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Wheatley, Phillis
7 articles on Wheatley, Phillis
Wheatley, Phillis
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 1824 Includes: Bibliography(b. c. 1754; d. 5 December 1784),
American poet. Phillis Wheatley was one of America's first published poets, and the first African American woman to have her work published. Born in Africa and brought to America in 1761 when she was about seven years old, Phillis lived most of her life in Boston. Her birthplace was probably somewhere in Senegambia, and her first language was most likely Wolof, yet she mastered the English language and died a free woman and American patriot. An extraordinary individual, she has served as a controversial focus of debates about race ever since the eighteenth century. Philliswas the name of the slave ship that brought her to Boston, and Wheatley was the name of the family that purchased her. Arriving in rags, the girl found her life transformed in the household of her ...
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Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 1315 Includes: Bibliography1753?–1784
Poet who is considered by many to be the founder of African American literature.Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
So ends Phillis Wheatley's poem “On Being Brought From Africa to America” (1773). The poem is remarkable not only for the honest way it speaks about color prejudice among white Christians—never a polite subject, and certainly not one in 1773—but also for the singular achievements of the author. Wheatley wrote the original version of this poem in 1768, at age fourteen, seven years after she came to America as an African slave. At the time of its publication, she was just nineteen years old yet already an internationally celebrated poet whose admirers included ...
“Their colour is a diabolic dye.”
Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,
May be refined, and join the angelic train.
Read full articleWheatley, Phillis
Source: African American National Biography
Word Count: 2037 Includes: Further Reading(c. 1753–5 Dec. 1784), poet and cultivator of the epistolary writing style, was born in Gambia, Africa, probably along the fertile lowlands of the Gambia River. She was enslaved as a child of seven or eight and sold in Boston to John and Susanna Wheatley on 11 July 1761. The horrors of the Middle Passage likely contributed to her persistent trouble with asthma. The Wheatleys apparently named the girl, who had nothing but a piece of dirty carpet to conceal her nakedness, after the slaver, the Phillis, that transported her.The Wheatleys were more kindly toward Phillis than were most slaveowners of the time, permitting her to learn to read. The poet in Wheatley soon began to emerge. She published her first poem on 21 December 1765 in the Newport Mercurywhen she was about twelve. The poem,Much ...
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Source: Black Women in America, Second Edition
(b. c. 1753 ; d. 5 December 1784 ),
Revolutionary era poet and author. Phillis Wheatley was the first African American to publish a book and the second American woman to publish a book of poems ( Anne Bradstreet was the first). The volume was her collection Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral ( 1773 ).Because she herself identifies Gambia in “Phillis's Reply” as the land of her birth and because her slender facial features (long forehead, thin lips, well-defined cheekbones, and small nose) resemble those of the present-day Fulani, a people who occupied the region of the Gambia River during the eighteenth century, Phillis Wheatley was probably born of the Gambian Fulani. At the time of her purchase in Boston on or about ...
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Source: The Oxford Companion to United States History
Word Count: 432(ca. 1753–1784), African-American poet. Born in West Africa, Wheatley as a child of about eight was kidnapped and brought to Boston, where she was purchased by John Wheatley, a prosperous tailor, to be a servant for his wife, Susanna. In the pious household she was given the name Phillis and tutored in both English and Latin as well as the Bible. Admiring the English poets John Milton and Thomas Gray, Alexander Pope's translation of Homer, and the Latin poets Virgil and Ovid, she began to write verse very early; her first poem appeared in a newspaper in 1767. In the early 1770s, having published several of her poems as broadsides that were widely reprinted, she became something of a local celebrity. In 1773she traveled to London to seek support of her poetry, and while there she met manyBenjamin ...
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Source: The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature
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. ...
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Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature
Word Count: 2701(c. 1753–1784), the first African American and the second woman to publish a book in the colonies on any subject. Phillis Wheatley was born, by her own testimony, in Gambia, West Africa, about the year 1753. Unlike her African American contemporary, Venture Smith, who devoted over a third of his 1798 Narrative to a detailed recollection of his African homeland, Wheatley, who was seized and taken into slavery when seven or eight years of age, recalled her homeland to her white captors in considerably less detail. While we may never know what memories this remarkable poet and cultivator of the epistolary style shared of her native Africa with her most frequent correspondent and black soulmate, Obour Tanner, we do know that her public memories were at least three.She did recall the sight ofWhen ...
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