Phillis Weathley and Slavery In America

Religions, 2019

This essay examines the means by which African American poet Phillis Wheatley uses her evangelical Christianity to engage issues of race in revolutionary America. In her poetry and other writings, she addresses and even instructs white men of privilege on the spiritual equality of people of African descent.

Rubikon, 2022

The issues of race, racism and discrimination always become the canter of the study of the African-American community, for example in literature. An example of African-American Literature that described those things is written by Phillis Wheatley. In her poems that were influenced by the Neoclassicism era, entitled:-On being brought from AFRICA to AMERICA'' and-To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth‖, she delivered the issues of race and racism. This paper aims to analyze racism toward African-America as described in Phillis Wheatley's poems. The researcher employed a qualitative descriptive method in which the collected data were analyzed, interpreted, and described to answer the objective of the study. The primary data in this undergraduate thesis are two selected poems by Wheatley and the supporting data were taken from books, articles, journals, online sources, and other sources. The researcher applied African-American criticism to answer the objective of the research. The Researchers use three basic tenets of African-American criticism (Everyday Racism, The Social Construction of Race and Voice of color). The findings show Wheatley's poems portray the life of an African American who experienced racism first-hand. The concept of racism in the two selected poems from Wheatley's has correlation with 3 concepts of racism of African-American criticism, those are: Everyday racism, The Social Construction of Race, Voice of color.

The here proposed short essay aims at introducing the figure of Phillis Wheatley - the first published female Afro-American poet. The main objectives of the publication are to acknowledge her contribution to American literature and culture as well as encourage further research.

Postcolonial Studies, 2020

The first African-American to publish a book, Phillis Wheatley has long been disparaged, by eighteenth-century slave owners and twentieth-century leftists alike, as ‘a third rate imitation of Alexander Pope’. No one, however, seems to have taken very seriously what the obvious presence of Pope in Wheatley’s poetry might mean, and this is the question the following article explores. Pope belonged to a conservative neo-classical cultural movement that was united by its opposition to the capitalist modernity emerging in early eighteenth-century England, and Wheatley draws from and in the process boldly reinvents the aesthetics and thought of this movement in order both to reiterate its republican values and to illuminate their abolitionist and indeed socialist potential.

Homo sum, humani nil a me alienum puto." Terence Phillis Wheatley was a strikingly original and great American poet. She was an important historical agent at a crucial juncture in American and British history, a literary celebrity, an "Afric muse", a household slave stolen from Africa, a uniquely situated and insightful thinker, a deeply-believing Christian, and much more. Her changing appeal and the controversy over her work in the two hundred and fifty years since the publication of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral is due in part to the ways that her poems and letters combine these and other identities in unprecedented ways. 1 All biographical and historical information about Wheatley is from Carretta (2011) and Wheatley (2001), unless noted. 2 Unless modified by a first name, "Wheatley" refers to Phillis Wheatley. 3 Jupiter Hammon, widely considered the first published African-American poet, was born into slavery on Long Island and educated in his master's family. It seems from his writings that his education was primarily religious. Today Hammon is perhaps best known for his poem praising Wheatley's piety "AN Address to Miss Phillis Wheatley".

Early American Literature, 2023

Abstract: This article argues that the manuscript poem “On the Death of Love Rotch” recently recovered from a Quaker commonplace book kept in 1782 can be confidently attributed to Phillis Wheatley (Peters). The attribution of the poem provides crucial new evidence for Wheatley’s early presence and influence in Nantucket, New Bedford, and Newport; supplies new evidence for how her poems first appear in these regions that map onto Quaker ministerial routes; and bares traces of her poetic and political influence on these hotbeds for early abolitionist efforts. In addition to placing Wheatley physically closer to Obour Tanner and others in the Newport community before the Revolution, the poem’s presence points toward other communities of color Wheatley engaged with, including New Guinea and Philadelphia, and the possibility that she wrote an elegy for a Black woman named Rose. Combined the article not only makes a case for the expansion of the Wheatley canon but also demonstrates how attribution studies can inform knowledge of the author’s life, location, activities, public contributions, and influence on the larger cultural climate.

Romanticism on the Net, 2000

This essay describes critics’ relations to sentimentality, and then situates Phillis Wheatley’s poetry within it. Carefully distinguishing between Enlightenment poetry of sensibility and nineteenth-century sentimental poetry allows us to recognize Wheatley as among the first innovators of sentimentality, and it is precisely the politics of “race” which promotes such an innovation. Wheatley’s poetry presents us with a manifesto of sentimentality. She discovered the advantages, in the task of overcoming poetical oppression, of constructing a sentimental poetry that is genuinely intersubjective rather than subjective. What this examination of Wheatley’s work shows us is that the Romantic, expressivist aesthetic, allegedly so spontaneous, can be seen as in fact much more manipulative – at least politically – than Wheatley’s innovative, sentimentalist form.

A common-place book containing two previously unknown poems connected to Phillis Wheatley is a significant recent discovery that sheds fresh light on Wheatley’s reception and participation in the local manuscript culture of Boston. The poems, entitled “Slavery” and “To Mrs. Eliot on the Death of her Child,” reveal that poetic coteries in Boston, and specific manuscript poets in particular, were more active in Wheatley’s career than has been understood. This essay introduces the lately uncovered poet Ruth Barrell Andrews (1749-1831) and two of her poems that relate directly to Wheatley.

THE CALL OF CLASSICAL LITERATURE IN THE ROMANTIC AGE, 2018

Phillis Wheatley's neo-classical tour-de-force, "To Maecenas," exploits the affordances of ekphrasis to supplement and correct the image of her presented in the elaborate front-matter of her 1773 volume, POEMS ON VARIOUS TOPICS. "To Maecenas" pictures a theory (as WJT Mitchell might put it) about the liberating power of poetry and, at the same time, proffers a revolutionary claim to the ethos of a poet, the ethos of a free, representative self. In this way, Wheatley anticipates the British Romantics attraction to and experiments with ekphrasis as a way to interrogate the limits and promises of representation, imagination and invention.