"This book very conclusively debunks the over two-hundred-year-old conventional wisdom that Wheatley owes her poetic sensibilities to Alexander Pope. ... It wil

The first African American to publish a book on any subject, poet Phillis Wheatley (1753?-1784) has long been denigrated by literary critics who refused to beli

The prophetic poetry of slavery and its abolition During the pitched battle over slavery in the United States, Black writers—enslaved and free—allied themse

At the age of 19, Phillis Wheatley was the first black American poet to publish a book. Her elegies and odes offer fascinating glimpses of the beginnings of Afr

Phillis Wheatley, the African-born slave poet, is considered by many to be a pioneer of Anglo-American poetics. This study argues how in her 1773 POEMS, Wheatle