Phillis Wheatley

Notes:

1.) Wheatley is a “fascinating” poet:

• She reflects Puritan influence
• She wrote poetry that imitates Alexander Pope
• She was the first African American to publish a book

2.) She writes about liberty as an abstract or spiritual condition, rather than as freedom from slavery.

3.) POEM: “On Being Brought from Africa to America” -- the kind of enslavement she seems most concerned with is that of her former ignorance of Christianity and redemption.

4.) Her LETTERS provide a valuable addition to our understanding of Wheatley’s life, documenting her correspondence with abolitionist groups in England and America and with other Africans in servitude in America.  The correspondence continues to suggest that she views spiritual salvation as “the way to true felicity,” as she expresses in her letter to Arbour Tanner, but also that she is aware of the needs of both Africans and American Indians.  Her letter to Samson Occom comes closest to revealing the development of Wheatley’s voice as an advocate for the natural rights of blacks.

5.) Compare Wheatley with Bradstreet as poets on public subjects:

6.) What explains the absence of personal voice in Wheatley?

7.) Is her emulation of 18th century British poets a kind of performance or does this poetic style allow her both to achieve and to evade a distinct literary voice?

8.) Wheatley does make a connection between achieving “exalted language” in poetry -- or in art, as in “To S.M., a Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works” -- and rising on “seraphic pinions.”

9.) Wheatley resembles the earlier colonial writers -- such as Wigglesworth and Edward Taylor -- for whom personal concerns and personal voice are largely absent.

10.) But, the powerful images of “rising” and racial uplift will reappear in black prose and poetry from Booker T. Washington to Countee Cullen.

Source: Norton Anthology of American Literature (IM)