On 18 October 1770 there appeared at Boston, Massachusetts, an advertisement for a broadside entitled An Elegiac Poem, On the Death of . . . George Whitefield. Whitefield was a charismatic evangelical preacher from England, who had died near Boston on the last day of September. The author of the poem, “Phillis, a servant girl, of 17 years of age, belonging to Mr. J. Wheatley,” is instantly recognisable to most of us as the famous Afro-American poet Phillis Wheatley. This was not her first poem, or even her first appearance in print. She had been writing poetry for about five years. In only two more years more her master was to make the first attempt to get together subscribers for a published collection of her poems. October dates resonate throughout Wheatley’s career. In only three more years, by October 1773, her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral were published at London in England. Meanwhile somebody (possibly Phillis but more likely the white Wheatley family) had already in 1770 discovered that a market existed for elegiac or commemorative poems by this brilliant young black girl to mark the deaths of prominent (white) citizens. Wheatley was, says Orlando, “already an accomplished poet, who moves with ease and confidence among the conventions of poetic diction and Christian mourning, her expression never stiff and never awkward.” Even if writing these poems was not her own idea, they brim with an energy, confidence, a sense of the value of life and a religious acceptance of death, which were all her own.
On 18 October 1773 Phillis Wheatley wrote in a letter about her own recent manumission, the end of her slavery and the beginning of her hard life as a free woman. On 30 October 1779, now married and answering to the name of Phillis Peters, she issued proposals for a second volume of poems, but she was unable to generate sufficient interest to go ahead.
This information is provided by Dr Isobel Grundy, University of Alberta, and comes from Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present, Cambridge University Press, by subscription: see http://orlando.cambridge.org .
