Phillis Wheatley Peters

Phillis Wheatley (Peters) (1753–1784) is one of the most important poets in early American literature and considered by many the mother of African American literature. As a young child, she may have flourished with her family in the largely Muslim Senegambia region of Africa where she would have been taught how to write and read Arabic. As is typical of the violence of the Atlantic slave trade, certainty about her early life’s exact geographical location is elusive. One of more than twelve million African persons trafficked to American during the slave trade, she endured the horrors of Middle Passage and was sold in Boston to the enslavers John and Susannah Wheatley. They renamed her Phillis after the ship that, the poet later wrote, she survived only by divine “mercy.” In the wake of this trauma, she nevertheless quickly acquired English, established friendships within the diasporic Black community in and beyond Boston, engaged and influenced a transatlantic evangelical culture and a transatlantic abolition movement, participated in defining the meaning of the American Revolution and its ideals, contributed to theological developments in Black Christianity, nurtured Black creative community, and cultivated a network of supporters to ensure the publication of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773)—the first published book of poems by an African American. She leveraged her success to gain freedom from the Wheatleys, and she married the free man John Peters, who, even after her untimely death in 1784, sought (though unsuccessfully) to have her second book of poems published. In addition to her published book, she also circulated her work widely in broadside, newspaper, and manuscript. She achieved international fame as a poet and abolitionist by age eighteen and left a literary and political legacy that is still being fully recovered. Though literary critics and creative writers once argued about her literary merits and supposed white-washed verse, these arguments have been superseded by work that details Wheatley’s complex and nuanced aesthetics and politics. Her relevance to scholars and students today has become more apparent than ever in large part through the past and current work of Black scholars and the field of Black studies.