Phillis Wheatley and the Romantics

Preface

Preface This monograph extends the argument of Phillis Wheatley’s Poetics of Liberation : Backgrounds and Contexts, which holds that Wheatley is a largely misunderstood yet brilliant author. The objective of this and the earlier text is to ascertain the value of Wheatley’s works, along with their multi-layered meanings . Surprisingly, a productive and provocative result of acknowledging the value of Wheatley’s texts leads us to learn that, at least during the later years of the eighteenth and the early years of the nineteenth centuries, her poems prove to have been more appealing to many intellectuals in Great Britain and the Continent than they were to Early Americans. In short, Phillis Wheatley and the Romantics traces a heretofore unrecognized impact that certain of Wheatley’s texts, particularly her “Long Poem,” consisting of “On Recollection,” “Thoughts on the Works of Providence,” and “On Imagination,” exercised in the shaping of what we have come to call the several romanticisms. While not all authors named herein (e.g. Kant, Blumenbach, Imlay, and Clarkson) were romantics, certainly Wordsworth, Coleridge, DeQuincey, and Keats fall into this category. Never at any time do I presume in this tract to define romanticism. What I have attempted to demonstrate is how remarkably certain of Wheatley’s poems participate in what others, from Walter Jackson Bate and Francis Gallaway to Meyer Abrams and Peter Otto, have claimed the various romanticisms to have been. As well, an inevitable concomitant of this approach has been the discovery that, long before Edgar Allan Poe, an author from the American colonies enjoyed, for a significant time, a traceable persuasive moment upon several Europeans, especially Samuel Taylor Coleridge. What must be pointed out, beyond the connections to Coleridge and others, is the simple global direction. Rather than the timeworn notion that, before Poe, ideas crossed the Atlantic exclusively from Europe to the colonies, now we must open our minds to the unmistakable reality that the principles of Wheatley’s imagination poetics sailed from the New World to the Old, reversing the conventional wisdom that finds this transatlantic phenomenon to have been virtually impossible. x Preface ...