Extract

In July 1761, John Wheatley, a prosperous Boston merchant, purchased an African girl as servant for his wife, Susanna. The child was named Phillis, probably after the vessel that brought her to America, and was surnamed after her owners. Thus, Phillis Wheatley came to a new world where she would achieve fame as a poet. The first African American to write a published book, Wheatley has been hailed by some as the founding mother of the African-American literary tradition but excoriated by others as not sufficiently proud of her blackness or militant enough in the struggle against slavery. The critical response to Wheatley's work has been divided from the beginning, often reflecting the assumptions, prejudices, and agendas of her readers. In the late twentieth century Wheatley began to receive her due as a poet of genuine, if modest, gifts, one whose accomplishment is all the more remarkable given the difficult circumstances of her short life. Scholarship of that time helps us to see that Wheatley's poetry reveals not only her profound faith and trust in God—what some would call otherworldly concerns—but also her commitment to the affairs of this world, centering, as one critic asserts, on the issue of spiritual and political freedom.