Complete Writings Read Online

Complete Writings

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

Acknowledgements

Dedication

PREFACE

POEMS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS.

EXTANT POEMS NOT PUBLISHED IN POEMS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS

VARIANTS OF POEMS PUBLISHED IN POEMS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS

LETTERS

VARIANT LETTERS

PROPOSALS FOR VOLUMES OF POETRY

NOTES

APPENDIX A

APPENDIX B

APPENDIX C

APPENDIX D

COMPLETE WRITINGS

Destined to become the first published woman of African descent, Phillis Wheatley was born around 1753 somewhere in West Africa, probably between present-day Gambia and Ghana. She was taken to Boston aboard the slave ship Phillis in 1761 and bought by John and Susanna Wheatley, who employed her as a domestic servant. Encouraged by her mistress, Phillis quickly became literate and began writing poetry that soon found its way into Boston newspapers.

Phillis Wheatley gained international recognition with her 1770 funeral elegy on the death of the evangelist George Whitefield, addressed to his English patron, Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, and published in London and Boston in 1771. By 1772 Wheatley had written enough poems to enable her to try to capitalize on her growing transatlantic reputation by producing a book of previously published and new works. Unable to find a publisher in Boston, Susanna and Phillis Wheatley successfully sought a London publisher and Huntingdon’s patronage.

Having spent several weeks in London with her master’s son in 1773 before the publication there of her Poems on Various Subjects: Religious and Moral, Phillis Wheatley returned to Boston to nurse her ailing mistress. Once there, she was soon freed, “at the desire of my friends in England.” Wheatley’s Poems earned the praise of fellow black writers Jupiter Hammon and Ignatius Sancho. Even Thomas Jefferson begrudgingly acknowledged her literary efforts.

The last years of Wheatley’s life were marked by personal and financial loss. On April 1, 1778, she married John Peters, a free black who subsequently changed occupations frequently and was often in debt. They had three children, who all died very young. Having failed to find a publisher for her proposed second volume of poems, Phillis Wheatley Peters died in poverty in Boston on December 5, 1784. She was buried in an unmarked grave with her youngest child on December 8.

Vincent Carretta is a professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. His publications include “The Snarling Muse”: Verbal and Visual Satire from Pope to Churchill (1983); George III and the Satirists from Hogarth to Byron (1990); and Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century (1996); Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings (1995); Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African (1998); and Quobna Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery and Other Writings (1999). Professor Carretta has also co-edited and contributed an essay on Equiano to “Genius in Bondage” (2001), a collection of essays on early English-speaking transatlantic writers of African descent.

BookishMall.com
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road,
Auckland 10, New Zealand

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

All rights reserved

CIP data available

eISBN : 978-1-440-67289-7

http://us.penguingroup.com

INTRODUCTION

Born around 1753 somewhere in west Africa, probably between present-day Gambia and Ghana, the little girl who would become Phillis Wheatley was brought to Boston, Massachusetts, on July 11, 1761, aboard the Phillis, a slave ship commanded by captain Peter Gwin and owned by Timothy Fitch. At the time, approximately one thousand of Boston’s more than fifteen thousand residents were slaves, with perhaps twenty free people of African descent in the total population. About seven or eight years old (her front teeth were missing), the sickly child was soon bought from the slave dealer John Avery by John Wheatley, a prosperous Boston merchant, for his wife, Susanna. Named after her new owners and the vessel that had brought her to America, Phillis Wheatley was taken to the Wheatley home at the corner of King Street and Makerel Lane (present-day State and Kilby Streets) to help the Wheatleys’ few other domestic slaves care for their mistress and master, as well as their eighteen-year-old twins, Mary and Nathaniel. The Wheatleys were members of the New South Congregational Church. Susanna was also an active supporter of the evangelical missions of the Calvinist Methodist minister George Whitefield and others. John was gradually turning over to his son the management of his real estate, warehouse, wharf, and wholesale businesses, and the London Packet, a three-masted schooner, used to trade between Boston and London.

Mainly through the tutelage of Mary Wheatley, the obviously precocious Phillis gained an extraordinary education for a woman of the time, and an unprecedented one for a female slave. According to John Wheatley, within sixteen months Phillis was proficient enough in the English language to be able to read even “the most difficult Parts of the Sacred Writings.” She was taught English and Classical literature (especially poetry), geography, and history, as well as the Bible, some Latin, and Christianity. Her poems and letters show that she became familiar with works by Alexander Pope (her principal poetic model for the use of heroic couplets), John Milton (her most admired modern poet), William Shenstone, Horace, Virgil, Ovid, Terence, and Homer (the last through Pope’s translations). None of Wheatley’s surviving writings, however, indicates a familiarity with Classical sources that could not have been gained from translations alone.

Phillis’s first known piece of writing, a now-lost letter to the Mohegan minister, Samson Occom, was written in 1765, when she was about twelve years old. A Wheatley family friend, Occom had gone with Nathaniel Whitaker, another minister, to England and Scotland in 1766 to raise money for the education of Occom’s fellow Native Americans in New England. The school that resulted from their efforts was Dartmouth College, named after William Legge, Earl of Dartmouth, another of Phillis’s correspondents and the subject of one of her poems. Her first published work, the poem “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin,” appeared on December 21, 1767, in a newspaper, the Newport Mercury, no doubt through the support and contacts of Susanna Wheatley. The poem’s combination of Christian piety and Classical allusions anticipates the themes and expression found in most of her subsequent verse. The subscription proposal for Phillis’s first volume of poetry indicates that she was composing poetry as early as 1765. The surviving variant versions of many of her poems demonstrate her desire to improve her verses and her ability to fit them for various audiences.