Sympathy the poem that inspired Maya Angelou

Paul Laurence Dunbar was an American poet, novelist, and short-story writer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born in Dayton, Ohio, to parents who had been enslaved in Kentucky before the American Civil War, Dunbar began writing stories and verses when he was a child. He published his first poems at the age of 16 in a Dayton newspaper and served as president of his high school's literary society.
Dunbar's popularity increased rapidly after his work was praised by William Dean Howells, a leading editor associated with Harper's Weekly. Dunbar became one of the first black writers to establish an international reputation. In addition to his poems, short stories, and novels, he also wrote the lyrics for the musical comedy In Dahomey (1903), the first all-African-American musical produced on Broadway in New York. The musical later toured in the United States and the United Kingdom. Suffering from tuberculosis, which had no cure, Dunbar died in Dayton, Ohio, at the age of 33.
Dunbar's extensive body of work uses a variety of dialects and provides a significant representation of black life at the turn of the twentieth century.