Phillis Wheatley, abducted from Africa and brought to America as an enslaved person in 1761, is not only the first African American to publish a book, but is also the first to obtain international recognition as a writer. A genius child, within four years of her enslavement in Boston (at about age 11), she had learned English and Latin and begun writing, publishing her first verses in a Rhode Island newspaper around age 13.
Her poetry exemplifies the neoclassical poetic style of her day with excellence, but despite her literary genius, most white Americans chose not to believe that she had produced her own poems. The only book-length version of her poetry published during her lifetime appeared in London, as several attempts to solicit subscribers in America had failed.[1] There is even a much-circulated quote by Thomas Jefferson in which he outright denies the poetic value of her work: “Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whatley [sic] but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.”[2]
Wheatley was clearly a living challenge to the racist logic of her time and place. Undoubtedly, her physical safety and ability to publish, was highly dependent on masking any such challenge that she might pose in her writing. Many people, including Amiri Baraka of the Black Arts Movement, have interpreted her poetry as being acquiescent to her owners’ religion and culture. One of the beautiful things about skilled poets, however, is their fine attention to the subtle details of diction, sound, syntax and punctuation, and their ability to make slight alternations in these elements to dramatically change the meaning of a sentence or word. Needless to say, Wheatley’s criticism of hypocritical Christian slaveholders is noticeable to careful and willing readers.[3]
To understand the subversive elements in her poetry, it’s important to recognize the constraints she was writing under: the neoclassical style[4] used in Wheatley’s poetry, which was an Enlightenment reaction to the fancy and imagination of Renaissance poetry, was characterized by its rationalism, didacticism, and realism. Neoclassical poetry followed strict formal rules and was characteristically devoid of the poet’s feelings, sentiments, and imagination, preferring instead to focus on the harsh realities of the world with an eye toward practical and rational instruction and action.[5] Unless one reads between the lines of convention in Wheatley’s poetry, there is little to glean about her interior life. This brings us to the beauty and compassion of the 2020 poetry collection The Age of Phillis by American poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers.
Jeffers’s poetry is a lyrical reimagining of Wheatley’s biography—what writer Saidiya Hartman calls critical fabulation, or writing that combines historical and archival research with critical theory and fictional storytelling.[6] This poetic rendition of Wheatley’s life not only engages with prominent critical readings of the subversive elements in her poetry, but it also imaginatively fills in the personal details and emotions that are missing in the white-authored historical accounts of her life. In addition to the poetry, Jeffers gives a non-fiction account of her own investigative research on Wheatley, providing very convincing evidence to suggest that the definitive source for Wheatley scholarship in American history is likely authored by a person who did not exist (a supposed friend of the Wheatley’s, Margaretta Matilda Odell) and contains erroneous and speculative information, namely surrounding Odell’s account of the poet as a sycophant of white culture and Wheatley’s husband John Peters (a free Black man) as a swindler.[7] In my opinion, this investigative historical work would make a great Netflix series if someone isn’t on it already!
Anyway, let’s look at a poetic example of how beautifully and hauntingly Jeffers renders Wheatley’s life and poetry. Many of the poems in Jeffers’s book reference Wheatley’s published poems and letters, so let’s examine one of Wheatley’s most-well known and most controversial poems: “On Being Brought from AFRICA to AMERICA”. The completely capitalized country names are true to the original manuscript but are not often carried through in later printings. However, they are one of the important subversive elements. Here is the full poem:
‘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:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
“Their colour is a diabolic die.”
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,
May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.
This poem contains common elements of neoclassical style, namely heroic couplets,[8] a consistent meter of iambic pentameter, Biblical references, and an instructional tone in the last two lines. On the surface, this poem appears to be an admission of the poet’s gratitude for having been brought from Africa to America, a vindication of both Christianity and the slave trade. This is how many people read it at the time and throughout history, and of course the ease of this reading is what allowed this poem to be so popular in the first place.
However, if one looks at this with a poet’s eye, there are many details that suggest an alternate reading. I suggest Mary Catherine Loving’s excellent article on subversion in this poem, from which I will point out some of the more prominent evidence.[9] First of all, according to grammatical rules of the time, capitalization and italics were important for denoting words of particular importance in a poem, and capitalization was a necessity for names and appellations of God. Wheatley chose to capitalize both the country of her birth and America, putting them on equal ground, and although she was often seen as an exceptional anomaly of the Black race with her history obscured in accounts of her life, she chooses to acknowledge her origin in the title. This alignment of herself with her homeland and challenge of Christianity continues throughout the poem—all five of the italicized and capitalized words in the poem are key to this move in which she uses emphasis in order to invert meaning. In the first line, “mercy” appears to refer to God, but without the capitalization, it refers to the Christian or Christian-backed slaveholders who literally “brought” her to America. In this way, the italics of “Pagan” is a kind of censure of white labelling of her homeland. It is the Middle Passage which she is indirectly speaking about in this first couplet, and it is this horrible journey filled with death, starvation and rape that taught her “benighted soul” to understand. One meaning of the word “benighted” means to be surrounded by and preyed upon by darkness, similar to her abduction from Africa. Again, notice the mocking tone with the italicized “Saviour”. The region of Africa where Wheatley likely came from did not believe in a trinity (with a savior separate from God). The colon at the end of line three indicates that there is more to this thought, she acknowledges a time before her abduction when she neither knew nor sought redemption—again redemption, echoing mercy, has no capitalization. I’ll let you have a look at Loving’s article if you’re interested in more of these details.
What’s especially interesting is how Jeffers foregrounds this subversion and critiques surface readings of Wheatley’s poetry in the first of her poems, which builds on the idea of mercy: “An Issue of Mercy #1”.[10] The first three lines of this poem read:
Mercy, girl.
What the mother might have said, pointing
at the sun rising, what makes life possible.”
Jeffers refers back to one of the only recorded memories that Wheatley had of her childhood in Africa—watching her mother prostrate herself before the first beam of morning sun (likened to the sunrise ceremony of the Moslem faith in the part of Africa where Wheatley was abducted).[11] Later in the poem, the speaker reframes “mercy” saying:
Perhaps it was mercy,
Dear Reader.
Mercy
Dear Brethren.
By choosing to both capitalize and not capitalize “mercy”, the speaker plays with the idea of mercy being a deity—she appears to be asking whether one’s choice to put emphasis on the lack of capitalization in Wheatley’s poem has to do with one’s position as a reader or one’s position as a Christian, part of a “brethren” or male religious order. Jeffers is able to be more forthright with her criticism of hypocritical Christian slaveholders and her description of the Middle Passage:
Journey.
Let’s call it that.
Let’s lie to each other.
Not early descent into madness.
Naked travail among filth and rats.
And after evoking the sorrowful imagery of Wheatley’s mother in Africa speculating on the fate of her stolen daughter, Jeffers ends the poem by repeating the first two words of Wheatley’s poem and invoking the long American history of lies about the lives and humanity of enslaved peoples with two very casual but indicting lines:
‘Twas mercy.
You know the story—
how we’ve lied to each other.
Jeffers begins the poem with the capitalized deity Mercy of Wheatley’s homeland in Africa and her mother’s sunrise ritual, and ends the poem with the small mercy of America—the supposed mercy of Christian slaveholders. In all of the poems in this collection, Jeffers infuses Wheatley’s life with the ghosts of her African past; she paints deeply moving images of the struggles of a genius black child in a racist white world; and she offers biting censure of a long history of American lies.
[1] It was common at that time for poets to acquire funding through subscriptions prior to publication.
[2] Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. 1781.
[3] Erkkila, Betsy. “Phillis Wheatley and the Black American Revolution.” A Mixed Race: Ethnicity in Early America, edited by Frank Shuffelton. Oxford University Press, 1993, p. 225-240.
Loving, MaryCatherine. “Uncovering Subversion in Phillis Wheatley’s Signature Poem: “On being brought from AFRICA to AMERICA.” Journal of African American Studies, vol. 20, no. 1, 2016, p. 67-74.
[4] Neoclassical specifically refers to a rebirth of classicism, and in terms of poetry, to the authorial styles of ancient Greece and Rome, specifically those of the Augustus age of Rome including Horace, Virgil, and Ovid.
[5] https://owlcation.com/humanities/Neoclassical-Poetry-Definition-and-Characteristics-of-Neoclassical-Poetry#:~:text=Rationalism%20is%20the%20most%20essential,intellect%2C%20not%20fancy%20and%20imagination.
[6] Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe, vol. 12, no. 2, 2008, p. 1-14.
[7] Jeffers, Honorée Fanonne. The Age of Philis. Wesleyan University Press, 2020, p. 180.
[8] In heroic couplets, every set of two lines in the poem has strong end rhyme.
[9] Loving, Ibid.
[10] https://poems.com/poem/an-issue-of-mercy-1/
[11] Loving. Ibid, p. 71.