Oak and Ivy" showed no distinctive Negro
influence, but rather the influence of James Whitcomb Riley. At this time
Paul and I were together every day for several months. He talked to me a
great deal about his hopes and ambitions. In these talks he revealed that
he had reached a realization of the possibilities of poetry in the
dialect, together with a recognition of the fact that it offered the
surest way by which he could get a hearing. Often he said to me: "I've
got to write dialect poetry; it's the only way I can get them to listen
to me." I was with Dunbar at the beginning of what proved to be his last
illness. He said to me then: "I have not grown. I am writing the same
things I wrote ten years ago, and am writing them no better." His
self-accusation was not fully true; he had grown, and he had gained a
surer control of his art, but he had not accomplished the greater things
of which he was constantly dreaming; the public had held him to the things
for which it had accorded him recognition. If Dunbar had lived he would
have achieved some of those dreams, but even while he talked so dejectedly
to me he seemed to feel that he was not to live. He died when he was only
thirty-three.

It has a bearing on this entire subject to note that Dunbar was of unmixed
Negro blood; so, as the greatest figure in literature which the colored
race in the United States has produced, he stands as an example at once
refuting and confounding those who wish to believe that whatever
extraordinary ability an Aframerican shows is due to an admixture of white
blood.

As a man, Dunbar was kind and tender. In conversation he was brilliant and
polished. His voice was his chief charm, and was a great element in his
success as a reader of his own works. In his actions he was impulsive as a
child, sometimes even erratic; indeed, his intimate friends almost looked
upon him as a spoiled boy. He was always delicate in health.
Temperamentally, he belonged to that class of poets who Taine says are
vessels too weak to contain the spirit of poetry, the poets whom poetry
kills, the Byrons, the Burns's, the De Mussets, the Poes.

To whom may he be compared, this boy who scribbled his early verses while
he ran an elevator, whose youth was a battle against poverty, and who, in
spite of almost insurmountable obstacles, rose to success? A comparison
between him and Burns is not unfitting. The similarity between many phases
of their lives is remarkable, and th