Lyric, African-American Experience
We can identify Paul Laurence Dunbar's work because of the type of poetry he likes to write. Dude was really into writing lyrics. His poems often have a first person speaker, who tells us about his thoughts and feelings. We can see this first person speaker in poems of his like "The Valse" and "Drizzle."
In "Drizzle," we'll also notice that Dunbar's speaker uses African-American dialect. This is another way we can recognize Dunbar's poetry: he's a poet who is famous for innovating a type of poetry that uses African-American dialect. Though there's no dialect in "Sympathy," keep an eye out for this technique in some of his other poems.