Phillis Wheatley

The Argument

Phillis Wheatley was the first African American and one of the first American women to publish a book of poetry. She was enslaved, brought to Boston as a child, educated by the Wheatley family, and published her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral in 1773 — a collection that required eighteen prominent Bostonians to attest in writing that a Black woman could actually have written it. The attestation is its own commentary on the culture.

Wheatley wrote in the neoclassical tradition — heroic couplets, classical allusions, formal diction — and she deployed that tradition with precision and, when she chose, with devastating irony. Her poem On Being Brought from Africa to America is the most debated eight lines she wrote. She thanks God for her conversion, which some readers have taken as accommodation and others as a subtle subversion: she reminds her readers that Negroes may be refined and join the angelic train, a reminder that her readers needed.

For literary apologetics, Wheatley is a figure who used the Christian Gospel as the ground of her claim to full humanity in a culture that denied it. The Gospel told her she bore the image of God. She believed it. And then she wrote from within that belief with such skill that the culture that enslaved her had to acknowledge the work even while refusing the full humanity of its author.