Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt: Appropriating Milton in Early African American Literature

2. Phillis Wheatley’s Miltonic Journeys in Poems on Various Subjects

57 2 Phillis Wheatley’s Miltonic Journeys in Poems on Various subjects Wheatley ruptured literary history by disturbing the demonic grounds of Miltonic interpretation. It was she who first sang and published a collection of verse in the African American literary tradition by allusively echoing the words of John Milton to significant effect. Singing in subversive intertextual strains in her only volume of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, she defied post-Enlightenment ideas that conventionally regarded African Americans as intellectually inferior. Thomas Jefferson’s denigration of Wheatley’s poetic abilities as intellectually inferior in “Query XIV” of his Notes on the State of Virginia underscores what was culturally at stake relative to the publication of Poems. Espousing the racist notion that Poems was lacking in intellectual or creative merit, Jefferson recognized Wheatley’s verse as “below the dignity of criticism.”1 Ironically, his dismissive assessment of the slave poet presents an interpretive occasion to examine the fugitive poetics governing her subversive approach to disturbing the demonic grounds of Miltonic appropriation throughout her Poems. One of the interpoetic dignities of Poems ironically rests upon Wheatley’s sublunary explorations in Milton’s hell. Capturing a facet of this poetic artistry necessitates journeying to the demonic grounds of Paradise Lost. This hellish geography holds rhetorical 58 Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt significance for the advanced literacy Wheatley expresses throughout Poems. This performance of advanced literacy proves subversively artistic in the sense that Wheatley’s appropriated figures require readers to pay special attention to interpretive details. Astute readers can only gain fuller comprehension and appreciation of her artistic messages by pursuing hermeneutic investigations that go beneath the interpretive surface of literal meaning. Each successive intertextual engagement with Milton in these poems enriches meaning on implied and inferential levels. Interpoetic engagements of this type, according to Gregory Machacek, “encourage minute attention to verbal detail and mnemonic retention of such detail,” yielding aesthetic results that further dignify the beautiful science governing belated works.2 Throughout Poems, Wheatley repeatedly dignifies her literary art by completing and complicating Milton on the demonic grounds of hell, then launching herself from these subterranean depths in favor of heaven’s celestial spheres. Her sublunary navigations merit closer interpretive scrutiny than previous critics have accorded them because they underscore the degree to which Poems engages in diachronic and synchronic practices with Milton and his premier epic, Paradise Lost. More specifically, Wheatley’s sublunary navigations throughout her elegies constitute geographical flight patterns that allusively echo Milton in the form of a fugitive poetics. According to this interpoetic schema, Wheatley figuratively sets her sights on freedom from the melancholic vantage of physical enslavement. Completing and complicating Paradise Lost through these hellish ascensions of poetic adaptation ultimately empowers the enslaved poet to emancipate herself from the psychological chains of oppression and disempowerment. Her fugitive poetics also serves a political purpose bigger than her own self-interests. Apart from liberating herself, Wheatley’s Miltonic engagements assist her in elevating her people several rungs up the Great Chain of Being. In remastering the English language through Milton, Wheatley enlarges the interpretive terrain of his demonic grounds of contention while also distorting the epic writer’s meaning out of orthodox contexts. A pioneering forerunner of this neglected tradition in black letters, Wheatley bequeaths a distinct Miltonic legacy to subsequent African American writers, orators, and readers. Phillis Wheatley’s Miltonic Journeys 59 She not only sings, preaches, tests, and testifies with Milton to the Christian tune of his most cherished theme, liberty, she also achieves this ministry on demonic grounds but for messianic purposes of emancipatory uplift. Before she could speak intertextually on the demonic grounds of Milton’s hell, Wheatley would have to experience transatlantic translation via the Middle Passage. Captured and enslaved in Africa, then brought to America aboard the schooner, Phillis, Wheatley was purchased by John Wheatley of Boston in 1761. According to J. Saunders Redding, “she was judged to be in her seventh or eighth year and was educated under the Wheatley’s tutelage.”3 Blyden Jackson notes the Wheatleys “nourished the young prodigy’s precocity,” teaching her grammar, some astronomy and ancient history in addition to “the Bible and the leading Latin classics, particularly Virgil and Ovid.”4 Wheatley soon displayed a talent for writing poetry, further showcasing her ability to speak in the tongue of her double-voiced heritage. By 1772, she had written and compiled 20...