1) Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem, “We Wear the Mask,” contains the famous lines:
Why should the world be overwise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
This poem recalls a moment in history when African Americans were forced to conceal their true thoughts and feelings or risk their lives attempting to communicate them to whites. The speaker in Dunbar’s “Antebellum Sermon” demonstrates the manner in which enslaved Africans both heeded and skirted around the unwritten rule that one’s real thoughts and feelings were best kept to one’s self. Dunbar’s poem, “Philosophy,” however, seems to directly contradict the ideas in “We Wear the Mask.” Write a 4-page, typewritten, double-spaced essay that discusses the debate taking place in these poems between strategic concealment of one’s thoughts and feelings and boldly asserting them.
https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/192/lyrics-of-love-and-laughter/4161/philosophy/
https://genius.com/Paul-laurence-dunbar-we-wear-the-mask-annotated
Last Completed Projects
| topic title | academic level | Writer | delivered |
|---|