Phillis Wheatley, First Poet Of A New Nation

We trace Phillis Wheatley’s journey from captivity to literary force, exploring how her poems speak to faith, freedom, and belonging during the American founding. We highlight her craft, the battle to be believed, and why her voice reframes the Revolution.

• capture in Africa and arrival in Boston 
• education in the Wheatley home and early brilliance 
• eulogy poems, public readings, and patronage 
• the publication controversy and authorship “trial” 
• patriotism and British identity in tension 
• faith shaping moral claims about slavery 
• “On Being Brought” and its paradoxes 
• letter to Samson Occom and “modern Egyptians” 
• why literary voices reframe founding politics 
• how to start reading: “To Maecenas” 
• Jefferson’s critique and Wheatley’s enduring merit

Check Out the Civic Literacy Curriculum!

School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership

Center for American Civics

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Topic Set
• 1:38 From Africa To Boston
• 4:02 Education And Early Brilliance
• 5:58 Public Readings And Eulogy Poems
• 8:08 Publication Battles And Validation
• 9:55 Patriotism, Faith, And Freedom
• 13:23 “On Being Brought” And Moral Tension
• 15:17 Why Wheatley Matters Today
• 17:11 Where To Start: “To Maecenas”

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:47

Welcome back to Physics in here. I am super excited to have Christian Burkhog back with us. And today we are talking about Phyllis Wheatley. So Dr. Burkog, Phyllis Wheatley is a poet. She is America's first African-American poet. So can you tell us a little bit about Phyllis Wheatley and her poems that go with like patriotism, religion, and race?

SPEAKER_01: 1:14

Absolutely. So Phyllis Wheatley is a fascinating figure in American history and kind of little studied, which is a shame. So I guess we should begin where we know her story begins. She's born in Africa, likely somewhere in the country of Guyana, although we can't actually know that for sure. And when she's about six or seven, again, we don't know for sure. She's kidnapped, enslaved, and sent over in the North American slave trade and lands in Boston, Massachusetts. She lands in Boston in 1761, and there happens to be a well-to-do family in Boston who is out seeking domestic work. This is the Wheatley family. They come and tour the enslaved people who were for sale and select Phyllis Wheatley. She actually, Phyllis was not her name. We have no idea what her original name was. She was named for the ship that brought her to Massachusetts, the Phyllis. So Phyllis Wheatley for the ship that brought her and for the family that bought her. So she is bought by the Wheatley family and from there moves into their household. And I don't want to be reductive here about the realities of slavery and the slave trade. No one is lucky to be a part of the slave trade. Absolutely, this is a horrible thing that happened to her. It did, however, happen that her circumstances within the Wheatley household were about as good as it could get for someone who was enslaved. So while she is enslaved, owned by people, it turns out that these people had a kind of particular affection for her. Early on, she shows a kind of intellectual aptitude, even though she speaks no English. And the matriarch of the family, Susanna Wheatley, assigns her young daughter, Mary, to tutor Phyllis, and she does and does a pretty darn good job. And that in part could be due to the fact that Phyllis Wheatley's kind of uncommonly brilliant. So she didn't speak a word of English by the time she arrived in America in 1761. By 1764, she is writing whole poems. And I'm not talking, you know, the cat jumped over the lazy dog or something. Nothing elementary about them. She's like using Alexander Pope, the great neoclassical poet, as a model for her own style of poetry, like really sophisticated stuff. And at this point, she's a preteen, early teenager. She just has the intellectual prowess to make this happen over a short period of time. And this is something of a novelty in Massachusetts society. There was a lot of, at this point, pseudoscience surrounding race and in particular racial inferiority for people who weren't white. And here she was as sort of living evidence that that was not true. So people in Massachusetts would come to the Wheatley household to hear her read poems. And she actually began something of a business, of course, not a business that ends up getting run on her behalf, but one in which Susanna Wheatley and the family keeps most of the money, writing eulogies, eulogy poems. And in fact, a large amount of her collective works are these eulogy poems. And they're really fascinating pieces of work. Of course, they're sophisticated and well constructed. But also, scholars like David Wallstriker have said like a lot of these poems that express grief actually do a very subtle job of conveying Wheatley's own grief at her sort of circumstances and the situation in which she lived in as an enslaved person, even though, as I mentioned, right, like, you know, she was well regarded by the family, by all accounts well taken care of, but at the same time knew she was not free. And this is a kind of present theme throughout all of her poems. She writes a poem for the Reverend George Whitfield, who was a uh first Great Awakening figure who came to Boston in the 1760s, 1770s, a couple of times. Uh, she writes a poem for him that ends up kind of exploding onto the scene in Boston. It gets published, and it also ends up making its way across the Atlantic to this woman, this countess, effectively, in Great Britain, who is wealthy and powerful and loved George Whitfield, and as a result, takes on Phyllis Wheatley as uh as a kind of patron, right? So she would pay for her to write poems. She eventually publishes one manuscript, poems on various subjects, religious and moral. And there's a lot of controversy about the publication of this manuscript. And one of the major controversies is that there are groups of publishers who reject the idea that she could have written it, that there was no way a black enslaved woman could have written poems of this caliber. So this event happens, which is known as the trial of Phyllis Wheatley, and it has been often sort of exacerbated or exaggerated in uh literature and various retellings, as basically a bunch of leaders in Massachusetts getting together to debate whether or not Phyllis Wheatley could have written this. And it turns out a number of these leaders sign a document on her behalf saying that, yes, indeed, we have seen this woman write poetry and we think that she wrote this. And one of the signatories is actually John Hancock. So just a little sort of sense of the kind of you know, circles of society in which she's embedded at this point. And within this volume of poems, there are a number of poems that deal with questions of freedom and of slavery. Wheatley viewed herself as a Bostonian first and foremost. She found herself deeply aggrieved by the wrongs she saw done to her community by the King of Great Britain, but also thought of herself as a British person too, as many Bostonians did. So there are some poems that sort of reflect these ongoing tensions. And then later poems, written as the revolution progresses, start to nod in more of the revolutionary direction. And later on, she would write poems uh for George Washington, you know, lauding him as this leader of the American Revolution. And then in the mix of all of this, there are also poems about her identity as an enslaved person. She has this poem on being brought to America from Africa, right? And this is a poem that's sometimes controversial because it also weaves in a lot of her religious background. She's a serious religious person. She's a serious Christian. And in part, she seems in some sections of the poem to be grateful for the opportunity to experience her Christian faith. But at the same time, at no point does she let anyone off the hook for the fact that like slavery is a true wrong. And we see this later echoed in her public life. She wrote this open letter to a Native American pastor, Samson Occam, where she describes the plight of enslaved Americans as equal to that of the ancient Hebrews. She refers to enslavers as our modern Egyptians. And this is, you know, really condemning speech. So this is always a sort of world in which she's living in. She's living in this transitional moment where she finds herself British and then American. She is enslaved in a time where people care a lot about liberty, and she's writing amidst all of this tension. She has a particular voice, but is only allowed to use it in particular ways. And we find that, you know, across the course of her poetry, she really finds her opportunities to express herself. Sometimes it's really subtle, but it's always there. And reading her poems really rewards rereading for that purpose.

SPEAKER_00: 9:10

Why would her poems be important for us to study and read now?

SPEAKER_01: 9:15

Well, in part because in any moment, important moment, the official political proceedings are not the only things that matter, and they're not the only things that tell us what's going on. Of course, they matter, right? Things like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and the Federalist Papers, these are all things that are important and that matter, but they are one piece of a really big moment that includes people like Phyllis Wheatley. And when we think about that moment or any moment, literature is always a part of the story. What people are writing and what people are reading and how all of that influences a cultural moment plays into all of this just as much as the political ideas. And in fact, there's plenty of political ideas to be found in literature generally and in Phyllis Wheatley specifically. So she just gives us this insight into a slightly different political perspective, not slightly different, right? Very different from any of the founders, right? This is an enslaved person who is writing, you know, politically charged poems during the founding. That's an interesting perspective. And it tells us something that we don't necessarily get if we keep ourselves to just sort of reading the big, you know, the big names or the big classics in the founding tradition. Of course, we should read them, but we should also keep in mind opportunities to explore other avenues in that moment and get a broader perspective of what's going on.

SPEAKER_00: 10:48

What are your favorite poems of Phyllis Wheatley's? Because I'm sure that there are like that might be a really hard question to answer. But if I'm somebody who is just learning about Phyllis Wheatley as a poet, where would you suggest that I start with her poetry?

SPEAKER_01: 11:05

So one of my favorite Phyllis Wheatley poems that I think is sort of the key to unlocking how she's operating on multiple different levels as a poet, as a woman, as an enslaved person, as someone who is trying to write about things that she really doesn't have a permission structure to write about yet. Her poem Tuma Sinus is one of my favorites. So Thomasinus comes kind of right in, actually, it thinks right at the beginning of her collection of poems, poems on various subjects, religious and moral. And in this poem, she's using tons of that classical imagery, right? She's always sort of borrowing from and you know, innovating on the neoclassical poets. So she's using references to ancient Greece, ancient Rome. And on its surface, this poem is meant to thank a patron to for giving her the opportunity to write and to write with a little bit of money coming her way. Not really her way, you know, in the way of the people who own her. But so she writes this poem of thanks to her patron, who she leaves unnamed. But she's got all of these really interesting little bits where she talks about being, you know, partially blessed by the muses, but not as much as she could be. And here these are kind of subtle allusions to her acknowledging the fact that she's not totally free in the way that the great classical poets were. The great classical poets, when they had patrons, it meant that they were completely free to write. And she, even though she has this great patron, doesn't necessarily have that. And at the end of the poem, she invokes the ancient playwright Terence, which is this really interesting connection. We don't know a ton about Terence. We have some of his plays, but we do know that Terence comes to Rome a slave. And not only that, he comes as a slave, most likely from North Africa. So Terence comes to Rome, his the person who owns him realizes that Terence has these kind of uncommon abilities of playwriting. And as a result, he frees him. And Terence is free to be a playwright. And he's eventually lost at sea. This is how he dies. And in there's like a period, a year-long period of mourning after his death. So this is Terence, right? An enslaved genius who is freed by merit of being enslaved. And it's really kind of clear that she's drawing this parallel to herself. Because not only was Terence enslaved, Terence was also potentially black, right? This is like someone who has more in common with her than just slavery. He has a racial connection potentially with her. So she's pointing this out as a way of, you know, turning the mirror around on her society. Here we have a brilliant enslaved playwright who's freed because he's recognized to be brilliant. And yet here's Phyllis Wheatley, none of the same things happen for her. So this is just a really interesting poem. It's packed with tons of these sorts of layers. So that's always one that I recognize to start with, just because I think it encapsulates so many of the things that she's so good at doing.

SPEAKER_00: 14:15

I just I think that her life is so amazing. And you know, when you talk about like we don't actually know what her real name was because she was named after the ship and she had a quote unquote good life, but she's also enslaved. Like there's so many, you know, contradictions in her life. When we look at her poems, what is one thing that you hope in general that people kind of get from her work?

SPEAKER_01: 14:45

I hope that people recognize the genuine artistic merit that's there because that is something Wheatley had to fight against for much of her life. Is one, the assumption that she didn't actually write the things that she wrote. And then once she could prove that she could write the things that she wrote, she also had to deal with people who would then say, Well, it's not that good, anyways. And one of these people was, in fact, Thomas Jefferson. In his notes on the state of Virginia, he's got this really, it's a really kind of profoundly ugly chunk of Jefferson. And there are ugly parts of Jefferson. There's ugly parts of all of us, and Jefferson had several things. But he's got this really ugly bit about how, you know, effectively Phyllis Wheatley is just junk, you know, and she's proof that non-white people can't write beautifully. And I think that's evidently wrong when you look at the ways that she's writing and the ways that she's weaving in influences from multiple different sources. Like I said, all these neoclassical influences, religious influences. She's also has this beautiful way of tying in some of her early memories of her life in Africa. So she's had this brand new synthesis of things that she's putting together and recognized formal poetic structures. And she truly is an excellent writer. So I hope they take away the value and the quality of the work, first and foremost, and that also people would dig deeply to find the things that may be hidden below the surface of the poems, right? That this is someone who was writing under less than ideal circumstances. And as a result, we need to look closely at the things that she's saying and assume that not everything she's saying sits on the surface, but that plenty more is to be found if we dig a little bit deeper.

unknown: 16:36

Dr.

SPEAKER_00: 16:37

Berghard, thank you so much for this. Phyllisley is so fascinating. And I actually like have pulled up a couple of her poems to read when we're done. So thank you so much for giving us, you know, this very brief. I'm sure we could do hours and hours on Phyllisley, but thank you for your expertise in this, and I'm really looking forward to our next one.

SPEAKER_01: 16:57

Thank you.