The Defense of Phillis Wheatley

As the first African-American woman to publish in the colonies, Phillis Wheatley and her poetry has been glorified and reviled. On one hand, she was an exemplar of the intellectual capabilities of enslaved Africans, the foremother of the African-American literary tradition and received her manumission after her publication of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). On the other hand, she has also been critiqued for being a poor imitator of Alexander Pope and his contemporaries, for not reflecting the black experience, and for writing in a neoclassical or "white" style. Intervening in this contentious conversation and gesturing toward new plateaus, John C. Shields crafts a fascinating portrait of a literary trailblazer. In Phillis Wheatley's Poetics of Liberation: Backgrounds and Contexts (Tennessee, 2008), Shields passionately defends Wheatley's legacy and argues that her use of neoclassicism, biblical themes, and techniques such as the heroic couplet are reflections of Wheatley's artistic and spiritual freedom. Through the course of six chapters, Shields incorporates eighteenth-century primary sources such as Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1787) and bears witness from the perspective of a scholar whose interest in Phillis Wheatley began as a doctoral candidate at the University of Tennessee and has sustained the entirety of his academic career. Thus, in Phillis Wheatley's Poetics of Liberation, archival research, the evolution of Wheatley Studies, and an examination of reception history culminate in Wheatley's lyrics giving voice to the diurnal concerns of disenfranchised colonists and for enslaved Africans.

From the beginning, Shields's introduction describes the social, cultural, and intellectual biases that haunted the reception and readings of Wheatley's poetry. However, instead of focusing upon the authentication of her authorship and validation of the poet's youthful gifts by white men such as John Erving, he begins with the commentary of Jefferson. As well as being a founding father of the United States of America and the nation's third president, he was also a slave owner. Subsequently, he was invested in proclaiming that the black race was incapable of producing a writer of verse and in undermining Wheatley's achievements. From Shields's vantage point, Jefferson is an antecedent of other misinformed and misguided perceptions of Wheatley and her work. Ironically, Jefferson's refusal to acknowledge her as an artist also becomes a compelling narrative thread in Poetics of Liberation. Thus, an insult is transformed into an indictment of the racial, gender, and class prejudices which contributed to years of devaluing Wheatley's literary contributions.

Consequently, in chapter 1, "Poetics of Liberation," Shields demonstrates Wheatley's ability to attain freedom through the written word. With her devotion to Christian values, mastery of neoclassicism, and artistic representation of hybrid cultural experiences in Africa, America, and Britain, she transcends the limitations of her social position. Furthermore, with the theoretical framework of Mortimer Adler's The Idea of Freedom, Shields explains the creative and moral beliefs that undergirded the young poet's autonomy.¹ Explicating a stanza of "On Imagination" (1773), he argues that creativity bestows upon Wheatley self-determination and authority to control her own art. Also, with Wheatley's epistle to her friend and mentor Samson Occom, Shields shows the poet's strains of freedom consisted of expressing a desire for liberation for all of humanity. Simultaneously, the critical eye of Shields and primary sources from the mind, heart, and hand of Wheatley convey her poetical and political consciousness.

In the second chapter, entitled "Wheatley Considered Intellectually Impoverished: The First 190 Years," Shields provides a selective history of commentary about Wheatley and her verse. He analyzes various misinterpretations of her poetry that neglect line by line explication to profound critiques by Alice Walker. This portion of the book illuminates the shifting critical terrain of Wheatley studies and the sensitive stakes of interpreting literature. Although this chapter enlightens readers about Wheatley's reception history, focusing upon misinterpretations of her life and work in this way impedes the increasingly valuable mission of recovering and examining marginalized writers. As we know from Shields's other work and many other articles, dissertations, and books, minority and...