America

No poet in the mid-18th century, British or American, wrote without following the templates of the Neo-Classical giants. Thus Wheatley’s poetry—with its complex prosody, its lofty and erudite diction, and its allusive references to the myths of Antiquity—is conventional for her era. Despite being technically an American living in Boston, Wheatley drew on the poetic templates of the Neo-Classical poets in England whose works were popular and acclaimed. She became familiar with the works of John Dryden, John Milton, and Alexander Pope, as well as a host of Greek and Roman poets, most notably Ovid and Cicero. Wheatley displayed a confident command of how poetry should sound, how it should scan, and how it should look to conform to the conventions of the day.

However, as an enslaved person, Wheatley attracted both acclaim and skepticism for her work. It was initially difficult for her to find a publisher for her debut collection, and even after its release there were some who either derided her verse or expressed disbelief that an enslaved person could write poetry at all. She became something of a celebrity for a time, but she then struggled again to publish a second collection and sunk into poverty. In the decades after her death, her poetry continued to divide opinion: Some abolitionists would find an argument against slavery in her clear display of talent, while later Black scholars criticized what they regarded as Wheatley’s apparent acquiescence to her enslaved status. It was only more recently that scholars have re-evaluated their assessments of her life and work, uncovering more clues regarding her critical stance towards slavery. In this, Wheatley’s literary context reaches back to British Neo-Classical templates, but it anticipates more than a century later the assertion of pride and dignity that became the roots of the artistic renaissance among Black writers, painters, musicians, and visual artists.