Phillis Wheatley

Notes:

1.) Her Christian viewpoint -- her acceptance of the pious religious views of 18th century New England.

2.) Does anything in the poetry of Wheatley indicate that she was a woman?  Could her poetry have been written just as easily by a man?  Compare her poetry, in this regard, to the poetry of Anne Bradstreet.

3.) Wheatley uses conventional themes and poetic artifices of Augustan English poetry:

• Ritual invocation to the muse
• Periphrasis -- round-about method of stating ideas
• Personification
• Heroic couplet

Augustan English poetry = English neoclassicists (Pope 1688-1744)

4.) Heroic Couplet:

• Iambic pentameter lines rhymed in pairs
• Alexander Pope -- an important and fixed form
• End-stopped lines versus Caesuras
• Inherent DECORUM

5.) POEM -- “On Being Brought from Africa to America” reveals the poet’s acceptance of the conventional wisdom of the day.  Explain how it reveals “the whiteness of blackness” in colonial America.

6.) POEM -- “On Imagination”

• Can her concept of the role and power of the imagination be considered transitional, an embodiment of both neoclassical and romantic doctrines?
• Compare her views on the imagination with the early neoclassical critical doctrines that ignored the imagination in favor of the imitation of nature.
• Her apparent neoclassic identification of the fancy with the imagination, the idea of the imagination as a divinely inspired faculty essential to creativity -- the “leader of the mental train” and ruler over the “subject-passions.”
• She views the imagination as a divinely inspired source of visions that transcend the limits of the natural world.

Source: Prentice Hall Anthology of American Literature (IM)