[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

It’s rare when a POETS Day featured poet comes complete his own POETS Day call to arms, but such is the case with Paul Laurence Dunbar. “Sympathy,” one of his most popular works, contains the iconic line “I know why the caged bird sings.” Many know the 1899 poem and appreciate it on its merits, but most these days more are likely to know it by association with Maya Angelou’s eponymously titled autobiography. The poem, or at very least the line, is startling in the ready empathy it evokes; now an expression of black oppression and a powerful image for civil rights movements.

In 1897, Dunbar and Alice Ruth Moore, soon to be Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar, moved to Washington D.C. where Paul had been hired as an attendant, which I assume is sort of clerk, at the Library of Congress. It must have seemed an exciting opportunity for the literary-minded poet. He hated it with a mad (poetic) passion. Alice told him to quit and focus exclusively on writing. I don’t think he was hard to convince. She wrote about what prompted him to write the poem in 1914.