“THE BOOK HERE PROPOSED FOR PUBLICATION,” WROTE PRINTER ARCHIBALD BELL ON SEPTEMBER 13, 1773, “DISPLAYS PERHAPS ONE OF THE GREATEST INSTANCES OF PURE, UNASSISTED GENIUS THAT THE WORLD EVER PRODUCED. THE AUTHOR IS A NATIVE OF AFRICA…”
“And so, against the greatest odds,” wrote Professor Gates, “POEMS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL, became the first book published by a person of African descent in the English language.”
When Phillis Wheatley’s book of poetry was published in London in 1773, it became only the fifth book published in English by a woman. It marked the beginning of the African-American literary tradition.
Advertisements for the book appeared in the LONDON MORNING POST featuring the statement from the esteemed Bostonians as proof that Phillis was the “real author” of the book.
“Everyone knew that the publication of Wheatley’s book was an historical event,” wrote Dr. Henry Louis Gates. It was “greeted by something akin to the shock of cloning a sheep.”
The printer, Archibald Bell, put out his own advertisement for the book in London newspapers on September 10, 1773.
“This day, Sept. 11, will be published , price Twop shillings, sewed or Twop Shillings and sixpence neatly bound, adorned with an elegant engraved likeness of the author. A volume of POEMS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL, by PHILLIS WHEATLEY, Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley of Boston.”
“The book here proposed for publication displays perhaps one of the greatest instances of pure, unassisted genius that the world ever produced. The author is a native of Africa and left not the dark part of the habitable system till she was eight years old. She is now no more than nineteen and many of the poems were penned before she arrived at near that age.”
Professor John Shields, in his 2008 study of Wheatley and her poetry, wrote that “Two factors which advanced her international success in the 1770’s more than any others were, first that she was a black author and second, that she was female.”
He notes that fifteen years before Phillis Wheatley faced the “Wheatley Court” challenge to her legitimacy, a white poet, Martha Brewster, one of only four American women before Wheatley to publish a book, was forced to prove her capacity to write by publicly creating a verse from a psalm.
Phillis Wheatley confronted her status as a black woman, a slave and a poet head on. “Rather than disguise or deny these facts, she allowed a vivid and, we are told, accurate engraving of her likeness to serve as frontspiece to her 1773 POEMS,” Shields wrote. “She not only announced to the world her color but her s*x and in as bold a manner as was then possible.”
According to her first biographer Margaretta Oddell, a member of the Wheatley family, Phillis’ portrait was “a striking representation.”
She tells how a “grand-niece of Mrs. Wheatley’s informs us that during the absence of Phillis one day, she called upon her relative who immediately directed her attention to a picture over the fireplace (the original engraving of her portrait), exclaiming: ‘See! Look at Phillis! Does she not seem as though she would speak to me!’”
The book’s inside cover features an "elegant engraved likeness of the Author," according to the publisher. The poet is pictured inside an oval frame. The legend around the frame states: ‘PHILLIS WHEATLEY, NEGRO SERVANT TO MR. JOHN WHEATLEY OF BOSTON.”
The poet is seated at a table, a book at her elbow, her chin resting thoughtfully in her left hand while her right hand holds a pen about to engage in the act of writing. The eyes of the young woman are gazing upward, as if seeking inspiration.
The portrait clearly highlights her African heritage. Just as significantly, it demonstrates her inferior social status—she is wearing a cap and an apron, the humble clothes of a house servant.
“With the publication of her book,” wrote Dr. Gates, “Phillis Wheatley, almost immediately, became the most famous African on the face of the earth.”
Phillis Wheatley left Boston for London aboard the London Packet on May 8, 1773, accompanied by the Wheatley’s son Nathaniel. They arrived on June 17, just as the publicity campaign for her forthcoming book, coordinated by Susanna Wheatley, was beginning in the London press.
POEMS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS revealed that Phillis' favorite poetic form was the couplet, both iambic pentameter and heroic. More than one-third of her canon is composed of elegies, poems on the deaths of noted persons, friends, or even strangers whose loved ones employed the poet.
“Wheatley’s POEMS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS was widely and generally favorably reviewed in British literary magazines, many of which included exemplary poems from the collection,” wrote Professor Vincent Carretta in his INTRODUCTION to PHILLIS WHEATLEY’S COMPLETE WRITINGS (2001)
One reviewer in the CRITICAL REVIEW, September 1773, praised her work, especially the poem TO MAECENAS, noting that “there are several lines in this piece which would be no discredit to an English poet. The whole is indeed extraordinary, considered as the production of a young Negro, who was, but a few years since, an illiterate barbarian.”
The French writer Voltaire was in England at the time Wheatley’s book came out and was there to witness this momentous event. Clearly, he read her poems. In a letter to a French Baron, Voltaire wrote: “There is at the present day a black woman (Phillis) who makes very good English verse.”
The poems that best demonstrate her abilities are those that employ classical themes as well as techniques. In her epyllion "Niobe in Distress for Her Children Slain by Apollo, from Ovid's Metamorphoses, and from a "View of the Painting of Mr. Richard Wilson," she not only translates Ovid but adds her own beautiful lines to extend the dramatic imagery. In "To Maecenas" she transforms Horace's ode into a celebration of Christ."
By the time she returned to Boston in September 1773, just as her book was going on sale, Phillis Wheatley was a renoun poet both in the United States and England.
“Since my return to America,” Phillis wrote to her friend Col. Worchester on October 18, 1773, “my master has, at the desire of my friends in England, given me my freedom.”
Phillis Wheatley, America’s first black poet, was now a free woman.
ON IMAGINATION
By PHILLIS WHEATLEY
THY various works, imperial queen, we see
How bright their forms! how decked with pomp by thee!
Thy wond'rous acts in beauteous order stand,
And all attest how potent is thine hand.
From Helicon's refulgent heights attend,
Ye sacred choir, and my attempts befriend:
To tell her glories with a faithful tongue,
Ye blooming graces, triumph in my song.
Now here, now there, the roving Fancy flies,
Till some loved object strikes her wand'ring eyes,
Whose silken fetters all the senses bind,
And soft captivity involves the mind.
Imagination! who can sing thy force?
Or who describe the swiftness of thy course?
Soaring through air to find the bright abode,
The empyreal palace of the thundering 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 the unbounded soul.
Though Winter frowns to Fancy's raptured eyes,
The fields may flourish, and gay scenes arise;
The frozen deeps may burst their iron bands,
And bid their waters murmur o'er the sands.
Fair Flora may resume her fragrant reign,
And with her flow'ry riches deck the plain;
Sylvanus may diffuse his honours round,
And all the forest may with leaves be crowned;
Showers may descend, and dews their gems disclose,
And nectar sparkle on the blooming rose.
Such is thy power, nor are thine orders vain,
O thou, the leader of the mental train:
In full perfection all thy works are wrought,
And thine the sceptre o'er the realms of thought;
Before thy throne the subject passions bow,
Of subject-passions sov'reign ruler Thou;
At thy command joy rushes on the heart,
And through the glowing veins the spirits dart.
Fancy might now her silken pinions try
To rise from earth, and sweep the expanse on high;
From Tithon's bed now might Aurora rise,
Her checks all glowing with celestial dies,
While a pure stream of light o'erflows the skies.
The monarch of the day I might behold,
And all the mountains tipt with radiant gold,
But I reluctant leave the pleasing views,
Which Fancy dresses to delight the Muse;
Winter austere forbids me to aspire,
And northern tempests damp the rising fire;
They chill the tides of Fancy's flowing' sea,--
Cease then my song, cease the unequal lay.
Posted By: Richard Kigel
Tuesday, December 29th 2009 at 11:21PM
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