LibGuides: African American Women Writers: Phillis Wheatley

Phillis Wheatley (later Peters), poet, was the first African American to publish a book, and is regarded by many as the founder of an African American canon of literature. In his Foreword to the Schomburg edition of her poems, the critic Henry Louis Gates writes that 'the birth of the Afro-American tradition occurred in 1773 when Phillis Wheatley published a book of poetry.' According to him, Wheatley 'launched' single-handedly both the African American literary tradition and the black women's literary tradition, since before her Poems on Various Subjects came out in 1773 no black person had published an imaginative work in English; indeed, no other black person was to do so until 1829. Since the 'progenitor of the black literary tradition' is a woman, writes Gates, all black authors may claim a matrilinear line of descent. This is perhaps an exaggerated claim, but it is one that acknowledges the importance of Wheatley for generations of subsequent writers.

More about Phillis Wheatley at ProQuest One Literature

By Phillis Wheatley

Poems by Phillis Wheatley
Phillis Wheatley was America's first published Black poet. Her poems were published before the Revolutionary War and were recognized throughout the English speaking world. She was born in Africa, sold as a slave in America, and became a celebrity in Europe. In addition to the poems of Phillis Wheatley, this volume contains a short and poignant memoir of her life.
Poems on various subjects, religious and moral by Phillis Wheatley

About Phillis Wheatley

New Essays on Phillis Wheatley by John C. Shields (Editor); Eric D. Lamore (Editor)
Fourteen prominent Wheatley scholars consider her work from a variety of angles, affirming her rise into the first rank of American writers. The pieces in the first section show that perhaps the most substantial measure of Wheatley's multilayered texts resides in her deft handling of classical materials. The contributors consider Wheatley's references to Virgil's Aeneid and Georgics and to the feminine figure Dido as well as her subversive critique of white readers attracted to her adaptation of familiar classics. They also discuss Wheatley's use of the Homeric Trojan horse and eighteenth-century verse to mask her ambitions for freedom and her treatment of the classics as political tools. Engaging Wheatley's multilayered texts with innovative approaches, the essays in the second section recontextualize her rich manuscripts and demonstrate how her late-eighteenth-century works remain both current and timeless. Together, these essays reveal the depth of Phillis Wheatley's literary achievement and present concrete evidence that her extant oeuvre merits still further scrutiny.
Phillis Wheatley : Biography of a Genius in Bondage by Vincent Carretta
With Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), Phillis Wheatley (1753?-1784) became the first English-speaking person of African descent to publish a book and only the second woman--of any race or background-- to do so in America. Written in Boston while she was just a teenager, and when she was still a slave, Wheatley's work was an international sensation. Vincent Carretta uncovers new details about Wheatley's origins, her upbringing, and how she gained freedom. Carretta solves the mystery of John Peters, correcting the record of when he and Wheatley married and revealing what became of him after her death. Assessing Wheatley's entire body of work, Carretta discusses the likely role she played in the production, marketing, and distribution of her writing. Wheatley developed a remarkable transatlantic network that transcended racial, class, political, religious, and geographical boundaries. Carretta reconstructs that network and sheds new light on her religious and political identities. In the course of his research he discovered the earliest poem attributable to Wheatley and has included it and other unpublished poems in the biography
Phillis Wheatley Chooses Freedom: history, poetry, and the ideals of the American Revolution by G. J. Barker-Benfield
There is an uncomfortable paradox at the heart of the American Revolution: many of the men leading the war for independence were slave owners, contradicting the ideal of freedom that they claimed to represent. Meanwhile, abolitionist sentiments of the time contained contradictions as well. Abolitionists encouraged freed Christianized slaves to return to Africa. In this way, they hoped to send more missionaries to Africa in order to Christianize the continent and, at the same time, to send free blacks away from America. This tension is revealed through the dramatic story of Phillis Wheatley, an African-American poet who refused to marry a man she had never met and return with him to Africa as a missionary. Agreeing to the proposed marriage - arranged by Congregationalist minister Samuel Hopkins - would have echoed the social mores of the time, particularly those for enslaved black women. However, due to her prodigious talents as a poet, Wheatley won her freedom a year prior to Hopkins' arrangement, allowing her to take her future into her own hands. G.J. Barker-Benfield considers Wheatley's story and Hopkins's plan in the broader context of the American Revolution. The ideals of the revolution motivated Hopkins and some of his contemporaries to propose freeing African slaves and thus address the "monstrous inconsistency" fundamental to the white slave owners leading the revolution. In so doing, they presented themselves as freedom fighters who resisted the threat of slavery at the hands of British tyranny. Wheatley challenged this inconsistency and, taking the revolutionaries' rhetoric seriously, called for liberty for all human hearts: women's and men's, blacks' and whites'.