Neo-Classic Tradition

Wheatley, 1753 - 1784 Your Name: ______

Neo-classic tradition:

On Virtue ~ Phillis Wheatley O Thou bright jewel in my aim I strive To comprehend thee. Thine own words declare Wisdom is higher than a fool can reach. I cease to wonder, and no more attempt Thine height t' explore, or fathom thy profound. But, O my soul, sink not into despair, Virtue is near thee, and with gentle hand Would now embrace thee, hovers o'er thine head. Fain would the heav'n-born soul with her converse, Then seek, then court her for her promis'd bliss. Auspicious queen, thine heav'nly pinions spread, And lead celestial Chastity along; Lo! now her sacred retinue descends, Array'd in glory from the orbs above. Attend me, Virtue, thro' my youthful years! O leave me not to the false joys of time! But guide my steps to endless life and bliss. Greatness, or Goodness, say what I shall call thee, To give me an higher appellation still, Teach me a better strain, a nobler lay, O thou, enthron'd with Cherubs in the realms of day. Questions for “On Virtue” and Phillis Wheatley’s Library of Congress Biography

1) How did Phillis Wheatley get her name?

2) What was notable about Wheatley’s time as a slave?

3) Why is Phillis Wheatley famous today?

4) Why might Wheatley’s work have been considered controversial? Wheatley, 1753 - 1784 Definitions of Virtue (Merriam Webster online, accessed on 10/2/12)

1 a: conformity to a standard of right : 4: manly strength or courage b: a particular moral excellence 5: a commendable quality or trait 2 plural: an order of angels 6: a capacity to act 3: a beneficial quality or power of a thing 7: chastity especially in a woman

1) Properly introducing a quote from the poem with a colon, explain which definition -- or definitions -- of virtue that you think Wheatley uses in her poem.

2) Properly introducing a quote from the poem with a comma, please highlight an example of personification.

3) Properly incorporating a quote from Wheatley’s biography into a sentence without punctuation, can you say one part of Wheatley’s biography that interested you and why.

4) Properly using very small parts of a quote from the biography without punctuation, can you make a comparison between the way Wheatley’s and Bradstreet’s used tone? Wheatley, 1753 - 1784 Great Lives from History: The 18th Century Phillis Wheatley (Library of Congress, 2006.)

The first African American and the second colonial American woman to publish a book, Wheatley mastered eighteenth century verse models and, by her example, advanced the case against slavery as well as the emergence of African American letters.

Born: 1753?; west coast of Africa (possibly Senegal-Gambia) Died: December 5, 1784; Boston, Massachusetts Areas of Achievement: Literature, social reform

Phillis Wheatley, enslaved at the age of seven or eight, had few childhood memories of Africa, but she did remember her mother's ritual prayer at sunrise. On July 11, 1761, Phillis was purchased by John and Susanna Wheatley of Boston, was named after the ship on which she arrived, was trained in household duties, and on August 18, 1771, was accepted as a member of the Old South Congregational Church.

In intervals between her chores, she was tutored in English, Latin, and Bible studies. Her first published poem, "On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin," appeared in the December 21, 1767, issue of Rhode Island's Newport Mercury. In October, 1771, a broadside (a large sheet of paper printed on one side) with her elegy on the famous minister George Whitefield sold for seven coppers. This poem was commercially reprinted many times. Impressed by Phillis's success as a poet, Susanna Wheatley advertised in 1772 for about three hundred colonial subscribers to finance a proposed book by the young poet. This volume, however, never appeared.

With the aid of friends, Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was published in London in 1773. Advertised to appeal to the eighteenth century European interest in prodigies, the verse in this edition was somewhat revised to suit an English audience. The book included a frontispiece portrait of the poet contemplatively posed, in accordance with painterly conventions of the day, to suggest her religious conversion and poetic inspiration. In both England and colonial America the critical response to this work was on the whole favorable. Jupiter Hammon, a slave in New York, published a poem of appreciation addressed to Wheatley in 1778.

While visiting London a few months prior to the release of her book, Wheatley enjoyed the attention of several famous individuals, including Benjamin Franklin. After her return to Boston, she was manumitted (released from slavery). The emancipated poet married John Peters, a free black man who worked odd jobs. Together they struggled with poverty. In 1779, Wheatley again Wheatley, 1753 - 1784 unsuccessfully sought sponsors for an American edition of her writings.

In the years of her life that remained after the publication of her book abroad, she continued to write letters and occasional verse, which sometimes appeared in publications such as Boston's Independent Chronicle and Advertiser. Her most famous letter, written in 1765 and reprinted in many New England newspapers in 1774 (first in the Connecticut Gazette on March 11), was an antislavery letter addressed to American Indian minister Samson Occom. In the letter, Wheatley represents slaves as latter-day Israelites awaiting deliverance from the captivity of a pharaoh. Expressing the emerging revolutionary spirit of colonial America, Wheatley wrote, "In every human breast, God has implanted a principle, which we call Love of Freedom."

At this point in her life Wheatley could openly state her opposition to slavery. Earlier as a slave, however, she felt constrained to convey her abolitionist sentiment more subtly in her verse. "On Being Brought from Africa to America," for example, the poet does more than express gratitude for her conversion to Christianity, and she does more than insist that blacks are capable of both spiritual and cultural refinement. Importantly, in the last line of this short poem, two allusions to passages from the Old Testament book of Isaiah shrewdly intimate the equality of whites and blacks from their Creator's point of view. Wheatley's African American audience would have been especially sensitive to such allusions to Isaiah because many slaves found personal hope for their own liberation in this Old Testament prophet's forecast of the end of the Israelites' Babylonian captivity.

In two verse paraphrases of biblical passages, Wheatley likewise subversively hints at an abolitionist point of view that she dared not openly express. Her "Goliath of Garth" retells the David and Goliath story. In this verse she implies that enslavers are not real Christians, but instead are deity-defying Philistines who will eventually be overthrown. Her verse paraphrase "Isaiah LXIII. 1-8" likewise recalls David's victory against Goliath and similarly implies that slave masters disobey divine providence and, consequently, will not be included among the deity's Davidian chosen people.

Wheatley also subtly used classical allusions to insinuate her early antislavery convictions. In "To Maecenas," the first verse in her book, the poet speaks through an assumed voice of a shepherd- figure of the sort found in classical pastoral poetry. Her manner in this prefatory poem indicates a self-conscious disguise, and it suggests that deeper meanings lie below the surface of the "masked" poems to follow in her book. This is indeed the case in Wheatley's "On Imagination," in which seemingly conventional neoclassical devices serve as vehicles for the poet's subtle advancement of her point about love as a natural bond that should end the inhumanity of enslavement. Wheatley, 1753 - 1784 Even Wheatley's early elegies on famous and unfamiliar figures expressed her opposition to slavery. "On the Death of a Young Lady of Five Years of Age" she opposes human bondage by associating freedom and equality with the blessings of heaven. Pertinent, as well, are the dialogues between the living and dead in "A Funeral Poem on the Death of C. E., an Infant of Twelve Months." The recovery of previously suppressed voices in this poem includes, significantly, African Americans who had been oppressed while they were alive. In both elegies freedom is identified as a divine gift intended for all human beings of every race.

Wheatley's career as a poet would end prematurely. Chronically ill, she died at age thirty-one, apparently of complications related to childbirth.

In her time Phillis Wheatley's literary legacy served both advocates and opponents in debates concerning the intellectual and cultural potentialities of African Americans. If Thomas Jefferson was not persuaded by her work, his fellow revolutionary Benjamin Rush thought her poetry resulted from a "singular genius."

In later times, as well, Wheatley has provoked controversy. From the 1960's onward, some African Americans have faulted her writings for its lack of anger and especially for its subservience to the dominant culture's religious and literary paradigms. Others, however, have focused on the clever strategies the poet used to revise, resist, or subvert certain beliefs prevalent in the culture of her day. These strategies, Wheatley's defenders claim, reveal a characteristic African American double consciousness: the difficult attempt to reconcile one's self with the ways of a world presently hostile to the true expression of that self.

Wheatley wrote from within her Anglo-republican culture, but her double consciousness also enabled her to detect and reveal several of its inconsistencies and hypocrisies. However, in a world where women and blacks were expected to be docile, she had to be vigilant about her public image. The slave-poet carefully mingled simple piety and conventional verse techniques with a discreetly managed republican spirit of independence. While still a slave, she embedded the American spirit of political revolution below the surface of the literary conventions and pious sentiments of her poetry. Her contemporary readers valued her expression of piety and her execution of literary conventions because both elements met their expectations concerning cultural refinement. The poet's more underground revolutionary sentiment went undetected by her white advocates and detractors alike because such a spirit of independence was not expected from a person who was black, female, and a slave. While Wheatley's place in American cultural history is secure, the appreciation of her achievement will increase as more of her underground, revolutionary techniques are made apparent. William J. Scheick Wheatley, 1753 - 1784