Also: Phillis Wheatley: Biography
Critics have differed on the contribution of Phillis Wheatley's poetry to America's literary tradition. Most critics agree that the fact that a slave could write and publish poetry at that time and place is itself noteworthy in history. Some, including Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush, wrote their positive assessments of her poetry. Others, like Thomas Jefferson, dismissed her poetry's quality. Critics through the decades have also been split on the quality and importance of her poems.
What can be said is that the poems of Phillis Wheatley display a classical quality and restrained emotion. Many deal with pietistic Christian sentiments. In many, Wheatley uses classical mythology and ancient history as allusions, including many references to the muses as inspiring her poetry. She speaks to the white establishment, not to fellow slaves nor, really, for them. Her references to her own situation of enslavement are restrained.
Was Phillis Wheatley's restraint simply a matter of imitating the style of poets popular in that time? Or was it in large part because, in her role as a slave, Phillis Wheatley could not express herself freely? Is there an undertone of critique of slavery as an institution -- beyond the simple reality that her own writing proved that Africans and slaves could be educated and could produce at least passable writings? Certainly her situation was used by later abolitionists and Benjamin Rush in an anti-slavery essay written in her own lifetime to prove their case that education and training could prove useful, contrary to allegations of others.
In the published volume of her poems, there is that attestation of many prominent men that they are acquainted with her and her work. On the one hand, this emphasizes how unusual was her accomplishment, and how suspicious most people would be about its possibility. But at the same time, it emphasizes that she is known by these people -- an accomplishment in itself, which many of her readers could not themselves share.
Also in this volume, an engraving of Phillis Wheatley is included as a frontispiece. This emphasizes her color and, by her clothing, her servitude and her refinement and comfort. But it also shows a slave and woman at her desk, emphasizing that she can read and write. She is caught in a pose of contemplation -- perhaps listening for her muses -- but this also shows that she can think -- an accomplishment which some of her contemporaries would find scandalous to contemplate.
