By Bill Gaither
Members gathered on February 16, 2025, for a stimulating and sometimes impassioned discussion of the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, an American contemporary of Jane Austen and the first African-American author to publish a book of poetry. The discussion was ably led by regional coordinator Sara Tavela, who also provided an introduction to the life and poetry of Wheatley. This was a Virtual Book Club meeting.
Born free in West Africa, Wheatley (ca. 1753 – 1784) was transported as a slave aboard the ship Phillis to Boston, Massachusetts, at the age of 7 or 8 years, where she was purchased by a wealthy merchant, John Wheatley, as a slave for his wife, Susanna. Taught to read and write by her master’s children, Wheatley read the poetry of Milton, Pope, and classical authors and at the age of 14 began to write poetry of her own in the Augustan manner. She gained fame in America from poems published in colonial periodicals, and at age 20 she was brought to London by Nathaniel Wheatley, where through the patronage of some prominent English figures she published Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), which contains 39 of her poems. She returned to Boston the same year and was manumitted; but tragic circumstances prevented the fulfillment of her poetic promise. Her proposal for a second volume of poetry did not gain backing, and she died in poverty of pneumonia at age 31.
Phillis Wheatley’s remarkable poetical accomplishments, so unusual in that age for a person of her race and station, made her an inspiration and a role model for Americans of all professions, but especially for artists and young women. During Wheatley’s career it was questioned whether a young black woman could actually have written such poetry as she had produced, until a board of eminent Bostonians examined her at length and validated her authorship. Her poetry was praised by Voltaire, by George Washington, and by John Paul Jones. Today she has been commemorated in the naming of many American women’s clubs, public schools, and college and civic buildings, including, as member Betty E. noted, the Phillis Wheatley Community Center in Greenville, SC, which offers programs for underserved communities.
As Sara noted, Joseph Rezek presented the program “Phillis Wheatley and her Books” as an event on Jane Austen & Co. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnYA4W454P8&t=4s).
The frontispiece of Wheatley’s Poems (2nd ed., 1773) is an engraving from a portrait of Wheatley by an unknown artist, who some scholars believe to have been Scipio Moorhead, a contemporary and a fellow Bostonian of Wheatley, to whom she addressed her poem, “To S. M., A Young African Painter” (see later on in this essay). This image is “the first known individual portrait of an American woman of African descent (Phyllis Wheatley on The Met’s website).
POETRY
The discussion focused on three of Wheatley’s better-known poems, all of which reference slavery.
1. Her best known poem, the short “On Being Brought from AFRICA to AMERICA,” is an ironic acknowledgement of God’s mercy in bringing the poet out of the paganism of her native Africa into the enlightened Christianity of slave-holding Boston. It concludes with a reminder to white Christians that African-Americans as well as whites can ascend to heaven:
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
“Their colour is a diabolic die.”
Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,
May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.
Although early literary critics saw the poem as obsequiously lending support to one of the leading arguments made by white colonists in support of the practice of slavery, that slaves had the benefit of being taught Christianity, later critics and many of our members found in the poem an intentional irony in the juxtaposition of the ideals of Christian redemption with the cruel practicalities of enslavement.
2. Wheatley’s poem addressed “To the Right Honourable WILLIAM, Earl of Dartmouth” casts the newly appointed English Secretary of State for the North American colonies as a champion of freedom, in hopes that he will ease the oppressive trade laws and the repressive political measures that the English Parliament had passed against the colonies. In a passage that anticipates language from the Declaration of Independence, our members found a subtle but distinct antislavery message in the implicit comparison of oppressed white colonists to enslaved African-Americans. This is how it feels to be enslaved!
No more, America, in mournful strain
Of wrongs, and grievance unredress’d complain,
No longer shall thou dread the iron chain,
Which wanton Tyranny with lawless hand
Had made, and with it meant t’ enslave the land.
A similar suggestion of the underlying commonality between oppressed colonists and enslaved African-Americans surfaces in a parenthetical passage in which the poet accounts for her own love of freedom by describing the forcible separation of herself as a child from her grieving parents:
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?
Such, such my case. And can I then but pray
Others may never feel tyrannic sway?
3. The poem “To S. M., A Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works” is addressed to Scipio Moorhead (see the description of the frontispiece of Wheatley’s Poems earlier in this essay). As members noted, the poet likens the craft of S. M. to the creative work of God:
When first thy pencil did those beauties give,
And breathing figures learnt from thee to live,
How did those prospects give my soul delight
A new creation rushing on my sight?
In a passage in which the poet imagines S. M. and herself pursuing their artistic work in heaven, members commented not only on the celebration of African-American community and African-American-produced art, but also on the liberation from the themes and conventions of historically white-dominated art:
There shall thy tongue in heav’nly murmurs flow,
And there my muse with heav’nly transport glow;
No more to tell of Damon’s tender sighs,
Or rising radiance of Aurora’s eyes,
For nobler themes demand a nobler strain,
And purer language on th’ ethereal plain.
4. Unfortunately time did not allow for members to comment on two other poems that were slated for discussion, “An Hymn to Morning” and “A Farewell to America. To Mrs. S. W.“
JANE AUSTEN AND PHILLIS WHEATLEY
Our members commented that in light of Jane Austen’s abolitionist sympathies, she may well have known of and read Phillis Wheatley’s poetry, although no positive evidence exists that she did so. As a profoundly expert user of irony, realism, and satire, Jane Austen would have appreciated the subtlety, the ironic social elements, and the humor in Phillis Wheatley’s poems. Members also noted a number of personal affinities between the two literary women: both loved books and loved to read; both experienced periods of economic hardship; both were marginalized women in male-dominated professions; and both died relatively young.
Up Next
In March, we’ll be exploring “wild nature” in Austen’s novels with our own Mary Jane Curry; you can learn more and register here. The details for April’s meeting are still being worked out and will be shared as soon as they’re ready. Our next book club will take place in May, and we’ll be reading a nonfiction selection to be determined by a vote in the March newsletter.