Title: Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral Author: Phillis Wheatley Creation Date: 1773 Location: London Collection: Women Who Wrote When They Weren't Supposed To
Brief
The first book published in English by a Black writer in the Anglophone Atlantic world appeared in London in September 1773, bearing a preface unlike any in the history of English letters: a signed attestation from eighteen Boston gentlemen — the royal governor, John Hancock, ministers, merchants — confirming that the poems had in fact been composed by the person whose name appeared on the title page. No previous author in the English language had been required to pass an oral examination before being permitted to publish. This one had, because she was an enslaved African woman, and the philosophical consensus of the age held that no such person could produce a work of genuine literary quality.
Phillis Wheatley was born around 1753 in Senegambia, kidnapped at seven or eight, transported across the Atlantic on the slave ship Phillis, and sold in Boston in 1761 to the merchant John Wheatley as a servant for his wife Susanna. The Wheatleys recognised her intelligence immediately. Within sixteen months she could read difficult scripture. By twelve she had taught herself enough Latin to read Ovid and was writing English poetry in the neoclassical heroic couplets of Alexander Pope. Boston publishers refused to print a volume by an enslaved Black woman, so the Countess of Huntingdon sponsored the London edition — but only after the authentication ceremony had been conducted and the attestation signed. Wheatley travelled to England that summer to promote the book, and on her return that autumn she was freed.
The thirty-nine poems are elegies, classical paraphrases, religious meditations, and occasional verse — competent Augustan work and in places accomplished. As a historical document, the book is the single piece of counter-evidence that the philosophical defenders of Atlantic slavery could not honestly dismiss. Every subsequent Black writer in English writes downstream of its demonstration that the book could exist at all.
The Prohibition
Wheatley wrote under three interlocking prohibitions, each reinforcing the others until the combined weight required an apparatus of authentication no poet before or since has been asked to endure.
The first was the prohibition against Black literacy. Massachusetts had laws restricting the teaching of enslaved people to read, because a literate enslaved person could read arguments against bondage, forge a pass, write to abolitionists, or produce a book that would undermine the intellectual architecture of the entire system. That Wheatley could read at all was an anomaly created by the Wheatleys' unusual domestic arrangement; that she could read Latin was extraordinary; that she could write publishable verse in the dominant literary form of her age was, in the philosophical framework of her contemporaries, supposed to be impossible.
The second was the argument, articulated most infamously by Hume in his 1753 footnote to "Of National Characters" and refined by Kant and Jefferson, that Africans were naturally inferior to Europeans and incapable of intellectual achievement. The chain of reasoning required that no African ever produce a work of unambiguous quality, because a single such work would falsify the premise on which the philosophical defenders of slavery had staked their position. The eighteen Boston gentlemen who examined Wheatley in 1772 were adjudicating, whether or not they understood it, the empirical claim on which a continental argument depended.
The third was the prohibition against female authorship in the serious genres. White English women had been publishing for a century, but always under conditions requiring apologetic framing, male sponsorship, and the strategic selection of acceptable subjects. Wheatley's poems had to satisfy three authenticity tests simultaneously: that they were actually written by a Black person, by a woman writing within acceptable range, and that they met Augustan technical standards beyond dismissal. No previous writer had been required to pass all three at once.
The Strategy
Wheatley's strategy was to master the single literary form in which her examiners could recognise quality and produce work they could not honestly dismiss. She chose the Popean heroic couplet — the dominant form of serious English verse since Dryden — because it was the form in which a Boston minister or London publisher would most immediately register competence. She read Pope's Homer, Virgil, Ovid, and Horace in Latin. By her mid-teens she could write couplets whose prosody was technically accurate, whose classical allusions were placed with understanding, and whose diction obeyed the decorums of the Augustan register. This was not capitulation to European norms. It was the only route through the wall, and she took it with deliberate and fully conscious craft.
Within the Popean mode she chose subgenres in which a young woman could acceptably publish. The 1770 elegy on George Whitefield did double strategic work: it announced her existence to the English evangelical abolitionist network and positioned her as a transatlantic voice rather than a local curiosity. The evangelical framework itself was strategic — Christianity taught that all souls were equal before God, and Wheatley held her white Christian readers to that teaching with a consistency that was neither naive nor accidental. Every poem that invoked salvation was implicitly arguing for her full humanity in the only vocabulary her audience could not refuse without abandoning their own professed beliefs.
The Wheatleys' patronage was a second leg — Susanna provided books, paper, and domestic leisure for composition, but the patronage was that of enslavers toward their property. Wheatley extracted what she needed without being in any position to refuse the terms on which it came. The London trip of 1773, undertaken alone, consolidated the abolitionist network whose support secured her manumission. She turned the promotional tour for her book into the instrument of her own freedom.
The Price and the Legacy
The price fell on Wheatley in the decade after publication. Susanna Wheatley died in 1774, removing her closest protector. The Revolutionary War disrupted the book trade and scattered her abolitionist network. She married John Peters, a free Black man whose subsequent business failures plunged them into poverty. She had three children; all three died in infancy. A planned second volume failed to attract subscribers, and the manuscript has never been recovered. She died in December 1784 in a Boston boarding house, at thirty-one. Her last surviving child died within hours. The most consequential African-descended American writer of the eighteenth century was buried in an unmarked grave.
Jefferson's 1785 dismissal of her poems as "below the dignity of criticism" set the tone for a century of neglect — a calculated refusal to accept the implications her competence carried for his own theoretical position on African capacity. The nineteenth-century abolitionists resurrected her as a symbolic figure more than as a poet. The definitive reassessment came in the late twentieth century, led by Black feminist critics including Alice Walker, June Jordan, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., whose Trials of Phillis Wheatley reconstructed the 1772 examination and argued for its status as a founding episode in the philosophical history of race.
The legacy is that she provided, at the moment the transatlantic argument over African intellectual capacity was conducted at its highest volume, the single piece of counter-evidence it could not honestly dismiss. The book exists. It has always existed. And every framework that required it to be impossible has had to answer for its existence ever since.
The Reading
The Frontispiece
A young woman sits at a writing desk. Quill in hand. Book open before her. Eyes lifted, not toward the viewer but toward something the viewer cannot see — the space where composition happens, where the next couplet is forming before the pen sets it down. She wears a servant's cap and plain gown. The desk, the book, the quill, the inkwell, the paper — every object in the engraving signals literary production, not domestic labour. This is the first published image of any African-American writer, inserted at the insistence of a Countess who understood what the London publisher did not: that the visual proof of the author's existence was as much a part of the argument as the attestation from the Boston gentlemen. Open it and the question is posed before any poem is read. Is this person a poet? The eye answers before the page is turned.
Behind the frontispiece, before the first line of verse, stands that attestation — signed, dated, bearing the names of the governor, the lieutenant-governor, ministers, and men of property. It reads as a preface. It functions as a scar. The authentication process has been preserved in print as a permanent record of what was required of a Black woman before she could be permitted to speak. Every copy carries that scar on its opening pages, where other volumes carry a dedication or a modest apology for the author's youth. Here there is neither dedication nor apology. There is a legal document. There is proof.
The Preacher's Death
The elegy on George Whitefield is the poem that made the name. Whitefield had been the central figure of the Great Awakening — the evangelical revival that swept through the American colonies — and his death in Newburyport in September 1770 was a major event throughout the Atlantic world. The elegy circulated in multiple American and British periodicals, and the rhetorical strategy is instructive. The dead preacher is addressed directly, his voice assimilated to the voice of Christ — Take him, my dear Americans, he said, / Be your complaints on his kind bosom laid — and then the poem pivots in its closing lines to address the Countess of Huntingdon, announcing the existence of the poem's author in a way the Countess could not miss. The evangelical was being mourned by an enslaved African girl who wrote in the metre of Pope, and every reader who accepted the elegy's grief implicitly accepted the legitimacy of the mind that composed it.
The other elegies fill many pages — funeral verse for the recently dead, composed to order for bereaved families in colonial Boston. The elegy was a genre in which a young woman could acceptably publish poetry, and it was what patrons and booksellers wanted. Each one performs the same quiet argument: the voice offering consolation speaks with the full authority of Christian compassion, and the reader who accepts the consolation has accepted the speaker. There is no moment in these poems where the voice asks permission to grieve. It simply grieves, and the grief is rendered in couplets no honest reader can dismiss as incompetent, and the competence is the argument.
The Mother Watching Her Children Die
"Niobe in Distress for Her Children Slain by Apollo" is the clearest demonstration of classical learning here — nearly two hundred lines retelling the Ovidian myth with unusual psychological attention to the mother's grief as her fourteen children are killed one by one in punishment for her pride. The source is Metamorphoses Book VI. The mythological machinery is handled correctly. The couplets register each death with a precision that is formally correct and emotionally devastating in the way that only formal correctness can be devastating — the control of the verse is what makes the grief legible, because grief without form is only noise.
Some readers have detected a displaced meditation on a lost African family — a mother remembered pouring libations to the rising sun, siblings never seen again after a capture at seven or eight. The text does not explicitly invite this reading. But the identification of the poet with a woman whose children are taken from her by indifferent divine violence is difficult to dismiss as purely decorative. The myth was chosen. The mother's perspective was chosen. The children's deaths are rendered individually rather than collectively. These are compositional decisions, and they carry the weight of whatever could not be said directly about the Middle Passage in a volume being marketed to London's evangelical book-buyers. The couplets hold what the publishing conditions would not permit the poet to say in plain speech, and the classical apparatus — the mythology, the Latin source, the Augustan diction — functions as a container for a grief that has no other available form.
Eight Lines That Change Everything
'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land, / Taught my benighted soul to understand / That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too.
"On Being Brought from Africa to America" is eight lines long. Modern readers have often found the opening's apparent endorsement of enslavement painful — the word "mercy" applied to the Middle Passage, the description of Africa as a "Pagan land," the word "benighted" laid across an entire continent. The discomfort is warranted and the discomfort is the point. Watch the poem's movement. The first six lines establish a concession: I was brought here, I was taught Christianity, I was saved. The concession is strategic. It places the speaker inside the framework her readers already hold — the missionary justification for slavery, the saving of African souls as compensation for African bodies. The reader nods. The reader is comfortable.
Then the closing couplet arrives: Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, / May be refin'd, and join th'angelic train. The pivot is a blade. The word "Remember" is an imperative — the enslaved poet is giving an order to her Christian readers. The theological claim is that Black souls are capable of salvation — a claim no Christian reader can refuse without denying the universality of their own faith. The argument is conducted with the compressed force of someone who knows she has exactly eight lines in which to change a reader's mind and cannot afford to waste a syllable. The opening concession was not capitulation. It was the ground being prepared. The closing couplet is the detonation.
The poem does the maximum argumentative work in the smallest possible space. It accepts the terms of its audience's theology and then holds that audience to the implications of those terms. Your claim to Christian superiority requires acknowledging my spiritual equality. You cannot have the faith without the consequence. Eight lines. No wasted breath.
The Secretary of State Learns What Freedom Means
"To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth" is addressed to the British Secretary of State for the American Colonies, praising his policies and connecting the colonists' fear of political "slavery" under British taxation to an actual experience of enslavement. The moment is subtle and merciless: Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song, / Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung... I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate / Was snatch'd from Afric's fancy'd happy seat: / What pangs excruciating must molest, / What sorrows labour in my parent's breast?
A member of the British cabinet is being taught what the word "freedom" actually means by the one person in the correspondence who knows the thing from the inside. The couplet is polite. The couplet is patriotic in the idiom of its moment. And the underlying argument is absolute: the colonists crying tyranny over stamp duties are borrowing a grief they have never experienced from the enslaved Africans they refuse to free. The word "freedom" cannot mean what the Revolution claims it means while the woman using it most precisely remains someone else's property. The prosody never raises its voice. It does not need to.
The poem to General Washington, sent in October 1775 during the siege of Boston, extends the strategy. The commander-in-chief of the Continental Army — himself an enslaver — is addressed in the mode of the heroic ode. A female personification of the new nation appears as "Columbia," and the female poet stands in implicit alignment with the female country. Washington wrote a gracious reply, invited the author to his headquarters at Cambridge, and forwarded the poem for possible publication. The exchange is one of the strangest in American literary history: the leader of the revolutionary cause corresponding respectfully with an enslaved Black poet about the meaning of liberty. The poem itself was the comment no additional commentary could improve upon.
Imagination Settles the Question
"On Imagination" is a meditation on the power of poetic imagination, written in the high Augustan register: Imagination! who can sing thy force? / Or who describe the swiftness of thy course? The poem catalogues the faculty's operations — its speed, its reach, its capacity to summon worlds not present to the senses — and in doing so it conducts a philosophical argument that never announces itself as one. Imagination, as the poem describes it, is the faculty that allows a mind to exceed its material circumstances. It produces visions beyond what the eye can see, music beyond what the ear can hear, landscapes beyond what the body can visit. The poem celebrates this power in the universal terms the Augustan tradition demanded, and the universality is the argument: the imaginative faculty the poem celebrates is available to its author regardless of her legal status, and the reader who accepts the poem's account of imagination's power has implicitly accepted its author's claim to possess it. A reader cannot admire the poem's description of imagination while denying that the describer has any. The argument is conducted entirely through the prosody and is never stated. It does not need to be. A reader who can follow the couplets has already conceded the point.
"A Hymn to Humanity" performs an analogous manoeuvre: the speaker of a hymn to humanity is, by definition, a member of the humanity she is hymning. The poem does not argue for membership. It enacts it. And the enactment, in metrically precise heroic couplets that no reader could dismiss as mechanical imitation, is stronger than any argument could be, because an argument can be refused while a demonstration can only be denied. The same logic runs through every religious meditation — each address to the divine, each assertion of the soul's equality before God, each invocation of Christian mercy, carries inside it the unstated but inescapable corollary: the speaker possesses the soul she is describing, the faith she is professing, the moral authority she is exercising. The theology is real. It is also a weapon, and its wielder knows exactly what she is doing with it.
The pair of poems addressed to Harvard undergraduates sharpens the point to its finest edge. Having established her claim to speak as a Christian, the voice turns to address the students directly: Improve your privileges while they stay, / Ye pupils, and each hour redeem... An Ethiop tells you 'tis your greatest foe. The self-identification as "Ethiop" is deliberate and unapologetic. The sermonic voice is that of the evangelical preacher she could never, as a woman, formally become. The students being lectured were the sons of the colony's governing class. The audacity of the gesture is easy to miss because it is executed with such formal propriety. A young enslaved Black woman is standing in the position of the moral instructor and addressing a white colonial elite, and the couplets never raise their voice. The authority comes not from volume but from the absolute correctness of the prosody, which says, in effect: I have earned the right to speak in this form, and you cannot dismiss what I say without dismissing the form itself, and the form is yours. It is one of the earliest instances in American literature of a Black writer addressing a white elite in the mode of direct moral instruction, and the form's calm is what makes it unanswerable.
The Lexicon of Dignified Restraint
Running through all these poems is a set of lexical choices that reveal an attention to position so precise it constitutes its own poetics. "Afric" appears more often than any other geographical term. The condition of enslavement is named by circumlocution rather than directly, because the direct naming would have fallen outside the Augustan register, but the circumlocutions are consistent and deliberate: "captive" is preferred to "slave"; the figure of the child snatched from the mother's breast is preferred to any generalising language about the trade. These choices constitute a vocabulary designed to hold grief and indignation inside a prosodic frame that forbids the expression of either in uncontrolled form. The restraint is not weakness. It is the condition under which the work could exist and be taken seriously, and the poet understood that distinction with a clarity available only to someone for whom the stakes of being taken seriously were not literary but existential.
The occasional verses — poems addressed to friends, to students embarking on voyages, to visitors, to patrons — are the quietest poems and in some ways the most revealing. The voice in these poems is settled, confident, engaged in the ordinary social exchanges of Boston's educated class. What they establish, collectively, is that the author was a fully participating member of a literary community, not a curiosity visiting it. The affection is real. The respect is mutual. The condolence offered to mothers of dead infants — and there are several such poems — is offered by someone whose authority to grieve will be tested later, when her own three children die in infancy in a Boston boarding house, in circumstances its original readers could not have foreseen and its author could not have imagined surviving.
Among these occasional poems is "To S.M. a young African Painter, on seeing his Works" — addressed to Scipio Moorhead, the Black portraitist who may have painted the original from which the frontispiece engraving was made. The poem is affectionate and collegial: one young Black artist addressing another, recognising a shared condition and a shared ambition. The tone is warm where much of this poetry is measured, and the warmth itself is significant — this is a voice at ease with a peer, speaking artist to artist across the racial divide that separated both of them from the world they were addressing. The poem to Moorhead is one of the few moments where the reader glimpses the community of Black artists that existed in colonial Boston, visible only in these brief textual traces, producing work that the dominant culture required authentication ceremonies to acknowledge.
These poems hold together by the double achievement they represent: a respectable contribution to late eighteenth-century Anglo-American verse, and a historical document for which no framework in 1773 existed. The two achievements are inseparable, because the historical significance depends entirely on the literary competence, and the literary competence cannot be fully appreciated without understanding the conditions under which it was produced. The attestation at the front is as much a part of this as the poems — the scar tissue of authentication preserved in print. The poems are constantly at work on the problem of that authentication — arguing, implicitly and explicitly, that the question they were written to answer is absurd, that the Christian and classical traditions both contain the answer already, and that the poems themselves settle the matter by existing. The argument was won. The poems exist. They are the proof.
This post is part of Women Who Wrote When They Weren't Supposed To, a series on women writing against the constraints of their time. See the full collection →
Edited by Vincent Carretta. The definitive scholarly edition — all poems, letters, and subscription proposals, with appendices collecting verse by her Black contemporaries Lucy Terry Prince, Jupiter Hammon, and Francis Williams. Called "a masterpiece of textual scholarship" by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Edited by John C. Shields. The Oxford University Press Schomburg Library edition, part of the landmark series recovering the tradition of Black women's writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Strong scholarly apparatus and contextual introductions.
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