The Poems of Phillis Wheatley

This is the first book in the Academy of American Poetry's list of groundbreaking books, all of which I have decided to read (or reread). I couldn't find the title they actually list, but I found a thin paperback called The Poems of Phillis Wheatley With Letters and a Memoir that contains a reproduction of the book Wheatley published in 1773.

To be honest, these poems didn't do that much for me at first. They gallop along in almost unvarying iambic pentameter and rhyming couplets--but that sort of extremely formal poetry was more typical in 1773 than it is now. Wheatley wrote a lot of poems about death, particularly the death of children, which was creppily interesting. But in my notes I scribbled that I had "more questions than answers." Because Phillis Wheatley was a slave. And her poetry mostly seems rather--or very--oblivious to that fact.

You can read about Wheatley's life here, but basically she was sold into slavery at the age of 7. It became apparent to her mistress that she was very smart, and she was taught to read and allowed, even encouraged, to write. (The memoir notes that she was sometimes "allow[ed] to polish a table or dust an apartment" but she kept writing material nearby in case a line came to her.)

As I read more about Wheatley's life and read her poems, I kept wondering, would any of the poems reveal a slant? As in, would they ever comment on her situation at all? I was also wondering, as I read what the back cover of my book describes as "mostly elegies for the departed and odes to Christian salvation," is this really a groundbreaking book or is it more accurate to say that Phillis Wheatley was a groundbreaking poet? I guess that, being a poet so steeped in the contemporary confessional/lyric tradition, I was hoping for Wheatley's poems to criticize slavery or mourn her kidnapping or somehow otherwise acknowledge her astounding and rather atrocious personal situation. But that kind of personal focus was not particularly common for poems in 1773, and even if it had been, Wheatley's poems wouldn't have been published if she had done those things.

Browsing the Internet, I came across this June Jordan essay that somewhat takes on my questions and concerns. In it, she reimagines Wheatley's life, lingering on the extraordinary set of circumstances that led Wheatley to write at all, and to write the kinds of poems she did. She draws connections between Wheatley and the state of African American poetry (in the 80's, which I think is when she wrote the essay). Although I don't agree with every part of the essay, I love the poem at its end, which to me best states why Wheatley's book was likely chosen by AAP as the first groundbreaking book of American poetry. Here are its closing lines (you can read the whole thing if you follow the link to the essay above):

"They taught you to read but you learned how to write
Begging the universe into your eyes:
They dressed you in light but you dreamed
with the night.
From Africa singing of justice and grace,
Your early verse sweetens the fame of our Race."

In conclusion, I enjoyed learning about this poet. Wheatley's life, which was fascinating enough for its first 19 years, gets even more fascinating (and tragic) after her book was published, and her poems are the kind that you have to take one at a time, line by line. They are, for me, anyway, relatively difficult but satisfying to puzzle out. As I have gone back to them every now and then over the past week or so, I have found more and more lines that surprise me and draw me in. I hope to keep reading more of Wheatley even as I move on down my list.