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Below, we select and introduce ten of her best. If this selection whets your appetite for more, we recommend the highly affordable volume The Poems of Phillis Wheatley with Letters and a Memoir. 1. ‘His Excellency General Washington’.
Twenty of her fifty five surviving poems are elegies written to comfort relatives with eternal life in heaven. Wheatley also wrote about current political events such as the Stamp Act and was a supporter of the American independence.
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. The poems that best demonstrate her abilities and are most often questioned by detractors are those that employ classical themes as well as techniques.
Apr 9, 2024 · Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784) was born in Senegal or Gambia, West Africa. When she was around 7 years old, she was captured and taken to Boston with other “refugee” slaves who were, because of frailty or age, not suitable for rigorous labor. Phillis was bought by Susanna Wheatley, wife of a prominent tailor.
Apr 15, 2024 · Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753−84) was the first Black woman to become a poet of note in the United States. She is best known today for her poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America” (1768).
In 1838, Boston-based publisher and abolitionist Isaac Knapp published a collection of Wheatley's poetry, along with that of enslaved North Carolina poet George Moses Horton, under the title Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley, A Native African and a Slave.
In 1773, Phillis Wheatley accomplished something that no other woman of her status had done. When her book of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, appeared, she became the first American slave, the first person of African descent, and only the third colonial American woman to have her work published.
