Some of Wheatley's critics

• Thomas Jefferson (1782):

  Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry. Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry ... Religion, indeed, has produced Phyllis Whateley; but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism. The heroes of the Dunciad are to her, as Hercules to the author of that poem.
  

• William J. Long (1913):

  Here is not Zulu, but drawing-room English; not the wild, barbaric strain of march and camp and singing fire that stirs a man's instincts, but pious platitudes, colorless imitations of Pope, and some murmurs of a terrible theology ... she sings like a canary in a cage, a bird that forgets its native melody and imitates only what it hears.
  

• William H. Robinson (1984):

  Weaknesses, limitations, faults and all, Phillis could and did versify on a range of topics beyond Christian piety, and, to a limited extent, she worked beyond her favored heroic couplet.

Questions for discussion and papers

1. Wheatley is often seen as the first “African American” poetess. In your informed opinion, was she an “American” poet? How does she view herself in relation to America and England?
2. What uses does Wheatley make of the “African” identity of her poetic persona? How does the meaning of the poems change as the significance of “Africa” transforms from the literal to the metaphorical or allegorical?
3. Take one poem and give a close reading of the poem, investigating its various poetic elements with regard to content and form (visual qualities, aural qualities, etc.). What is the “tension” of the poem, what its “thesis”? How does it “work”?
4. Discuss to what extent Wheatley is a “Neo-Classical” poetess and to what extent she departs from neo-classical poetics. Pay particular attention here to “On Recollection” and “On Imagination.”
5. Often times, Wheatley is read as being largely complicit with the ideology that rationalized slavery. Is Wheatley ever critical of it?
6. In reference to the American Revolution, historians have often spoken of a “process” rather than an “event” that took place (and ended) in 1776. How does Wheatley make reference to the American Revolution and Revolutionary rhetoric (“liberty,” “equality,” etc.). To what extent does her poetry about the American Revolution bear out that it was not an “event” but rather a “process”?