Frederick Douglass

"An Ante-Bellum Sermon" by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1895)

This poem was published alongside “Frederick Douglass” in Dunbar’s Majors and Minors poetry collection, which included poems written in standard American English verse and dialect. It similarly engages with many of the same issues of freedom and slavery, but in a notably different register and context.

"Frederick Douglass" by Robert Hayden (1966)

Hayden’s poem for Frederic Douglass was written as the civil rights movement hit its most crucial turning point in the United States in the 1960s. It recalls the living legacy of Douglass on the Black community more than 70 years after his death, commemorating his profound impact on the movement for freedom and equality.

"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d" by Walt Whitman (1865)

Written in free verse, Walt Whitman’s long elegy for Abraham Lincoln provides another example of this genre from the second half of the 19th century, which similarly commemorates the death and legacy of an important figure in American history.

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight (2018)

To learn more about the subject of the poem, this Pulitzer Prize winning biography provides a comprehensive chronicle of Douglass’s career and influence as an orator, abolitionist, and diplomat, giving a full picture of a complex man fighting for change at the crossroads of history.