Dean Howells with promoting his early success, but was dismayed at the critic's encouragement that he concentrate on dialect poetry. Angered that editors refused to print his more traditional poems, Dunbar accused Howells of "[doing] me irrevocable harm in the dictum he laid down regarding my dialect verse." Dunbar was continuing in a literary tradition that used Negro dialect; his predecessors included such writers as Mark Twain, Joel Chandler Harris and George Washington Cable. Two brief examples of Dunbar's work, the first in standard English and the second in dialect, demonstrate the diversity of the poet's works: (From "Dreams") What dreams we have and how they fly Like rosy clouds across the sky; Of wealth, of fame, of sure success, Of love that comes to cheer and bless; And how they wither, how they fade, The waning wealth, the jilting jade — The fame that for a moment gleams, Then flies forever, — dreams, ah — dreams! (From "A Warm Day In Winter") "Sunshine on de medders, Greenness on de way; Dat's de blessed reason I sing all de day." Look hyeah! What you axing'? What meks me so merry? 'Spect to see me sighin'''W'en hit's wa'm in Febawary?Critical response and legacy Dunbar became the first African-American poet to earn national distinction and acceptance. The New York Times called him "a true singer of the people – white or black." Frederick Douglass once referred to Dunbar as, "one of the sweetest songsters his race has produced and a man of whom [he hoped] great things." His friend and writer James Weldon Johnson highly praised Dunbar, writing in The Book of American Negro Poetry:Paul Laurence Dunbar stands out as the first poet from the Negro race in the United States to show a combined mastery over poetic material and poetic technique, to reveal innate literary distinction in what he wrote, and to maintain a high level of performance. He was the first to rise to a height from which he could take a perspective view of his own race. He was the first to see objectively its humor, its superstitions, its short-comings; the first to feel sympathetically its heart-wounds, its yearnings, its aspirations, and to voice them all in a purely literary form. This collection was published in 1931, following the Harlem Renaissance, which led to a great outpouring of literary and artistic works by African American people. They explored new