Phillis Wheatley

African-born American poet

• Born: 1753(?)
• Birthplace: West Coast of Africa (possibly the Senegal-Gambia region)
• Died: December 5, 1784
• Place of death: Boston, Massachusetts

The first African American and the second colonial American woman to publish a book, Wheatley mastered eighteenth century verse models and, by her example, advanced the case against slavery as well as the emergence of African American letters.

Early Life

Phillis Wheatley, enslaved at the age of seven or eight, had few childhood memories of Africa, but she did remember her mother’s ritual prayer at sunrise. On July 11, 1761, Phillis was purchased by John and Susanna Wheatley of Boston and was named after the ship on which she arrived. She was trained in household duties and, on August 18, 1771, was accepted as a member of the Old South Congregational Church.

In intervals between her chores, she was tutored in English, Latin, and Bible studies. Her first published poem, “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin,” appeared in the December 21, 1767, issue of Rhode Island’s Newport Mercury. In October, 1771, a broadside (a large sheet of paper printed on one side) with her elegy on the famous minister George Whitefield sold for seven coppers. This poem was commercially reprinted many times. Impressed by Phillis’s success as a poet, Susanna Wheatley advertised in 1772 for about three hundred colonial subscribers to finance a proposed book by the young poet. This volume, however, never appeared.

Life’s Work

With the aid of friends, Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was published in London in 1773. Advertised to appeal to the eighteenth century European interest in prodigies, the verse in this edition was somewhat revised to suit an English audience. The book included a frontispiece portrait of the poet contemplatively posed, in accordance with painterly conventions of the day, to suggest her religious conversion and poetic inspiration. In both England and colonial America the critical response to this work was on the whole favorable. Jupiter Hammon, a slave in New York, published a poem of appreciation addressed to Wheatley in 1778.

While visiting London a few months prior to the release of her book, Wheatley enjoyed the attention of several famous individuals, including Benjamin Franklin. After her return to Boston, she was manumitted (released from slavery). The emancipated poet married John Peters, a free black man who worked odd jobs. Together they struggled with poverty. In 1779, Wheatley again unsuccessfully sought sponsors for an American edition of her writings.

In the years after the publication of her book abroad, she continued to write letters and occasional verse, which would sometimes appear in publications such as Boston’s Independent Chronicle and Advertiser. Her most famous letter, written in 1765 and reprinted in many New England newspapers in 1774 (first in the Connecticut Gazette on March 11), was an antislavery letter addressed to American Indian minister Samson Occom. In the letter, Wheatley represents slaves as latter-day Israelites awaiting deliverance from the captivity of a pharaoh. Expressing the emerging revolutionary spirit of colonial America, Wheatley wrote, “In every human breast God has implanted a principle, which we call Love of Freedom.”

At this point in her life Wheatley could openly state her opposition to slavery. Earlier as a slave, however, she felt constrained to convey her abolitionist sentiment more subtly in her verse. “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” for example, the poet does more than express gratitude for her conversion to Christianity, and she does more than insist that blacks are capable of both spiritual and cultural refinement. Importantly, in the last line of this short poem, two allusions to passages from the Old Testament book of Isaiah shrewdly intimate the equality of whites and blacks from their Creator’s point of view. Wheatley’s African American audience would have been especially sensitive to such allusions to Isaiah because many slaves found personal hope for their own liberation in this Old Testament prophet’s forecast of the end of the Israelites’ Babylonian captivity.

In two verse paraphrases of biblical passages, Wheatley likewise subversively hints at an abolitionist point of view that she dared not openly express. Her “Goliath of Garth” retells the David and Goliath story. In this verse she implies that enslavers are not real Christians, but instead are deity-defying Philistines who will eventually be overthrown. Her verse paraphrase “Isaiah LXIII. 1-8” likewise recalls David’s victory against Goliath and similarly implies that slave masters disobey divine providence and, consequently, will not be included among the deity’s Davidian chosen people.

Wheatley also subtly used classical allusions to insinuate her early antislavery convictions. In “To Maecenas,” the first verse in her book, the poet speaks through an assumed voice of a shepherd-figure of the sort found in classical pastoral poetry. Her manner in this prefatory poem indicates a self-conscious disguise, and it suggests that deeper meanings lie below the surface of the “masked” poems to follow in her book. This is indeed the case in Wheatley’s “On Imagination,” in which seemingly conventional neoclassical devices serve as vehicles for the poet’s subtle advancement of her point about love as a natural bond that should end the inhumanity of enslavement.

Even Wheatley’s early elegies on famous and unfamiliar figures expressed her opposition to slavery. “On the Death of a Young Lady of Five Years of Age” she opposes human bondage by associating freedom and equality with the blessings of heaven. Pertinent, as well, are the dialogues between the living and dead in “A Funeral Poem on the Death of C. E., an Infant of Twelve Months.” The recovery of previously suppressed voices in this poem includes African Americans who had been oppressed while they were alive. In both elegies freedom is identified as a divine gift intended for all human beings of every race.

Wheatley’s career as a poet would end prematurely. Chronically ill, she died at age thirty-one, apparently of complications related to childbirth.

Significance

In her time Phillis Wheatley’s literary legacy served both advocates and opponents in debates concerning the intellectual and cultural potentialities of African Americans. If Thomas Jefferson was not persuaded by her work, his fellow revolutionary Benjamin Rush thought her poetry resulted from a “singular genius.”

In later times as well, Wheatley has provoked controversy. From the 1960’s onward, some African Americans have faulted her writings for their lack of anger and especially for their subservience to the dominant culture’s religious and literary paradigms. Others, however, have focused on the clever strategies the poet used to revise, resist, or subvert certain beliefs prevalent in the culture of her day. These strategies, Wheatley’s defenders claim, reveal a characteristic African American double consciousness: the difficult attempt to reconcile one’s self with the ways of a world presently hostile to the true expression of that self.

Wheatley wrote from within her Anglo-republican culture, but her double consciousness also enabled her to detect and reveal several of its inconsistencies and hypocrisies. However, in a world where women and blacks were expected to be docile, she had to be vigilant about her public image. The slave-poet carefully mingled simple piety and conventional verse techniques with a discreetly managed republican spirit of independence. While still a slave, she embedded the American spirit of political revolution below the surface of the literary conventions and pious sentiments of her poetry. Her contemporary readers valued her expression of piety and her execution of literary conventions because both elements met their expectations concerning cultural refinement. The poet’s more underground revolutionary sentiment went undetected by her white advocates and detractors alike because such a spirit of independence was not expected from a person who was black, female, and a slave. While Wheatley’s place in American cultural history is secure, the appreciation of her achievement will increase as more of her underground, revolutionary techniques are made apparent.

Bibliography

Carretta, Vincent, and Philip Gould, eds. Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001. Carretta and Gould present a collection of essays relating the poet to English and other American black authors.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers. New York: Basic Civitas, 2003. Gates, a well-known scholar of African American history and literature, explores the poet’s interaction with American revolutionary figures. Also, he defends her against criticism and defines her political and poetic legacies.

Lasky, Kathryn. A Voice of Her Own: The Story of Phillis Wheatley, Slave Poet. Cambridge, Mass.: Candlewick Press, 2003. A review of the poet’s life and work specifically designed for young readers.

Robinson, William H., ed. Critical Essays on Phillis Wheatley. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. An anthology of responses to the poet’s works.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Phillis Wheatley and Her Writings. New York: Garland, 1984. An archival source providing a substantial introduction to and facsimiles of the earliest editions of the poet’s work.

Scheick, William J. Authority and Female Authorship in Colonial America. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998. Chapter 4 examines the subtle implications of biblical matter in Wheatley’s poetry.