Poems on Various Subjects, Phillis Wheatley

Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral by Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784) is an important historical and literary work for it was and remains the first published collection of poetry written by an American of African descent in the English language. It appeared in Great Britain in 1773 and in Boston, Massachusetts, the following year. Many antebellum abolitionists used the existence of this well-received work as evidence that Africans are inherently as human as and equal to Caucasians. In the mid-twentieth century, however, Wheatley's work came under fire by leaders of the civil rights movement, who believed it represented subservient attitudes.

Born in western Africa (likely Senegal, Sierra Leone, or the Isles de Los) sometime around 1753, Wheatley was enslaved and brought to Boston on July 11, 1761. Her buyer, John Wheatley, named her for the slave ship Phillis on which she had traveled the Atlantic. Thus an eight-year-old Phillis Wheatley became one of a number of domestic servants for the Wheatley family, which included Susanna Wheatley and her teenage twins Nathaniel and Mary. It appears that Phillis's workload was not onerous because Mrs. Wheatley allowed Mary to teach Phillis, who probably spoke Wolof, to read English and Latin. Within sixteen months, the young girl learned to read so well that she was not only reading the Bible but English and classical literature, history, and geography. John Wheatley was awed by her precociousness, writing:

Without any Assistance from School Education, and by only what she was taught in the Family, she, in sixteen Months Time from her Arrival, attained the English Language, to which she was an utter Stranger before, to such a Degree, as to read any, the most difficult parts of the Sacred Writings to the great Astonishment of all who heard her. (Gates 2002)

Phillis began writing verse as early as 1765, and her first published poem, On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin, was published in the Newport Mercury on December 21, 1767. It well demonstrates Wheatley's style, which combined classical allusions and Christian devoutness. Wheatley wrote a number of occasional poems, that is, works inspired by certain events. Many of them were elegies, and a particular one, that for Rev. George Whitefield (1714–1770), the chaplain of Selina Hastings (1707–1791), Countess of Huntingdon, resulted in Phillis's gaining her support. Thomas Woolbridge wrote to Lord Dartmouth (1731–1801) about the genesis of this poem:

While in Boston, I heard of a very Extraordinary female Slave, who made some verses on our mutually dear deceased Friend [Whitefield]; I visited her mistress, and found by conversing with the African, that she was no Imposter; I asked if she could write on any Subject; she said Yes; we had just heard of your Lordships Appointment; I gave her your name, which she was well acquainted with. She, immediately, wrote a rough Copy of the enclosed Address & Letter, which I promised to convey or deliver. I was astonished, and could hardly believe my own Eyes. (Gates 2002)

In addition to being published in England, this poem was printed as a broadside in America and distributed throughout New England.

In 1772 Phillis wanted to publish a collection of her poems, but to do so she had to go through the ordeal of appearing before a committee of eighteen prominent Bostonians, most of them Harvard University graduates, a majority slaveholders, and three of them poets. The eighteen-year-old poet successfully impressed this committee, and Susanna Wheatley attempted to get enough advance orders for a collection of verse to be published. Yet she was unsuccessful because, despite the committee's attestation of authenticity, the readership of Boston did not believe that an African slave had composed such verses

Fortunately, the Countess of Huntingdon believed in Phillis's talents and decided to financially sponsor the publication of what became Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, which she dedicated to her patron. So, Phillis had to use the Wheatleys' connections to find a publisher in London. In order to print the work, the London publisher Archibald Bell required that a preface attest to the authenticity of the poems therein. "The Book here proposed for publication," wrote Bell in the preface, "displays perhaps one of the greatest instances of pure, unassisted genius, that the world ever produced" (Wheatley, 2001, p. xviii).

Readers were impressed, and Wheatley became the most famous African of her time. According to Vincent Carretta in his introduction to Wheatley's Complete Writings, the work elicited many favorable reviews in the British press. An example of such a review by an anonymous writer appeared in the Critical Review on September of 1773: "[T]here are several lines in this piece [To Maecenas], which would be no discredit to an English poet. The whole is indeed extraordinary, considered as the production of a young Negro, who was, but a few years since, an illiterate barbarian." Debate would continue, however, on both sides of the Atlantic as to whether Wheatley's verse was truly original or only imitative.

A year after its publication in England, the collection became available in New England and Novia Scotia, by which time the poet was a free woman. Yet her collection would not be brought out in an American edition until 1786. Nevertheless, Wheatley saw published a number of individual poems during the mid-1770s, but no second collection. Among these single poems was a 1775 poem in honor of George Washington (1732–1799), To his Excellency General Washington, which she sent to him in a letter. He replied:

I thank you most sincerely for your polite notice of me, in the elegant lines you enclosed; and however undeserving I may be of such encomium and panegyric, the style and manner exhibit a striking proof of your poetical talents; in honor of which, and as a tribute justly due to you, I would have published the poem, had I not been apprehensive, that, while I only meant to give the world this new instance of your genius, I might have incurred the imputation of vanity. This, and nothing else, determined me not to give it place in the public prints.

While Washington praised Wheatley's verse, another Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia (1787): "Religion indeed has produced a Phillis Whately [sic]; but it could not produce a poet. The compositions under her name are below the dignity of criticism." The reasons for such scathing criticism are unclear; yet Louis Gates Jr. (2002) suggests that "Jefferson's criticism of Phillis Wheatley seems aimed at the antislavery writers, who since 1773 had cited her so frequently as proof positive of the equality of the African, and therefore as a reason to abolish slavery."

Antebellum abolitionists had, indeed, been using Poems to support their claims for the humanity of slaves. For example, on August 31, 1856, a writer from Frederick Douglass' Paper wrote: "The style and typography of the book is peculiar to this early day, which alone would make it an interesting relic to the past." Yet he found more than the presentation of the book noteworthy, adding, "But there is something about the poetry which is very fine. The book contains some rare gems of thought, and displays a remarkable knowledge of history and literature, for one whose advantages had been so limited." Although this critic qualified his praise, another did not quail at judging Wheatley the equal of her male and well-educated contemporaries.

After the Civil War (1861–1865), Wheatley's poems continued to attract attention. "Miss Wheatley's poems compare favorably with the works of other American poets of the days of the American Revolution," wrote an anonymous Rocky Mountain News reviewer on January 9, 1887. "Miss Wheatley chooses classical and religious subjects and treats them in a quaint, grandiloquent way. So did every other American poet. Philip Freneau, Robert Treat Paine and other poets of that period select about the same subjects and treat them in about the same way that this colored poetess did."

During the twentieth century, Wheatley's work suffered neglect or the contempt of black nationalist critics. In 1930 Vernon Loggins (b. 1893) called her an imitator working on instinct. By the rise of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, she was seen, in the words of author Seymour Gross, as fitting the "Uncle Tom syndrome…. She is pious, grateful, retiring, and civil"; authors Mercer Cook and Steve Henderson criticized her as reflecting "the old self-hatred that one hears in the Dozens and in the blues." Other commentators challenged her for letting others define her as a person, for behaving too similarly to white people, or for being a cultural imposter. Gates, by contrast, believes that it is time for a reassessment of Wheatley's accomplishments. Unfortunately she died in 1784 before she was able to publish a second book, and her husband, John Peters, sold the manuscript, which has never been found. If this manuscript were to appear someday, scholars would have the chance to see how Wheatley's art developed when she was a free African American.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carretta, Vincent, ed. "Introduction." In Complete Writings: Phillis Wheatley. New York: Penguin, 2001.

Cook, Mercer, and Stephen Henderson. The Militant Black Writer in Africa and the United States. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "Mister Jefferson and the Trials of Phillis Wheatley." Lecture at Ronald Reagan Building and International Center in Washington, DC, March 22, 2002, http://usinfo.state.gov.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America's First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers. New York: Basic, 2003.

Gross, Seymour, ed. Images of the Negro in American Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.

Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. London: J. Stockdale, 1787.

Shields, John, ed. The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Wheatley, Phillis. Complete Writings, edited by Vincent Carretta. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.

                              Jeanne M. Lesinski