Early black poetry: Phyllis Wheatley Contents Introduction

Chapter I. Uniqueness in the life and work of Phyllis Wheatley
1.1. The Life and Works of Phyllis Wheatley
Although scholars had generally believed that An Elegiac Poem, on the Death of that Celebrated Divine, and Eminent Servant of Jesus Christ, the Reverend and Learned George Whitefield ... (1770) was Wheatley’s first published poem, Carl Bridenbaugh revealed in 1969 that 13-year-old Wheatley—after hearing a miraculous saga of survival at sea—wrote “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin,” a poem which was published on 21 December 1767 in the Newport, Rhode Island, Mercury. But it was the Whitefield elegy that brought Wheatley national renown. Published as a broadside and a pamphlet in Boston, Newport, and Philadelphia, the poem was published with Ebenezer Pemberton’s funeral sermon for Whitefield in London in 1771, bringing her international acclaim.
By the time she was 18, Wheatley had gathered a collection of 28 poems for which she, with the help of Mrs. Wheatley, ran advertisements for subscribers in Boston newspapers in February 1772. When the colonists were apparently unwilling to support literature by an African, she and the Wheatleys turned in frustration to London for a publisher. Wheatley had forwarded the Whitefield poem to Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, to whom Whitefield had been chaplain. A wealthy supporter of evangelical and abolitionist causes, the countess instructed bookseller Archibald Bell to begin correspondence with Wheatley in preparation for the book.
Wheatley, suffering from a chronic asthma condition and accompanied by Nathaniel, left for London on May 8, 1771. The now-celebrated poetess was welcomed by several dignitaries: abolitionists’ patron the Earl of Dartmouth, poet and activist Baron George Lyttleton, Sir Brook Watson (soon to be the Lord Mayor of London), philanthropist John Thorton, and Benjamin Franklin. While Wheatley was recrossing the Atlantic to reach Mrs. Wheatley, who, at the summer’s end, had become seriously ill, Bell was circulating the first edition of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), the first volume of poetry by an African American published in modern times.
Poems on Various Subjects revealed that Wheatley’s favorite poetic form was the couplet, both iambic pentameter and heroic. More than one-third of her canon is composed of elegies, poems on the deaths of noted persons, friends, or even strangers whose loved ones employed the poet. The poems that best demonstrate her abilities and are most often questioned by detractors are those that employ classical themes as well as techniques. In her epyllion “Niobe in Distress for Her Children Slain by Apollo, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book VI, and from a view of the Painting of Mr. Richard Wilson,” she not only translates Ovid but adds her own beautiful lines to extend the dramatic imagery. In “To Maecenas” she transforms Horace’s ode into a celebration of Christ.
In addition to classical and neoclassical techniques, Wheatley applied biblical symbolism to evangelize and to comment on slavery. For instance, “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” the best-known Wheatley poem, chides the Great Awakening audience to remember that Africans must be included in the Christian stream: “Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, /May be refin’d and join th’ angelic train.” The remainder of Wheatley’s themes can be classified as celebrations of America. She was the first to applaud this nation as glorious “Columbia” and that in a letter to no less than the first president of the United States, George Washington, with whom she had corresponded and whom she was later privileged to meet. Her love of virgin America as well as her religious fervor is further suggested by the names of those colonial leaders who signed the attestation that appeared in some copies of Poems on Various Subjects to authenticate and support her work: Thomas Hutchinson, governor of Massachusetts; John Hancock; Andrew Oliver, lieutenant governor; James Bowdoin; and Reverend Mather Byles. Another fervent Wheatley supporter was Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.
Wheatley was manumitted some three months before Mrs. Wheatley died on March 3, 1774. Although many British editorials castigated the Wheatleys for keeping Wheatley in slavery while presenting her to London as the African genius, the family had provided an ambiguous haven for the poet. Wheatley was kept in a servant’s place—a respectable arm’s length from the Wheatleys’ genteel circles—but she had experienced neither slavery’s treacherous demands nor the harsh economic exclusions pervasive in a free-black existence. With the death of her benefactor, Wheatley slipped toward this tenuous life. Mary Wheatley and her father died in 1778; Nathaniel, who had married and moved to England, died in 1783. Throughout the lean years of the war and the following depression, the assault of these racial realities was more than her sickly body or aesthetic soul could withstand.
On April 1, 1778, despite the skepticism and disapproval of some of her closest friends, Wheatley married John Peters, whom she had known for some five years, and took his name. A free black, Peters evidently aspired to entrepreneurial and professional greatness. He is purported in various historical records to have called himself Dr. Peters, to have practiced law (perhaps as a free-lance advocate for hapless blacks), kept a grocery in Court Street, exchanged trade as a baker and a barber, and applied for a liquor license for a bar. Described by Merle A. Richmond as “a man of very handsome person and manners,” who “wore a wig, carried a cane, and quite acted out ‘the gentleman,’” Peters was also called “a remarkable specimen of his race, being a fluent writer, a ready speaker.” Peters’s ambitions cast him as “shiftless,” arrogant, and proud in the eyes of some reporters, but as a Black man in an era that valued only his brawn, Peters’s business acumen was simply not salable. Like many others who scattered throughout the Northeast to avoid the fighting during the Revolutionary War, the Peterses moved temporarily from Boston to Wilmington, Massachusetts, shortly after their marriage.
Merle A. Richmond points out that economic conditions in the colonies during and after the war were harsh, particularly for free blacks, who were unprepared to compete with whites in a stringent job market. These societal factors, rather than any refusal to work on Peters’s part, were perhaps most responsible for the newfound poverty that Wheatley Peters suffered in Wilmington and Boston, after they later returned there. Between 1779 and 1783, the couple may have had children (as many as three, though evidence of children is disputed), and Peters drifted further into penury, often leaving Wheatley Peters to fend for herself by working as a charwoman while he dodged creditors and tried to find employment.
During the first six weeks after their return to Boston, Wheatley Peters stayed with one of her nieces in a bombed-out mansion that was converted to a day school after the war. Peters then moved them into an apartment in a rundown section of Boston, where other Wheatley relatives soon found Wheatley Peters sick and destitute. As Margaretta Matilda Odell recalls, “She was herself suffering for want of attention, for many comforts, and that greatest of all comforts in sickness—cleanliness. She was reduced to a condition too loathsome to describe. ... In a filthy apartment, in an obscure part of the metropolis ... . The woman who had stood honored and respected in the presence of the wise and good ... was numbering the last hours of life in a state of the most abject misery, surrounded by all the emblems of a squalid poverty!”
Yet throughout these lean years, Wheatley Peters continued to write and publish her poems and to maintain, though on a much more limited scale, her international correspondence. She also felt that despite the poor economy, her American audience and certainly her evangelical friends would support a second volume of poetry. Between October and December 1779, with at least the partial motive of raising funds for her family, she ran six advertisements soliciting subscribers for “300 pages in Octavo,” a volume “Dedicated to the Right Hon. Benjamin Franklin, Esq.: One of the Ambassadors of the United States at the Court of France,” that would include 33 poems and 13 letters. As with Poems on Various Subjects, however, the American populace would not support one of its most noted poets. (The first American edition of this book was not published until two years after her death.) During the year of her death (1784), she was able to publish, under the name Phillis Peters, a masterful 64-line poem in a pamphlet entitled Liberty and Peace, which hailed America as “Columbia” victorious over “Britannia Law.” Proud of her nation’s intense struggle for freedom that, to her, bespoke an eternal spiritual greatness, Wheatley Peters ended the poem with a triumphant ring:
Britannia owns her Independent Reign,
Hibernia, Scotia, and the Realms of Spain;
And Great Germania’s ample Coast admires
The generous Spirit that Columbia fires.
Auspicious Heaven shall fill with fav’ring Gales,
Where e’er Columbia spreads her swelling Sails:
To every Realm shall Peace her Charms display,
And Heavenly Freedom spread her gold Ray.
On January 2 of that same year, she published An Elegy, Sacred to the Memory of that Great Divine, The Reverend and Learned Dr. Samuel Cooper, just a few days after the death of the Brattle Street church’s pastor. And, sadly, in September the “Poetical Essays” section of The Boston Magazine carried “To Mr. and Mrs.________, on the Death of their Infant Son,” which probably was a lamentation for the death of one of her own children and which certainly foreshadowed her death three months later.”
Phillis Wheatley Peters died, uncared for and alone. As Richmond concludes, with ample evidence, when she died on December 5, 1784, John Peters was incarcerated, “forced to relieve himself of debt by an imprisonment in the county jail.” Their last surviving child died in time to be buried with his mother, and, as Odell recalled, “A grandniece of Phillis’ benefactress, passing up Court Street, met the funeral of an adult and a child: a bystander informed her that they were bearing Phillis Wheatley to that silent mansion.”
Recent scholarship shows that Wheatley Peters wrote perhaps 145 poems (most of which would have been published if the encouragers she begged for had come forth to support the second volume), but this artistic heritage is now lost, probably abandoned during Peters’s quest for subsistence after her death. Of the numerous letters she wrote to national and international political and religious leaders, some two dozen notes and letters are extant. As an exhibition of African intelligence, exploitable by members of the enlightenment movement, by evangelical Christians, and by other abolitionists, she was perhaps recognized even more in England and Europe than in America. Early 20th-century critics of Black American literature were not very kind to Wheatley Peters because of her supposed lack of concern about slavery. She, however, did have a statement to make about the institution of slavery, and she made it to the most influential segment of 18th-century society—the institutional church. Two of the greatest influences on Phillis Wheatley Peter’s thought and poetry were the Bible and 18th-century evangelical Christianity; but until fairly recently her critics did not consider her use of biblical allusion nor its symbolic application as a statement against slavery. She often spoke in explicit biblical language designed to move church members to decisive action. For instance, these bold lines in her poetic eulogy to General David Wooster castigate patriots who confess Christianity yet oppress her people:
But how presumptuous shall we hope to find
Divine acceptance with the Almighty mind
While yet o deed ungenerous they disgrace
And hold in bondage Afric: blameless race
Let virtue reign and then accord our prayers
Be victory ours and generous freedom theirs.

And in an outspoken letter to the Reverend Samson Occom, written after Wheatley Peters was free and published repeatedly in Boston newspapers in 1774, she equates American slaveholding to that of pagan Egypt in ancient times: “Otherwise, perhaps, the Israelites had been less solicitous for their Freedom from Egyptian Slavery: I don’t say they would have been contented without it, by no Means, for in every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance; and by the Leave of our modern Egyptians I will assert that the same Principle lives in us.”

In the past decade, Wheatley scholars have uncovered poems, letters, and more facts about her life and her association with 18th-century Black abolitionists. They have also charted her notable use of classicism and have explicated the sociological intent of her biblical allusions. All this research and interpretation has proven Wheatley Peter’s disdain for the institution of slavery and her use of art to undermine its practice. Before the end of this century the full aesthetic, political, and religious implications of her art and even more salient facts about her life and works will surely be known and celebrated by all who study the 18th century and by all who revere this woman, a most important poet in the American literary canon. —Original by Sondra A. O’Neale, Emory University

1.2. Uniqueness in the work of Phyllis Wheatley

In 1773, Phillis Wheatley accomplished something that no other woman of her status had done. When her book of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, appeared, she became the first American slave, the first person of African descent, and only the third colonial American woman to have her work published.
Born in Africa about 1753 and sold as a slave in Boston in 1761, Phillis was a small, sick child who caught the attention of John and Susanna Wheatley. Purchased as a domestic servant for Susanna, the small girl was named after the ship that brought her to Boston, the Phillis, and her master, Wheatley. Susanna soon discovered that Phillis had an extraordinary capacity to learn. She relieved the child of most domestic duties and educated her, with assistance from her own daughter, Mary, in reading, writing, religion, language, literature, and history.
Phillis began publishing her poems around the age of twelve, and soon afterward her fame spread across the Atlantic. With Susanna’s support, Phillis began posting advertisements for subscribers for her first book of poems. However, as Sondra O'Neale, a scholar of Phillis’s work, notes, “when the colonists were apparently unwilling to support literature by an African, she and the Wheatleys turned in frustration to London for a publisher.”
In 1773, Phillis, in continuously poor health, set off for London with her master’s son, Nathaniel. It was here that she was not only accepted, but adored—both for her poise and her literary work. It was also here that she met Selina Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon, a friend of Susanna Wheatley’s; the countess eventually funded the publication of Phillis’s book. Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, was published in London in late 1773, just as Phillis traveled back to Boston to tend to a gravely ill Susanna.
Even with her literary popularity at its all-time high, the years after the trip to London were difficult for Phillis. Although she was manumitted around the time of her book’s publication, freedom in 1774 in Boston proved incredibly difficult. Most of the Wheatley family died during 1774-78, and Phillis was unable to secure funding for another publication or sell her writing. There were glimmers of happiness; she married a free black man, John Peters, in 1778. The couple probably had three children, although that number is uncertain; as biographer Vincent Carretta notes, “Much about Phillis Wheatley’s life between 1776 and her death in 1784 remains a mystery.”
It is believed that none of their children survived infancy. The couple struggled with extreme poverty, and in 1785 Peters was placed in jail because of debt. Phillis continued to write—on subjects varying from biblical themes to the horrors of slavery—but was not able to support herself with these writings. (John C. Shields states that while most of these poems are lost, several were rediscovered in the 1970s and 1980s.) She took a job as a maid in a local boardinghouse, but she died on December 5, 1784. Her sick infant joined her in death later the same day. Phillis Wheatley’s “An Elegy on Leaving,” her last published poem (which Caroline Wigginton recently argues was actually written by English poet Mary Whateley), concludes with a much brighter vision for the heavenly afterlife:

But come, sweet Hope, from thy divine retreat,

Come to my breast, and chase my cares away,
Bring calm Content to gild my gloomy seat,
And cheer my bosom with her heav’nly ray.