Phillis Wheatley, The "Sable Muse"
Phillis Wheatley was born, according to existing
evidence, about 1753, in Senegal, West Africa. In 1761 she was brought
by slave traders to America, where she was bought in Boston as a house
servant for Susannah Wheatley, wife of Boston tailor John Wheatley.
Under the tutoring of the Wheatleys' daughter Mary, Phillis quickly
learned to read the Bible and to write, and by the age of thirteen she
displayed the precocious ability to compose poetry. She soon began to
read the works of such classical writers as Horace, Virgil, Ovid, and
the African born Terence, and in Boston she attracted a great deal of
attention, often asked to write public poems that recorded the events
of the time period.
Her first published poem appeared in 1767, and afterwards
much of her work began to appear in popular broadside sheets sold on
the crowded streets of Boston. During a trip to London with the
Wheatleys in 1773, a thirty-nine poem collection of hers was published
as Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, probably the
first book ever published by an African American. Almost immediately,
she became the rage of London, referred to by her admirers as the
"Sable Muse." During this time, Benjamin Franklin came to visit her.
The Lord Mayor of London presented her with a copy of Paradise Lost
, and even the great Voltaire read her poems and judged them to be
"very good English verse." Having achieved this critical success and
popularity in London, Wheatley returned to America, where she both
gained her freedom and, in April 1778, became the wife of John Peters,
another former slave who had just attained his own freedom. Her final
years, however, were dominated by illness, family disruptions, and the
deaths of her children, and the "Sable Muse" died in childbirth in
Boston on December 5, 1784. Despite her former success, upon her death
her life was characterized by obscure poverity and voluntary servitude.
The eighteenth century in America has been labelled the
Age of Reason, the age of Neoclassicism, and the Age of Enlightenment,
and it was a time defined by a new breed of scientists, religious
rationalists, and political philosophers. The ideas of these
individuals were rooted in the classical worlds of Greece and Rome, in
the Renaissance, and in the Protestant Reformation. American
literature during the period was largely modelled on the writing of
eighteenth century Englishmen, and Phillis Wheatley, who derived her
style, ideas, and regular couplets from Augustan English verse, was no
exception. Wheatley took her poetic subjects from the Bible, from
public events, and from the standared themes of Neoclassicism, but
despite the derivative nature of her work, it was nothing short of
extraordinary in a century when few women in the colonies could read
and write. Her literary achievements were particularly astonishing,
given that she was a slave with no formal education.
Though Phillis Wheatley was unquestionably the first
important African-American poet, only rarely do her poems display an
awareness of the problems associated with 'blackness.' Her apparent
concern was not for freedom from slavery but for the more philosophical
notion of 'abstract liberty.' Throughout her work her poetic voice
echoed the devout religion of her New England owners and thanked
Christians for bringing her to America. Her poem To The
University Of Cambridge, In New England, first published in
the aforementioned 1773 book Poems on Various Subjects, Religious
and Moral, represents a fine example of Wheatley's tendency to
reject her African roots in favor of her Christian upbringing in America.
In this poem, she referred to her birthplace as "The land of errors,
and Egyptian gloom" (line 4), and she praised God for bringing her
"safely from those dark abodes" (line 6).
It was the conventional wisdom in eighteenth century
New England that slavery brought the blessings of Christianity to
dark-skinned heathens, and Wheatley's To The University Of
Cambridge, In New England certainly reflects this belief. The
poem is also noteworthy for the simple fact that the author, an
informally educated slave, is addressing, in the work, the student body
of the most prestigious University in America. Given the vastly disparate
backgrounds of the poet and her intended audience in this poem, it is
certainly quite ironic that Wheatley would presume to be qualified to
advise a student of Cambridge (Harvard) on anything at all. That she
chose to take a decidedly Christian viewpoint is indicative of her
thematic tendency to root her poetic musings upon an unwavering,
Americanized, Christian viewpoint. That she is cognizant of the
incredible good fortune of those individuals lucky enough to
attend a University as prestigious as Harvard, a freedom she herself
was never granted, is reflected in the words, "Improve your privileges
while they stay" (line 21), and she was certainly qualified to remind
an elitist student body not to take their position for granted. I have
chosen to transcribe To The University Of Cambridge, In New
England as a fine example of Phillis Wheatley's poetry, then,
for three reasons: 1)The work reflects her propensity for basing her
poetic themes on Christian ideals, 2)At least three lines in the poem
refer to her tendency to reject her African roots as inferior to her
New England upbringing, and 3)The text is extremely ironic, given the
fact that a formally uneducated slave is therein attempting to advise a
highly educated student body.
Sources
Graphics Credits
The slave ship graphic was taken from http://dpls.dacc.wisc.edu/
slavedata/index.html.
Concise Anthology of American Literature, Fourth Edition.
General Editor: George McMichael, California State University, Hayward.
Copyright 1998 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. Simon & Schuster/A Viacom Company.
Upper Saddle River, New Jersey.
The Poems of Phillis Wheatley. James Mason, editor. Copyright
1966, 1989. The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC.
The engraving of Phillis Wheatley is attributed to Scipio Moorhead,
and was taken from the frontispiece of Poems on Various Subjects,
Religious and Moral. Phillis Wheatley. Printed for A. Bell, Bookseller, London,
and Sold by Messrs. Cox and Berry, King-Street, Boston. 1773.