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Concluding Remarks: Is Wheatley the Progenetrix of Romanticism? Among the many male authors Coleridge cites numbers Giordano Bruno, with whose martyrdom this monograph opened. Coleridge is impressed enough by Bruno, perhaps as much by his martyrdom as by what he has to say in celebration of imagination, to speak of him in Biographia several times. As for mention of Phillis Wheatley, we search in vain. Glaringly, Coleridge does not shrink from failing to name two other women whose work he “borrowed,” the Danish poet Frederica Brun and Mary (“Perdita”) Robinson, whom Coleridge knew and admired (see Fruman 27–29, 45). Indeed, it appears that the patriarchy of the era would not permit the naming of creative women. In its infinite wisdom, such a phenomenon as an original, thinking woman was, quite simply , an impossibility. This same reductive thinking has, of course, mitigated toward preventing proper recognition of our subject. In an Oxford Reader on Aesthetics, Linda Nochlin, a specialist on feminist art history, insists in “Women, Art, and Power,” that, particularly during the era of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a woman was considered to be “an object rather than a creator of art.” At that time, it was thought— by the patriarchy, of course—that it was patently ridiculous for a woman “to insert herself actively into the realm of history by means of work or engagement in political struggle” (72). Even so, Phillis Wheatley, having searched for and found her own agency as a poet (see Shields, Phillis Wheatley’s Poetics of Liberation passim), empowered herself by going so far as attempting to create herself an independent professional, with publication of her 1773 Poems. At the same time, Wheatley did in fact insert herself as a political figure in the American quest for freedom for everyone, regardless of race. We find Wheatley time after time enacting each of the tenets Iain McCalman asserts, in his “Introduction” to the cornucopia of information, 116 Concluding Remarks An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture, 1776–1832, which he serves as general editor, that “British romanticism . . . was nourished by . . . a transcendent ideal that elevated creative imagination, individual genius, and the inward self over the prosaic requirements of scribbling for a living” (2). Surely by this juncture we need not rehearse Wheatley’s elevation of imagination , her intellectual individualism ascertaining her genius, or her palpable turn inward to express her personal quest for the moments of freedom she boldly grants herself. We must quickly reiterate, nevertheless, that Wheatley arrives at these self-discoveries before 1776 (recall McCalman’s 1776–1832) and that she does soon the opposite side of the Pond. Interestingly enough, McCalman and his many contributors, while they do spend time with Kant and Schelling, give no space to Wheatley or, for that matter, to Bruno. As well, these same contributors speak on several occasions about the importance to British romanticism of Thomas Clarkson, Gilbert Imlay, and John Stedman, men who all assign at least some space to Phillis Wheatley! As we have observed repeatedly, Wheatley’s texts were in fairly broad circulation. Other male authors who exposed themselves to her texts include Voltaire, Blumenbach, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Grégoire, all of whom were probably joined by Kant, Stewart, and possibly Schleiermacher and Schelling. My point is simply to acknowledge that members of the patriarchy did in fact pay attention to texts by Phillis Wheatley, many of whom actually extolled the value of her texts, perhaps as evidence against targeting Africans for enslavement; but even so we find her again and again to be the subject of much attention. Such a staunch racist as Thomas Jefferson, for example , found himself forced to deal with her texts, if only to denigrate them and then to deny their authenticity. Inthelatest(ninth)editionofAGlossaryofLiteraryTerms,MeyerH.Abrams and Geoffrey G. Harpham assert that “Representative Romantic works are in fact poems of feelingful meditation which, although often stimulated by a natural phenomenon, are concerned with central human experience and problems” (214). Wheatley’s connections to the praxis of meditatio (“feelingful meditation”) have been enumerated, and her emphasis on the sun as perhaps the most immediately powerful suggestion of an even more power ful Creator is amply evident in her “Thoughts on the Works of Providence,” wherein the poet yearns for realization of the promise of freedom for all. Is Wheatley the Progenetrix of Romanticism? 117 Abrams and Harpham are careful to add that “Many writers,” among the romantics, “viewed a human being as...

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