless Southern Negro.” Dunbar, Paul Lau- and the Influence of African Aesthetics: Dunbar’s rence Dunbar Reader 43–45. Poems and the Tradition of Masking.” Harrell, We ———. “He Had His Dream.” Dunbar, Collected Poetry 61. Wear the Mask 3–16. ———. “Is Higher Education for the Negro Hopeless?” Arendt, Hannah. he Human Condition. Chicago: U of Dunbar, Paul Laurence Dunbar Reader 45–47. Chicago P, 1958. Print. ———. “Keep A- Pluggin’ Away.” Dunbar, Collected Poetry 46. Baker, Houston, Jr. Turning South Again: Re-thinking Modernism / Re- reading Booker T. Durham: Duke ———. “Our New Madness.” In His Own Voice. Ed. Her- UP, 2001. Print. bert Woodward Martin and Ronald Primeau. Athens: Balestrini, Nassim. “National Memory and the Arts in Ohio UP, 2002. 181–83. Print. Paul Laurence Dunbar’s War Poetry.” Harrell, We ——— . he Paul Laurence Dunbar Reader. Ed. 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