[A few years
back, I shared a handful of my favorite American poems in a
weeklong series. Before I go back to sharing poems for money—well, teaching
them as part of my job, but you get the idea—I wanted to highlight another week’s
worth of favorite poems and a couple reasons why I love each. Share your
favorites in comments, please!]
Today’s favorite
poem is Paul Laurence Dunbar’s
“We Wear the Mask” (1896).
I love “Mask”
because I don’t know of any other literary work that mirrors its
author’s situation more closely (Dunbar was a hugely learned and talented
poet forced by the market and publishers to write in a dialect voice much more
often than he would have preferred) while at the same time speaking for a broad
community of perspectives and experiences. I love it because if I had to pick
only one literary text to portray the lynching
epidemic, this would be the one. And I love it because of the raw, potent
emotion of “O great Christ.”
Next favorite tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Thoughts on this
poem? Other favorites you’d share?
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