One of the most striking aspects of W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903) is the author's use of lines of poetry and bars of song to open each of the book's fourteen chapters. Each inscription includes a few lines or stanzas of poetry by writers from America and Europe, such as James Lowell, Lord Byron, or Friedrich von Schiller, paired with one or two bars of song. How the reader should understand these epigraphs is not immediately clear, though, for they include just the lines, the notes, and the poets' names, without explanations or even titles. Indeed, throughout the first thirteen chapters of the book, Du Bois was silent about these epigraphs; they remain cultural inscriptions that we, as readers, must decipher. Only in his last chapter did Du Bois refer to them, and his commentary here is focused more broadly on what he called "the sorrow songs," the spirituals sung by slaves and their descendants, than on the epigraphs themselves. Here Du Bois indicated that the bars of song are symbols of the rich cultural achievements of African Americans; readers come to understand that they are part of his assertion of the importance of African Americans in America's cultural, spiritual, and material development. But even in this final chapter, Du Bois said little about the pairing of songs and poems. What, then, are we to make of these combinations?

We can understand the epigraphs simply as unifying elements of the book or as a signal of Du Bois's argument about the songs' artistic value. But if we consider Souls in the context of theories about relations among the arts in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, its combinations of music and poetry illuminate an as yet unappreciated aspect of Du Bois's creation. In particular, reading Du Bois's book in light of ideas about the "total work of art," especially as advocated by opera composer and theorist Richard Wagner, draws our attention to Du Bois's successful appropriation of theories about the unity of the arts to his goal of undermining American racism.¹ Indeed, Souls can be read as a total work of art in the sense advocated by Wagner. But Souls is a different kind of artwork than Wagner's operas, both in form and in politics. Du Bois extended the concepts outlined by Wagner, using them to create a new and distinctive kind of text suited to the struggle against racism in the United States. Evaluating his book as a total work of art, then, enhances our appreciation of its innovative form and of Du Bois's creative and intellectual achievement.

Admittedly, the extent to which Du Bois intentionally applied ideas like Wagner's to the composition of Souls is unclear. There is little evidence in his published writing to link the book to these concepts about the arts.² But there is significant cultural and textual evidence that suggests the relevance of the idea of the total work of art to Souls. It seems highly unlikely, moreover, that Du Bois would have been unfamiliar with the concept. For one thing, Wagner and his theories about the unity of the arts were widely disseminated and hugely influential in Germany in the years when Du Bois lived there as a graduate student. Wagner, who began to compose operas and publish essays about the arts during the 1840s, was one of many Romantic artists who were frustrated with what they saw as an unfortunate fragmentation of the arts. They believed that, in isolated form, works of art failed to have a sufficient effect on their readers or viewers. They hoped that creating works that involved multiple media, and thus reuniting the arts, might allow them to create texts that had a stronger impact. This goal was particularly widespread among English and German theorists and artists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.³ Those who attempted to create unified arts combined music and literature, music and the visual arts, and even music and odors or colors.⁴ They hoped, by doing so, to give their work synaesthesic properties, to create texts that appealed to more than one of the senses of the audience members.⁵ The stage often was the locus of these efforts, as the performance arts offered numerous possibilities for combining different kinds of stimuli.