Wheatley, Phillis

Wheatley, Phillis (ca. 1753–1784), African‐American poet.Born in West Africa, Wheatley as a child of about eight was kidnapped and brought to Boston, where she was purchased by John Wheatley, a prosperous tailor, to be a servant for his wife, Susanna. In the pious household she was given the name Phillis and tutored in both English and Latin as well as the Bible. Admiring the English poets John Milton and Thomas Gray, Alexander Pope's translation of Homer, and the Latin poets Virgil and Ovid, she began to write verse very early; her first poem appeared in a newspaper in 1767. In the early 1770s, having published several of her poems as broadsides that were widely reprinted, she became something of a local celebrity. In 1773 she traveled to London to seek support of her poetry, and while there she met many notables, including Benjamin Franklin. Her forty Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) was published there, accompanied by an engraved portrait of the poet, the first book published by an African American. Returning to America to care for Susanna Wheatley, she was manumitted. In 1778, following the deaths of both Wheatleys, she married John Peters, an impoverished freedman, by whom she had three children, none of whom survived her. In 1779 she sought unsuccessfully to publish a volume of thirty‐three poems and thirteen letters. She died when she was said to be thirty‐one and was buried in an unmarked grave.

Her mostly impersonal, deeply religious poetry is marked by neoclassicism, a style in which she felt at ease. A few of her writings reflect her status, such as the poem On Being Brought from Africa to America, a poem written to the earl of Dartmouth, and her letter on the natural rights of Negroes. In the later twentieth century, her writings received wide attention.
See also African Americans; Literature: Colonial Era; Poetry; Slavery.

Bibliography

William Henry Robinson , Phillis Wheatley and Her Writings, 1984.
Phillis Wheatley , The Collected Works, ed. John Shields, 1988.
Wheatley, and Phillis , The Poems, ed. Julian Mason, 1989.

Everett Emerson