THE POET AND OTHER POEMS

Cincinnati: [n.p.], 1920. Very good plus.. Rare inscribed first edition of the second poetry collection by the Black artist and author called by contemporaries the "Paul Laurence Dunbar of Cincinnati," presented to another Cincinnati poet. Dandridge, a painter and decorator in his early years, changed his profession to telephone coal sales and his creative talents to poetry after polio left him hemiplegic at the age of 29; by the mid-1920s he was literary editor of THE CINCINNATI JOURNAL. The poems in his three published collections are written alternately in dialect reminiscent of fellow Ohioan Paul Laurence Dunbar, to whom he was frequently compared, and in the literary register of poetic convention.

During and after his lifetime, Dandridge's lesser efforts were frequently anthologized. The poet is still more frequently damned with excruciating faint praise as an inspirational figure, his poetry reduced to "a striking example of what can be done in spite of handicaps" (Wormley, 1937). There was considerably more to his work than "sweetness and light" (Kerlin), however: "Facts," an uncompromising address to returning Black heroes of World War I ("If you are still to be the herder's cattle / Then ill spilt blood fell short of Freedom's aim"); "Supplication," dedicated to the Cincinnati Branch of the NAACP; and the notably direct "My Grievance": "Yes, I have long been underpaid, / Although my brain and brawn has made / You rich [...] Yes, I am lynched. Is it that I / Must without judge or jury die?"

An exceptionally scarce association copy from a fascinating figure of unrecognized range, unjustly dismissed as a poet of sentimental resignation, situated midway between Dunbar and Langston Hughes. 7.5'' x 5''. Original grey marbled boards. Grey marbled endpapers. 64 pages. Inscribed by Dandridge on front free endpaper "in grateful appreciation" to contemporary Cincinnati poet Emerson Venable. Light scuffing to boards. A bit of creasing to upper corners of several leaves. Else bright and sound.