Personification

This chapter recalls Phillis Wheatley's metalyrical creation of a poetics of personal abstraction in the late eighteenth century. The chapter focuses on the poem that became “On Recollection,” in order to consider the many ways in which Wheatley's poetics saw the threat of Romantic apostrophe coming in the privileged eighteenth-century figure of personification. As the chapter highlights, the result of this figure in Wheatley's poetics is not animation or “mute responsiveness,” but silence, disintegration, vanishing, dissemination, scattering, disappearance, and refinement into evanescence. It is as if her personifying figures literalized and realized the dangers of figurative personhood that later Black Romantic poets perceived before they happened. Yet, as the chapter also reveals, that may be because the pathos that aligned Wheatley's poetics with her self-characterization as the “last and meanest of the rhyming train,” the poet and the poetry “all beautiful in woe,” influenced the Anglo-American Romantic poetics that later Black poets recast as inherently antiblack. Finally, the chapter investigates how Wheatley's poetics prefigured both Romanticism and the Black nineteenth-century critique of Romanticism that together formed American lyric.