Essays on Phillis Wheatley

“Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land, Taught my benighted soul to understand That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too: Once I redemption neither sought nor knew. Some view our sable race with scornful eye, “Their colour is a diabolic die.” Remember,…

Phillis Wheatley has been criticized as both a writer and abolitionist because her writing style resembles her white contemporaries and she never explicitly denounces slavery in her work. However, Sondra O’Neale, in her article “A Slave’s Subtle War: Phillis Wheatley’s Use of Biblical Myth and…

Religion, especially Christianity, offers an outlet for Phillis Wheatley to communicate with and influence her audience. Religion was a subject that Wheatley could easily relate to with her audience considering the vast differences between herself and her audience. She was a former slave, a reformed…

Black history month is a month where African Americans are honored for achievements they have made or accomplished in U.S. history. On the other hand Black history month isn’t just a focus around the achievements or honorable moments that African Americans made, but also a…

In early America, to capture the feat of being female poet was extremely rare and was no easy task. Phyllis Wheatley and Emily Dickinson challenged what it meant to be a good poet, though for two completely different reasons. In Wheatley’s poetry, religious repetition and…

Freedom in Death: Wheatley’s Eulogies For a slave to write about slavery might be expected, but in using imagery of the slave trade as an overarching metaphor across her poems on death, Phillis Wheatley sets herself apart. Metaphor places both her journey to America and…

Close Reading of Phillis Wheatley’s Title Page Phillis Wheatley wrote the first ever published poetry book by an African American, during the time at which people in America were skeptical of a slave’s ability to read and write. The title page and the portrait of…

Paul Gilroy emphasizes the important role that the ship played during the African Slave Trade in The Black Atlantic. They were mobile elements that stood for the shifting spaces in between the fixed places that they connected. Accordingly they need to be thought of as…