R.I.P. PHILLIS WHEATLEY
1753-December 5, 1784
Brought to Boston as the
Wheatleys’ slave,
She took her freedom to a
pauper’s grave
With all the learning she
had swept up neatly
Into the couplets of Miss Phillis Wheatley.
Poems
on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, the first book published by Phillis Wheatley, America's first
significant Black poet, was printed in London on the first of September,
1773, a century after Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung up in America appeared in 1650, also in England, but there were
many other parallels between the two women. Mrs. Bradstreet was a native of
England. Though Phillis Wheatley was born on the west coast of Africa, she was
reared in the same rigorous New England climate that had brought her
predecessor to bloom. For whatever reason, however, Wheatley's spiritual home
was England no less than it had been Bradstreet's. The difference was only that
Anne Bradstreet's models were Puritan English; Phillis Wheatley's were Augustan
English.
The parallels continue: Wheatley' first publication, a translation of a story by Ovid, was published at the behest, and with the aid, of friends, and her first full book, Poems on Various Subjects, appeared in England in 1773, though a pamphlet of her work was printed in Boston in 1770. Wheatley emulated popular Augustan poetry to the degree that her talent, great as it was, never developed beyond mere competence, and the wonder she caused lasted no longer than her novelty.
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