A reader then recites the poet's "Address to a Haggis," almost certainly the most passionate dialect poem ever composed by a man to a meat product.

He became famous - perhaps despite himself - in 1958 with the publication of a dazzling volume of dialect poems, "With Black Ink."

The next year, Dunbar asked the Wrights to publish his dialect poems in book form, but the brothers did not have the facility to do so.

Though he saw "honest thinking and true feeling" in Dunbar's traditional poems, he particularly praised Dunbar's dialect poems.

Dunbar remained always suspicious that there was something demeaning about the marketability of dialect poems.

Howells extolled Dunbar's dialect poems to the virtual exclusion of the poet's preferred verses in standard English, thus establishing a pattern of praise that haunted him.

Arranged to appeal to British readers, it included only a few of his dialect poems and consisted mostly of sonnets.

He joined the Wiener Gruppe in 1955, participated in their literary cabarets, and wrote dialect poems, montages, and concrete poems.

Each movement is accompanied by excerpts from four different dialect poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar.

Lasting success attended his Humoresken (1892), the collection of dialect poems Altboarisch (1884), and several popular plays, dramatized from his novels.