ABSTRACT
Poet, playwright, novelist, director and professor, Owen Vincent Dodson was once called by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Richard Eberhart "the best Negro poet in the United States". The theme of religion and the sadness that is present in most of Dodson's work pervade Boy at the Window because it prominently reflects his personal experience. In his poetry and other writings, Dodson consistently refers to faith and religion in combination with sorrow. This thematic cluster enacts one of Dodson's primary literary goals: to invoke empathy rather than pity or anger for the sufferings of African-Americans. In reviewing his first poetry collection, Powerful Long Ladder, Jessica Nelson North commented: 'Owen Dodson celebrates the wrongs of his special minority, not with bitterness but with sorrow'. Sadness so consistently pervades Dodson's writing that James Hatch took the name of Dodson's poem "Sorrow is the Only Faithful One" as the title of his definitive biography.
