Dunbar, Douglass, Milton: Authorial Agon and the Integrated Canon

Harold Bloom’s ideas of influence illuminate Paul Laurence Dunbar’s response to the provocative precedence of John Milton. Dunbar’s early elegy for Frederick Douglass suffers the influence of “Lycidas.” A few years later the sonnet “Douglass” demonstrates Dunbar’s growth as a poet and his successful engagement with Milton and Wordsworth to integrate the sonnet tradition and, effectively, the larger canon. Douglass, as spokesman for civil rights, serves as the enabling figure of Dunbar’s agon to integrate African-American poetry into the canon of English poetry. This integration, in turn, suggests certain revisions to Bloom’s theory. While Bloom tends toward a transcendent aestheticism, playfully atemporal, Dunbar works out his agon in the historical moment, personal as well as national. While Bloom emphasizes an aggressive and isolating ambition, integration suggests that the true reward of the successful agon is communion and poetic community.