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

Until fairly recently, critical studies and anthologies of African American literature generally began with the 1830s and 1840s. Yet there was an active and liv

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

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