As the remarkable advertisement in The London Chronicle and The Morning Post and Daily Advertiser attests, Poems, the first book by an English-speaking black writer, went on sale the following day, while Wheatley was still at sea:

 

Dedicated, by Permission, to the Right Hon. the Countess of Huntingdon. This day, Sept. 11, will be published, Price Two Shillings, sewed, or Two Shillings and sixpence neatly bound, adorned with an elegant engraved like-ness of the Author. A Volume of POEMS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS: RELIGIOUS AND MORAL. By PHILLIS WHEATLEY, Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley, of Boston. London: Printed for A. Bell, Bookseller, Aldgate; and at Boston, for Messrs. Cox and Berry, in King Street. To the Public. The Book here proposed for publication displays perhaps one of the greatest instances of pure, unassisted genius, that the world ever produced. The Author is a native of Africa, and left not that dark part of the habitable system, till she was eight years old. She is now no more than nineteen, and many of the Poems were penned before she arrived at near that age.

They were wrote upon a variety of interesting subjects, and in a stile rather to have been expected from those who, a native genius, have had the happiness of a liberal education, than from one born in the wilds of Africa.

The writer while in England a few weeks since, was conversed with by many of the principal Nobility and Gentry of this Country, who have been signally distinguished for their learning and abilities, among whom was the Earl of Dartmouth, the late Lord Lyttelton, and others who unanimously expressed their amazement at the gifts with which infinite Wisdom has furnished her.

But the Publisher means not, in this advertisement, to deliver any peculiar eulogiums on the present publication; he rather desires to submit the striking beauties of its contents to the unabashed candour of the impartial public.

 

The “elegant engraved like-ness of the Author” featured in Bell’s advertisement had been added to Wheatley’s Poems as a frontispiece, at the urging of Huntingdon. It may have been designed in Boston, perhaps by Scipio Moorhead, a black artist to whom Wheatley addresses a poem, and engraved in London. Humbly dressed as a servant, the poet looks upward, as if seeking inspiration. Significantly, Wheatley is shown with a book, perhaps intended either to be her own Poems, or to indicate that hers was an educated as well as an inspired “native genius.” But perhaps as significantly, the frontispiece emphasizes Wheatley’s African heritage and her inferior social status by having her like-ness contained by an oval whose framing words appear to limit the extent of her gaze. The enslaved poet is euphemistically identified as “Phillis Wheatley Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley, of Boston.” The artistic quality of her frontispiece is as modest as her domestic status.

Wheatley’s Poems includes a Preface, a letter from John Wheatley to the publisher, and an “Attestation” by New England dignitaries, all intended to authorize and authenticate Phillis Wheatley’s achievement. She is conventionally described as an author who did not write for publication and who has agreed to have her poems printed “at the Importunity of many of her best, and most generous Friends.” Her volume’s title is reminiscent of other first books by poets, including Pope’s Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1717), Laurence Whyte’s Original Poems on Various Subjects, Serious, Moral, and Diverting (Dublin, 1742), her friend Mather Byles’s Poems on Several Occasions (Boston, 1744), her London acquaintance Thomas Gibbons’s Juvenalia: Poems on Various Subjects of Devotion and Virtue (London, 1750), George Roberts’s Juvenile Poems on Various Subjects (Limerick, 1763), and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Poems on Various Subjects (London, 1796), all titles appropriate for works intended to display a new poet’s talents in various forms of verse, such as the hymns, elegies, translations, philosophical poems, tales, and epyllions (short epics) found in Wheatley’s Poems. Several of the arguably anti-British poems advertised in the 1772 subscription proposal are not included in the 1773 collection published against a background of rapidly growing tensions between Britain and its North American colonies. And several of the occasional poems are given more general titles, better suited to a London audience unfamiliar with the particular Bostonians addressed or mentioned in them. Wheatley’s Poems became available in New England and Nova Scotia in early 1774.

Her opening poem, “To Maecenas,” appropriately thanks her unnamed patron, loosely imitating Classical models such as Virgil and Horace’s poems dedicated to Maecenas, the Roman politician and patron of the arts. Maecenas had long been proverbial as the greatest patron of poets. John Wheatley and Mather Byles have been suggested as Wheatley’s patron and thus the subject of the poem, but a more appropriate and likely candidate, despite her being female and Maecenas male, is the dedicatee of Poems: the Countess of Huntingdon. Only in the poem’s concluding stanza is “Maecenas” explicitly gendered male when addressed as “great Sir” and solicited for “paternal rays” of protection. But the reference to “Thames” in the stanza’s opening line clearly suggests that the dedicatee is English, and the closing request that “Maecenas” “defend my lays” echoes Wheatley’s comment in her July 27, 1773, letter to the Countess that through her patronage “my feeble efforts will be shielded from the severe trials of uppity Criticism.” As an aristocratic widow, Huntingdon had virtually all the authority and power of a male. With no classical models of female patrons available to her, Wheatley’s decision to address the Countess in the guise of a male would be understandable. Emphasizing in a footnote that the Classical Roman poet Terence “was an African by birth,” Wheatley implies that her “Maecenas” has enabled her to claim a place in the Western literary tradition, which has included Africans since its beginning:

 

The happier Terence all the choir inspir‘d,
His soul replenish’d, and his bosom fir’d;
But say, ye muses, why this partial grace,
To one alone of Afric’s sable race;
From age to age transmitting thus his name
With the first glory in the rolls of fame?

 

Indeed, her invocation of her African predecessor marks the poem’s turning point. Prior to naming Terence, the speaker of the poem is immobilized by her humility in the face of the epic achievements of Homer and Virgil:

 

But here I sit, and mourn a grov’ling mind,
That fain would mount, and ride upon the wind.

 

But I less happy, cannot raise the song,
The fault’ring music dies upon my tongue.

 

As an enslaved black woman poet entering the commercial publishing market, Wheatley’s interest in the reality of strength underlying apparent weakness, and in confidence beneath professed diffidence, may also account for her including in Poems the epyllion “Goliath of Gath,” whose title masks its true hero, David. Unlike the overly masculine “monster” Goliath, “[o]f fierce Deportment, and gigantic frame,” who mistakenly relies on his own physical strength, David is a relatively feminized hero, a “stripling,” “in youthful bloom,” who has “left the flow’ry meads,/And soft recesses of the sylvan shades,” and who relies on faith in God for his moral strength.