Poetry for Students, Volume 29

The poems to Julia are more erotic than these, and yet there is no fundamental difference in tone. Herrick is a poet of surfaces ...

On Being Brought from Africa to America Phillis Wheatley’s poem ‘‘On Being Brought from Africa to America’’ appeared in her 1773 ...

this poem against the whole body of Wheatley’s poems and letters. In context, it seems she felt that slavery was immoral and tha ...

African American studies in the twentieth cen- tury. Today, a handful of her poems are widely anthologized, but her place in Ame ...

confession of faith became proof to later readers that she had sold out, like an Uncle Tom, to her captors’ religious propaganda ...

bringing up Cain, she confronts the popular European idea that the black race sprang from Cain, who murdered his brother Abel an ...

Death and Christian Faith Religion was the main interest of Wheatley’s life, inseparable from her poetry and its themes. Over a ...

This style of poetry hardly appeals today because poets adhering to it strove to be objec- tive and used elaborate and decorous ...

Africans were brought over on slave ships, as was Wheatley, having been kidnapped or sold by other Africans, and were used for f ...

Lucy Terry and Jupiter Hammon, had printed individual poems before her. The American Revolution Against the unlikely backdrop of ...

assessments in his edited volumeCritical Essays on Phillis Wheatley. Wheatley’s English pub- lisher, Archibald Bell, for instanc ...

and its relation to American history, as well as to popular perceptions of the poet herself. Though lauded in her own day for ov ...

comfort in who she is, though she gives the credit to God for the blessing. Arthur P. Davis, writing inCritical Essays on Philli ...

There was no precedent for it. Nevertheless, Wheatley was a legitimate woman of learning and letters who consciously participate ...

others. Like them (the line seems to suggest), ‘‘OnceIredemption neither sought nor knew’’ (4; my emphasis). However, in the spe ...

than those uttered by the ‘‘some.’’ For example, while the worddieis clearly meant to refer to skin pigmentation, it also sugges ...

relies on biblical allusions to erase the difference between the races. ‘‘On Being Brought from Africa to America’’ (1773) has b ...

culturally) because God’s chosen are refined (purified, made spiritually white) through the afflictions that Christians and Negr ...

ground to self-empower their similar development of religious and cultural refinement. That there was an audience for her work i ...

Parks, Carole A., ‘‘Phillis Wheatley Comes Home,’’ in Black World, Vo. 23, No. 4, 1974, p. 95. Rigsby, Gregory, ‘‘Form and Conte ...