Biography

Born in Africa, probably in present-day Senegal or Gambia, Phillis Wheatley was brought to Boston when she was around eight years old to be a companion for Susannah Wheatley, the wife of a wealthy tailor. Mrs. Wheatley, part of an enlightened group of Boston Christians who believed that slavery could not be tolerated in Christian households, recognized Phillis's intelligence and saw that she was taught to read and write; Phillis studied the Bible, read Latin poets, and was influenced by Milton, Pope, and Gray. She became well known for her poem eulogizing the Reverend George Whitfield, and when she was nineteen or twenty she traveled to England, accompanied by the Wheatleys' son, with a manuscript of her work. Her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) inaugurated the black American literary tradition. A group of eighteen prominent citizens of Boston, including the state governor and John Hancock, asserted that Wheatley had composed the poems, although "under the Disadvantage of serving as a Slave in a Family in this Town." A second volume was proposed but never published, and most of the poems and letters have been lost.

Explorations

Though originally published in 1773, Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects have been only recently recovered into the American canon, and they remain controversial. Some leading African American scholars celebrate Wheatley as the founder of important literary traditions, as a breakthrough voice in the culture. Others find her insufficiently realized as a distinct voice or feel discomfort about her emulation both of a white, genteel eighteenth-century tradition in poetry and of the values of a society that kept her as property. The poets she knew of and took her schooling from wrote highly polished, public verse; this was an era in which poetry was to be "heard" rather than "overheard"--that is, it was more rhetorical than introspective and intimate. Part of the challenge of reading Wheatley is understanding her context and her efforts to stand both within it and apart from it.

1. Look carefully at the last four lines of Wheatley's most famous and most personal poem, On Being Brought from Africa to America. In the context of the poem, and given the etiquette of eighteenth-century Anglo-American verse, what tone can you hear in these lines? How would you make a case for hearing these words as you do?

2. One of the most challenging stanzas in Thoughts on the Works of Providence begins with the lines "As reason's powers by day our God disclose, / So we may trace Him in our night's repose." A generation later, the Romantics will put great emphasis on intuition, dreams, sleep, and the unconscious self; in Wheatley's time, Franklin and Paine are espousing the value of reason and common sense as ways of handling all questions, even spiritual ones. What does Wheatley say about the interaction between dreams and the wakeful, logical mind?

3. In her address to Harvard students in To the University of Cambridge, in New England, Wheatley closes with a warning about "sin, that baneful evil to the soul" as a special peril for those to whom
" 'tis given to scan the heights." Where in the American literary tradition have you seen this concern expressed before? Do Franklin and Jefferson share it?

4. Why at the close of To the University of Cambridge, in New England does Wheatley identify herself as "An Ethiop"? What is the effect of that disclosure?

Other sites to consult:

• Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. A Renascence Edition electronic transcription of Phillis Wheatley's 1786 collection of poetry. Includes the original biographical preface and 1773 title page.
• Voices from the Gaps: Women Writers of Color, Wheatley page. A useful resource, this page includes a biography, bibliography, Wheatley's poem "To Maecenias," and numerous links to other Wheatley sites.
• Phillis Wheatley page. From the PAL: Perspectives in American Literature site maintained by Paul P. Reuben (California State University, Stanislaus). Includes a bibliography, overview of Wheatley's achievements, selected poems, and study questions.