he words “broken tongue”. By calling Dialect tradition a “broken tongue”, Dunbar is referring to his own feelings that the white’s attempt at capturing the African-American’s speech by Dialect tradition is a poor, if not incorrect, representation. Even though not many blacks in the day thought the Dialect tradition illustrated their true speech, they were confined to use what they had. Because that style of writing was so popular at the time, Dunbar’s Dialect pieces got more notoriety than his standard English; and unfortunately the latter he felt was of higher quality.Another way Dunbar criticizes his inability to escape the brand of a Dialect poet is in the structure of the poem. About three quarters of the poem is Dunbar speaking about his standard English works. Then the very last two lines of the poem he contrasts the standard English side of his work with the Dialect tradition writing he has done. Here he is trying to tell the reader that even though a majority of his work was done in standard English, he is only recognized for his mastery of the Dialect tradition. The last part of the first stanza, “He voiced the world’s absorbing beat” (Dunbar 4), refers to Dunbar’s attempt at writing about people and the things he felt were important to people in general. Although the subject, for the most part, was about African-Americans, it could have easily been extrapolated to every person. His frustration with the blindness of American readers is clear by the end of the poem. Dunbar eventually died still angry at the fact that although slavery had been dead for over sixty years, he was still enslaved, by the wants of the American public, to produce Dialect tradition literature when he knew he was one of the world’s best standard English writers of his day....
