Imagination! who can sing thy force?
Or who describe the swiftness of thy course?
Soaring through air to find the bright abode,
Th' empyreal palace of the thund'ring God,
We on thy pinions can surpass the wind,
And leave the rolling universe behind:
From star to star the mental optics rove,
Measure the skies, and range the realms above.
There in one view we grasp the mighty whole,
Or with new worlds amaze th' unbounded soul.
Americans in the late 18th century couldn’t believe that an African enslaved woman could write such beautiful, deep, and thoughtful poetry. Some thought it was a trick and only a white educated man could write so. But it was the young, enslaved woman, Phillis Wheatly who penned these words and became the first African American woman to publish a book of poetry. In 1773, Phillis’ book of poems called, “Poems on Various Subjects” was published in London. No one in the colonies would publish the works of an enslaved girl. She was only 20 years old at the time.
Young Phillis Wheatly who was born in 1753, (we don’t know her African name), was seven or eight years old and living in West Africa, probably in the area of present-day Gambia or Senegal. She was sold by a local chief to a visiting slave trader, who took her to Boston in the then British Colony of Massachusetts, on July 11, 1761, on a slave ship called The Phillis. She endured the horror and trauma of what was called the “Middle Passage.”
Upon arrival in Boston, this scared, sickly, and naked young girl was bought by a wealthy Boston merchant and tailor John Wheatley as a slave for his wife Susanna. The Wheatleys named her Phillis, after the ship that had transported her to North America. She was given their last name of Wheatley after their family surname.
It may be a surprise to learn that there was enslavement in New England. It existed in all of the colonies, and in many of the northern states of the United States well into the 19th century.
Susanna soon discovered that Phillis had an extraordinary capacity to learn. She relieved Phillis of most domestic duties and educated her, with tutoring assistance from Susanna’s daughter, Mary. Soon Phillis was immersed in the Bible, astronomy, geography, history, British literature (particularly John Milton and Alexander Pope), and the Greek and Latin classics of Virgil, Ovid, Terence, and Homer.
At the age of 12, Phillis began writing poetry. With Susanna’s support, Phillis began posting advertisements for subscribers for her first book of poems. She did, however, find notoriety when she wrote a poem eulogizing George Whitefield, the English preacher of renown on both sides of the Atlantic. It was an elegant and beautiful poem written by 17-year-old Phillis Wheatly. Her fame began to spread across the colonies.
However, Wheatley had to defend her authorship of her poetry in court in 1772. She was examined by a group of Boston elites, including John Erving, Reverend Charles Chauncey, John Hancock, Thomas Hutchinson, the governor of Massachusetts, and his lieutenant governor Andrew Oliver. They concluded she had written the poems ascribed to her and signed a statement, which was included in the preface of her book of collected works: Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, later published in London in 1773.
In 1773, at the age of 20, Phillis accompanied Susanna’s son, Nathaniel Wheatley to London in part for her health (she suffered from chronic asthma), but primarily because Susanna believed Phillis would have a better chance of publishing her book of poems there than in the colonies. Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, became interested in the talented young African woman and subsidized the publication of Wheatley's volume of poems, which appeared in London in the summer of 1773.
The populace of London loved her work. The London Magazine in 1773, which published her poem "Hymn to the Morning" as an example of her work, wrote: "These poems display no astonishing power of genius; but when we consider them as the productions of a young untutored African, who wrote them after six months casual study of the English language and of writing, we cannot suppress our admiration of talents so vigorous and lively.”
After returning from London in 1773, the Wheatlys freed Phillis, and not long after Susanna died in 1774, and John Wheatly died in 1778, during the height of the American Revolution. Phillis Wheatly was now on her own and though her poetry was widely praised, it didn’t bring much in the way of income.
Soon, Phillis met and married John Peters, an impoverished free black grocer. They lived in poor conditions and two of their babies died. John was impoverished and was imprisoned for debt in 1784. With a sickly infant son to provide for, Phillis became a maid at a boarding house, doing work she had never done before; she developed pneumonia and died on December 5, 1784, at the age of 31. None of her children were known to have survived her.
During this era of the American Revolution, Phillis remained active in writing. She sent a copy of a poem entitled "To His Excellency, George Washington" the then-military general. The following year, Washington invited Wheatley to visit him at his headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which she did in March 1776. Thomas Paine republished the poem in the Pennsylvania Gazette in April 1776.
Not all American patriots were so enthralled with Wheatly’s talent. Thomas Jefferson, in his book Notes on the State of Virginia, was unwilling to acknowledge the value of her work or the work of any black poet. He wrote:
“Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry. Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. Love is the peculiar oestrum of the poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination. Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately [sic] but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.”
Others were much more generous. Voltaire, the European philosopher, stated in a letter to a friend that Wheatley had proved that black people could write poetry. John Paul Jones asked a fellow officer to deliver some of his writings to "Phillis the African favorite of the Nine (muses) and Apollo." This was an allusion to the classical themes that Wheatly often used in her writing along with strong Biblical themes mixed with what is likely an African pantheism that worshipped the sun. Her poetry provides a unique vision of life and culture unknown to colonial and early American writers.
Phillis Wheatly has been recognized recently as historical and literary studies have begun to focus on non-white contributors to the nation. Wheatley is featured, along with Abigail Adams and Lucy Stone, on the Boston Women's Memorial, a 2003 sculpture on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, Massachusetts. More recently, a 30-item collection of material related to Wheatley, including publications from her lifetime containing poems by her, was acquired by the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2023.
Wheatly should be honored and remembered as a leading writer of colonial and early American literature. Her place in history needs to be remembered for all time.
(For more information about Phillis Wheatly, read this entry about her at the Poetry Foundation.)