Wheatley, Phillis (c. 1753–1784), the first African American and the second woman to publish a book in the colonies on any subject. Phillis Wheatley was born, by her own testimony, in Gambia, West Africa, about the year 1753. Unlike her African American contemporary, Venture Smith, who devoted over a third of his 1798 Narrative to a detailed recollection of his African homeland, Wheatley, who was seized and taken into slavery when seven or eight years of age, recalled her homeland to her white captors in considerably less detail. While we may never know what memories this remarkable poet and cultivator of the epistolary style shared of her native Africa with her most frequent correspondent and black soulmate, Obour Tanner, we do know that her public memories were at least three.
She did recall the sight of her mother's daily ritual of pouring out water to the sun upon its rising, redolent of hierophantic solar worship, and then immediately prostrating herself in the direction of that rising sun, this practice probably describing the first of five daily prayers of Islam in which the believer kneels or prostrates her or himself toward Mecca, certainly the direction Wheatley's mother assumed. While the other two memories may not be as informative, they are more affecting. In her famous poem “To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth,” she holds that her “love of Freedom sprung” from the fact that she “Was snatch'd from Afric's fancy'd happy seat.” “Steel'd was that soul,” the poet continues, “and by no misery mov'd / That from a father seiz'd his babe belov'd.” In several rhapsodic and descriptive lines from “Phillis's Reply to the Answer” in which the author to whom she is replying prompts her to respond that “pleasing Gambia on my soul returns,” she extols Gambia's “soil spontaneous” which “yields exhaustless stores; / For phoebus revels on her verdant shores.”
When the young girl of seven or eight found herself on the slave block in midsummer Boston on 11 July 1761, was she thinking of her fertile, verdant Gambia while she tried to conceal her nakedness in a public place with nothing more than a piece of dirty carpet? The Wheatleys bought her, nevertheless, for a trifle and with diseased imagination named her Phillis after the slave schooner that brought her from Africa to America.
Despite the lamentable disadvantage of her enslavement, only four years later Wheatley had acquired enough skill in the use of English that she could correspond with the Mohegan Indian minister and graduate of Dartmouth College, Samson Occom. As well, she must have begun to experiment with the writing of poetry. Her first published writing, the poem “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin” (about the remarkable survival of these gentlemen in a hurricane off Cape Cod), appeared on 21 December 1767 in the Newport Mercury. At the approximate age of fourteen, then, Wheatley became a published public poet, a capacity in which she continued to function throughout the remainder of her short life.
Probably during this same period Wheatley initiated her classical studies, perhaps being tutored by the Harvard graduate, minister of Old South Church, one-time prolific poet, and encourager of young poets, Mather Byles. Wheatley soon became an excellent student of Latin, as her superb version of Ovid's Niobe episode from Book VI of the Metamorphoses ably attests.
On 18 August 1771 Wheatley was baptized by Samuel Cooper, minister and future spiritual and literary advisor to the poet. By 29 February of the following year, Wheatley had composed enough poems to comprise a volume. This volume failed to appear because of a lack of subscribers and, according to William H. Robinson, because of racist reasons. By September 1773, however, Wheatley had found a London publisher with the help of Selina Hastings, philanthropist and Countess of Huntingdon. Prior to the appearance of her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, Wheatley spent six weeks in London, from June 17 to July 26, during which time she prepared her Poems for the press and visited, or was visited by, several London dignitaries, such as Granville Sharp, who escorted the poet on tours of the Horse Armoury, the crown jewels, and the Tower of London; Thomas Gibbons, who Wheatley notes was a professor of rhetoric; the Earl of Dartmouth, who gave the poet five guineas, with which she purchased a set of Alexander Pope's complete Works; and Brook Watson, a wealthy merchant who gave Wheatley a folio edition of John Milton's Paradise Lost.
While in London Wheatley received Benjamin Franklin, who wrote to his American cousin, Jonathan Williams, that “Upon your recommendation I went to see the black poetess and offered her any services I could do her.” Even no less an intellectual lion than Voltaire, who was living in England at the time, wrote in a letter to a French friend in 1774 that Wheatley was the composer of “très-bons vers anglais” (very good English verse). Certainly Wheatley earned for herself on this trip an international reputation, the first African American to do so. She had already enjoyed an international reputation of sorts for her elegy on the death of George Whitefield, privy chaplain to the Countess of Huntingdon; appearing first in 1770 in Boston, this elegy was widely reprinted on both sides of the Atlantic and perhaps first brought to the countess's attention the poetic talent of the sixteen- or seventeen-year-old poet.
Soon after the appearance of Poems, Wheatley achieved her manumission, as she remarked in a letter of 8 October 1773 to David Wooster, later a general in the Revolutionary War, “at the desire of my friends in England.” Not until her pen brought her into the scrutiny of the British public did John Wheatley see fit to “give me my freedom.” Wheatley, therefore, is the first African American to free herself by means of her own writing ability. After Susanna Wheatley, the poet's former mistress, died on 3 March 1774, Wheatley continued to live at the Wheatley mansion for a time and to write patriotic verse. She corresponded with George Washington, composing the famous poem “To His Excellency General Washington,” on 26 October 1775, and received an invitation from the general to visit him. She did so at Washington's Cambridge headquarters, a few days before the departure of the British under General Howe from Boston, on 17 Marh 1776. Wheatley married John Peters, a free African American and jack-of-all-trades (grocery keeper, dandy, and advocate for black rights before the Massachusetts courts), on 1 April 1776.
After this time, given the ravages and uncertainties of the American Revolution, Wheatley's fortunes declined rapidly. She tried twice, but unsuccessfully, to solicit subscribers for a second volume of new poems, dedicated to Benjamin Franklin. On 30 October 1779 and in September 1784, just three months before her death, she published proposals for a collection that would have included an “Epithalamium” (perhaps showing the influence of Edmund Spenser), “Niagra,” “Chloe to Calliope,” “To Musidora or Florello,” and several new elegies as well as thirteen letters to such notables as Dartmouth, Benjamin Rush, and the Countess of Huntingdon. During this time, Wheatley served as part-time instructor in a petty school and as a domestic servant while trying to tend to three children. Wheatley died in abject poverty, preceded by her three children, on 5 December 1784, apparently from infection from having just given birth to her last child, unremembered and certainly unappreciated.
This internationally famous and accomplished artist nevertheless experienced an early career similar to that of most fine poets: an apprenticeship during which Wheatley produced a sizable body of juvenilia was followed by a period of maturity marked by poems of apparently aesthetic concerns. Wheatley's apprenticeship is characterized by statements of intense, Christian piety; such poems as “Atheism” and “An Address to the Deist,” both from 1767, appear to be the sorts of declarations that a racist white catechist might have exacted from a catechumen of color during this time. “On Friendship” (1769) and “On the Nuptials of Mr. Spence to Miss Hooper” (1768) suggest the aesthetic interests of her mature period, while the poems “America,” “On the Death of Mr. Snider Murder'd by Richardson,” “On the Affray in King-Street, on the Evening of the 5th of March” (almost certainly written in celebration of Crispus Attucks), and “To the King's Most Excellent Majesty. 1768,“predict Wheatley's preoccupation with American patriot politics.
Almost immediately after the publication in late February 1772 of her first proposal for a volume of poems, Wheatley's tone and subject matter shift away from pious testimony toward that of a zealous seeker for her own idea of God and for her own poetic idiom. In such works as “Thoughts on the Works of Providence,” which (while naming Jehovah once) makes no mention of Jesus but syncretizes solar worship, animism, and classicism with a broad Judeo-Christianity, and “On Imagination,” a complex poem that continues the religious syncretism but which represents a concentrated expression of Wheatley's poetics, Wheatley displays a sophisticated handling of the poetic and intellectual materials available to her. For that matter, this poet suggests by her work that she has recognized full well white duplicity (“Some view our sable race with a scornful eye”) and that she has constructed a poetics of subversion.
Several critics of Wheatley have recently recognized a subversive tone within her poetry. In a letter to Samson Occom dated 11 February 1774 and reprinted in colonial newspapers a dozen times during this year, Wheatley defines freedom in the following manner: “in every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance.” Surely any feeling, intelligent soul who can define freedom in these eloquent words can never be satisfied with servility. Lest any suspect Wheatley failed to recognize the implications for her and her black brothers and sisters of the American patriot cry for freedom from the British, observe what she says as she closes her letter to Occom: “How well the cry for Liberty, and the reverse Disposition for the Exercise of oppressive Power over others agree—I humbly think it does not require the Penetration of a Philosopher to determine”.
Wheatley assumes her subversive voice in “To Maecenas,” the opening poem of the 1773 Poems. Here she exploits the potential for subversion present in classical pastoral by donning the mask of an innocuous shepherd and by joining Maecenas, legendary Roman patron of Virgil and Horace, “beneath the myrtle shade,” the classic site of pastoral, so that she can profess a burning ambition to achieve the height of expression in the epic mode, descant upon the subject of freedom, and “snatch a laurel,” the symbol of poetlc maturity, while her white patrons “indulgent smile upon the deed”—hardly the aspirations of an allegedly derivative imitator of the neoclassical manner of composition. This subversive voice is evident in all of her occasional poetry after February of 1772, including “On Being Brought from Africa to America” (written as early as 1768 but doubtless revised for the 1773 Poems).
As noted earlier, Wheatley's efforts to articulate her subversive objections to “oppressive Power” went largely unnoticed because of her declining fortunes after her marriage to Peters. This decline came about because of the Revolutionary War, the apparently desultory support of her husband, and the failures of the two proposal attempts to attract subscribers. Her bleak outlook is evident in what is probably one of her last poems, “An Elegy on Leaving——,” for what she is leaving behind is the world of poetry: “No more my hand shall wake the warbling lyre.” Despite a despondent conclusion to a remarkably distinguished career, Phillis Wheatley represents a number of firsts in American culture. While she is author of the first book published by an African American, she is also the first woman who published her work largely through the efforts of a community of women: her mistress, Susanna, seems always to have encouraged her to write, and her daughter, Mary, may have served as the poet's first tutor; Obour Tanner, her black soulmate, evidently gave Wheatley encouragement and spiritual counsel, but it was probably through the efforts of Selina Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon, that she saw one of her volumes come into print. Wheatley also enjoys the distinction of being America's first woman writer who tried to make a living by the use of her pen, and she is certainly one of America's first authors, whether man or woman, to do so. In addition, Wheatley is one of America's first writers to cultivate for publication the epistolary style. According to Henry Louis Gates Jr.,, moreover, she is “the progenitor of the black literary tradition.” For all these reasons and more Phillis Wheatley deserves to be recognized as a major American author.[See also Literary History, article on Colonial and Early National Eras.]
Bibliography
- William H. Robinson, Black New England Letters, 1977. William H. Robinson, ed., Critical Essays on Phillis Wheatley, 1982. William H. Robinson, ed., Phillis Wheatley and Her Writings, 1984.
- Sondra A. O'Neale,“A Slave's Subtle War: Phillis Wheatley's Use of Biblical Myth and Symbol,” Early American Literature 21.2 (Fall 1986): 144–165.
- Henry Louis Gates Jr.,, Figures in Black, 1987. John C. Shields, ed., The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley, 1988.
- John C. Shields, “Phillis Wheatley,” in African American Writers, eds. Valerie Smith, Lea Baechler, and A. Walton Litz, 1991, pp. 473–491.
- Phillip M. Richards, “Phillis Wheatley and Literary Americanization,” American Quarterly 44.2 (June 1992): 163–191.
- Frances Smith Foster, Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women 1746–1892, 1993. John C. Shields, guest ed., Style: African-American Poetics 26 (Fall 1993): 172–270.
- Paula Bennett, “Phillis Wheatley's Vocation and the Paradox of the ‘Afric Muse,’” PMLA 113 (Jan. 1998): 64–76
John C. Shields
