Phillis Wheatley

 

 

Phillis Wheatley

 

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Phillis Wheatley

 

Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784) Probably the best-known of eighteenth-century African -American writers, Wheatley was a talented writer of Neoclassic verse. Kidnapped in Africa when she was about seven, she endured the Middle Passage, and was sold as a slave in Boston to Susanna Wheatley. Wheatley was highly educated, and conversant with Latin and with the Bible, and began to write in 1765, with the encouragement of members of the Wheatley family. She first published poems in a Rhode Island newspaper in 1767, at age 14.  Her mistress arranged for the publication of a volume of verse in London in cooperation with the Countess of Huntingdon in 1773. Wheatley was freed in the same year. Her poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America” (1773) is one of the first manifestations of a concrete sense of African-American racial identity. Poems from the Philadelphia (1786) edition of her work may be found at http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/wheatley.html.

 

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Phillis Wheatley

Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784)

 

  • Kidnapped as a slave from Africa when she was 7 years old
  • Sold from the South Boston market to Susanna Wheatley, a well-to-do woman
  • Raised as the only slave in a pious household and indulged
  • Precocious: learned English, Latin, and the Bible, and began writing in 1765, just 4 years after her arrival
  • Freed by her owner in 1773
  • 1767: Some of her verses are published in a Rhode Island newspaper
  • Writes in a variety of genres
  • 1773: Has a volume of poetry published—the first by a black American, man or woman. Poems on Various Occasions, Religious and Moral
  • 1773: Travels in England and is something of a sensation. Meets Benjamin Franklin.
  • Published in England (difficulty of finding an American publisher)
  • Early supporter of both American independence and abolition
  • Always identified herself as a black poet
  • There were proposals for a second book, but it was never published
  • 1778: Marries John Peters, another freed slave
    • Has three children, all three die as infants
  • Dies in 1784
  • Henry Louis Gates has said that “Wheatley offers a fascinating glimpse at the ways in which an intelligent woman managed to negotiate an intellectual identity for herself in the midst of a culture which viewed her as a commodity to be bought and sold, both before and after the American revolution” (qtd. in Castillo 581).

 

Works Cited and Consulted

Baym, Nina, editor.  The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Volume A.  NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003.

Castillo, Susan and Ivy Schweitzer, editors.  The Literatures of Colonial America: An Anthology.  Malden, MA: Blackwell Books, 2001.

 

Source : http://webpages.shepherd.edu/hhanraha/courses/eng204/204notes/wheatley.doc

Web site link: http://webpages.shepherd.edu/hhanraha/

Google key word : Phillis Wheatley file type : doc

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Phillis Wheatley

 

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Phillis Wheatley