Phillis Wheatley: Poems

"Let sin, that baneful evil to the soul/By you be shunned, nor once remit your guard/Suppress the deadly serpent in its egg/Ye blooming plants of human race divine/An Ethiop tells you ‘tis your greatest foe/Its transient sweetness turns to endless pain/And immense perdition sinks the soul."

These are the last seven lines of Phillis Wheatley's "To the University of Cambridge, in New England," a poem written in 1773. In the poem, the author is speaking to students about the importance of being a good Christian so that he may go to heaven.

I embarked upon the reading of Wheatley with an expectation of heavy abolitionist content, but I was mistaken. What I found instead in the selected readings was heavily RELIGIOUS content. In fact, every poem was loaded with projections of Wheatley's apparent pious character. As a non-Christian, I was quickly put off by the subject matter, but as an English major, I knew I must persist, and find a deeper appreciation for this trailblazing author, who was the first published African American writer, as well as the first published woman writer. I wonder if she knew how important she would become? She seemed to know the impact of words, or she wouldn't have boldly written to such prominent figures as George Washington... I wonder what her real intentions were. Did she wish to show the English that a black woman had the capacity to be an intellectual equal to the whites? It certainly seems so, according to some of the messages in her poetry, and in the fact that she chose audiences like Washington himself, or the students of such a prominent university.

Critic Robert Kendrick states that in Wheatley, the reader is presented with "a private, classical, subversive poet, on the one hand, and a public, Christian, assimilationist writer, on the other - two vastly different "Wheatleys" constructed within the same volume with competing agendas." I suppose I realized this as I explored further than the assigned readings and read some of the other poems in the Norton Anthology, but I still expected to find more of an abolitionist stance. I suppose at the time, it may have been impossible for her to burst onto the all-white literary scene with such a blatant message, so perhaps she held back. Perhaps on closer reading, I might find more clever, hidden messages in the lines that at first seemed benign.