American Literature Phillis Wheatley Peters
by
Wendy Raphael Roberts
  • LAST MODIFIED: 07 January 2025
  • DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0255

Introduction

Phillis Wheatley (Peters) (1753–1784) is one of the most important poets in early American literature and considered by many the mother of African American literature. As a young child, she may have flourished with her family in the largely Muslim Senegambia region of Africa where she would have been taught how to write and read Arabic. As is typical of the violence of the Atlantic slave trade, certainty about her early life’s exact geographical location is elusive. One of more than twelve million African persons trafficked to American during the slave trade, she endured the horrors of Middle Passage and was sold in Boston to the enslavers John and Susannah Wheatley. They renamed her Phillis after the ship that, the poet later wrote, she survived only by divine “mercy.” In the wake of this trauma, she nevertheless quickly acquired English, established friendships within the diasporic Black community in and beyond Boston, engaged and influenced a transatlantic evangelical culture and a transatlantic abolition movement, participated in defining the meaning of the American Revolution and its ideals, contributed to theological developments in Black Christianity, nurtured Black creative community, and cultivated a network of supporters to ensure the publication of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773)—the first published book of poems by an African American. She leveraged her success to gain freedom from the Wheatleys, and she married the free man John Peters, who, even after her untimely death in 1784, sought (though unsuccessfully) to have her second book of poems published. In addition to her published book, she also circulated her work widely in broadside, newspaper, and manuscript. She achieved international fame as a poet and abolitionist by age eighteen and left a literary and political legacy that is still being fully recovered. Though literary critics and creative writers once argued about her literary merits and supposed white-washed verse, these arguments have been superseded by work that details Wheatley’s complex and nuanced aesthetics and politics. Her relevance to scholars and students today has become more apparent than ever in large part through the past and current work of Black scholars and the field of Black studies.

General Overviews

Bynum, et al. 2022 curates the most current, concise, and field-transforming introduction to Wheatley studies, as well as why and how to teach her. Gates and McKay 1996–1997 provides a succinct introduction to Wheatley’s importance to African American literature and the institutional contexts in which her work is studied. Alice Walker’s revered essay remains essential for situating Wheatley in the larger context of Black women writers. It was read at Jackson State’s Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival in 1973, an event which Lee 2022 situates as a guide for Wheatley studies, and first appeared in the Jackson State Review 1974, landmark issue that reevaluated the poet and her importance to African American literature. Jordan 1986 is a foundational essay for situating Wheatley’s audacious insistence on her own being through writing as a Black poet.

  • Bynum, Tara, Brigitte Fielder, and Cassander Smith. “Introduction.” In Special Issue: Dear Sister: Phillis Wheatley’s Futures. Early American Literature 57.3 (2022): 663–679.

    DOI: 10.1353/eal.2022.0100

    Situates the current state of Wheatley studies in early American scholarship and curates a number of important new articles, many focused on teaching Wheatley amidst increased restrictions on teaching race and slavery. Foregrounds methodologies attuned to archival absence and curiosity and to expanding Black literature’s legacies and futures.

  • Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Nellie Y. McKay. “From Phillis Wheatley to Toni Morrison: The Flowering of African-American Literature.” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 14 (1996–1997): 95–100.

    Locates the beginnings of African American literature in an imagined Wheatley trial in which Gates and McKay dramatize the stakes of Black people writing literature to enlightenment conceptions of race. Also important to understand the study of Wheatley in relation to the resistance by predominantly white universities to the African American literary tradition and the persistence of Black writers and critics.

  • Jordan, June. “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America or Something like a Sonnet for Phillis Wheatley.” Massachusetts Review 27.2 (1986): 252–262.

    Influential essay that is widely taught to situate Wheatley’s poetry in relationship to her biography and Wheatley’s insistence on her own persisting being to expose white supremacist structures that deny the existence of Black poetry.

  • Lee, Kirsten. “Sister, Wasn’t It Good”: Archival Gestures, Mutual Witness, and the 1973 Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival.” Special Issue: Dear Sister: Phillis Wheatley’s Futures. Early American Literature 57.3 (2022): 857–871.

    Situates the Jackson State Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival as a repertoire of archival gestures of Black women’s intimacies and mutual witness, which Lee argues is foundational for the study of Wheatley’s poetry. Rather than focus on the scant record of this event in terms of anti-Black misogyny and recovery, Lee shifts “sites of inquiry to ongoing creative infrastructures of Black women’s relations with each other” and offers the festival and its participants as a model for Wheatley studies.

  • Walker Alexander, Margaret, ed. Special Issue: The Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival, November 4–7, 1973. Jackson State Review 6.1 (1974): 1–107.

    Walker’s formative reevaluation of Wheatley’s politics and poetry by Black women, including Alice Walker’s landmark reassessment of Black women’s art and history, “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens”; Paula Giddings’s reevaluation of criticism by Black scholars; Dorothy B. Porter’s bibliographic data of publications; and Margaret G. Burroughs’s argument that British loyalism and radical, abolitionist evangelicals are the context for understanding Wheatley’s social concerns and her alignment with Black insurgents (later reprinted in Robinson 1982).

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