A
Voice of Her Own
Phillis Wheatley (ca. 1753-1784)
Poems on Various Subjects,
Religious and Moral. . .
Portrait facing
Title Page - Title Page
Page 2
London, 1773
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The gifted young black poet Phillis Wheatley (ca. 1753-1784) was
celebrated as "the extraordinary poetical genius" of colonial New
England even before this compilation of her poems was published
in September 1773. Not yet eight years old when she was brought
to America from Africa in 1761, Wheatley was educated by her mistress,
and her first poem was published in a Rhode Island newspaper when
she was only fourteen. Her pious elegies for prominent English and
colonial leaders became popular and were often reprinted in colonial
newspapers or as broadsides.
Wheatley's 1773 visit to London, ostensibly to improve her frail
condition, was cut short by her mistress' failing health. Although
she was entertained by William Legge, Earl of Dartmouth, the abolitionist
Grenville Sharpe, John Thornton, and Benjamin Franklin, Wheatley
did not meet her patron, Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon,
to whom she dedicated her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and
Moral.
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