Authors
Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753-1784)
Bibliography
Biography
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Questions for Discussion and Writing
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?