Phillis Wheatley

One of America’s first poets, Phillis Wheatley was born in 1753 in Africa. She was captured by slave traders and brought to America where she was sold in July 1761 to the Wheatley family in Boston, Massachusetts. Her name (Phillis) was derived from the ship that brought her to America, “the Phillis.” Phillis Wheatley was America’s first black poet. Born in Senegal, Africa in 1753, she was kidnapped on a slave ship to Boston and sold at the age of seven to John and Susannah Wheatley of Boston as Mrs. Wheatley’s personal servant. Phillis, however, was soon accepted as a member of the family, and was raised and educated with the Wheatley’s other two children. Phillis became a Boston sensation after she wrote a poem on the death of the evangelical preacher George Whitefield in 1770. Three years later thirty-nine of her poems were published in London as “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.” It was the first book published by a black American.Phillis soon displayed her remarkable talents by learning to read and write English. At the age of twelve she was reading the Greek and Latin classics, and passages from the Bible. At thirteen she wrote her first poem.Most of Phillis Wheatley’s poems reflect her religious and classical New England upbringing. Writing in heroic couplets, many of her poems consist of elegies while others stress the theme of Christian salvation. Phillis Wheatley Although racial equality is not a theme to be found in Phillis Wheatley’s poetry, one allusion of injustice appears in one of her poems which appears below.