Phillis Wheatley’s Miltonic Poetics by Paula Loscocco (review)

Paula Loscocco rightly observes that her Phillis Wheatley’s Miltonic Poetics is a pioneering study of “the obscured achievement that is Wheatley’s Miltonic poetics” (3). Given the capaciousness of Loscocco’s methodology, hers may be virtually the last word on the subject.

Loscocco’s study comes soon after the only other extended consideration of Milton’s possible influence on Wheatley, which Loscocco acknowledges: Reginald A. Wilburn devotes a chapter to the relationship in his Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt: Appropriating Milton in Early African American Literature (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2014). Loscocco and Wilburn both emphasize themes and subjects in Wheatley’s poetry that they believe echo Milton’s. Loscocco, however, does not reiterate Wilburn’s argument that Wheatley’s “poetic flights [in her elegies] of fancy from the depths of abject darkness to celestial light [are] rhetorical evidence of Miltonic remastery” (Wilburn 52). Nor does she rely, as Wilburn does, on the frequency of the syntactical reversals of nouns and adjectives in Wheatley’s poems as evidence of Miltonic influence (a frequency, one might note, that may be dictated more by the demands of the couplet form than by any debt to Milton).

Loscocco finds Milton’s influence everywhere in Wheatley’s poetry, especially in her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London, 1773), which she “advertise[d] as a miscellany in the tradition of Milton’s first poetical book.” Not only does “this literary kinship profoundly shape her volume’s structure, poetic groupings, and verses,” but Wheatley’s use of Milton “dramatize[s] the powerful and liberatory nature of a poetics uniquely suited to respond to the challenges and opportunities of Anglo-America’s historical authority, present traumas, and civil potential” (8).

Loscocco cites John Shawcross as her methodological model for discovering Milton’s influence in American literature: “Some evidence … is clear — allusions, quotations; some evidence can be inferred; and some may be only in the realm of similarity, a likeness in thought or expression, with no direct relationship, yet suggesting a possible precedence in a forgotten past” (38). In practice, however, Loscocco does not tell us her criteria for distinguishing among certain, probable, and possible instances of Miltonic influence on Wheatley’s poetry. And at times she begs some significant questions. For example, in her detailed discussion of the structure of Wheatley’s Poems, as well as in her comparison of it to Milton’s early Poems of Mr. John Milton, Both English and Latin (1646), she assumes that Wheatley controlled the organization of her Poems, despite the fact that the volume was published in London while Wheatley was returning to Boston. Although Loscocco’s assumption may be correct, the question needs to be addressed directly.

As should the question of why an enslaved author who was as strongly influenced by Milton’s Paradise Lost as Loscocco believes she was would choose to write almost exclusively in heroic couplets rather than Miltonic blank verse, especially in light of the association Milton makes between rhyme and tyrannical enslavement in his paragraph on “The Verse” that prefaces Paradise Lost. If Loscocco is correct to claim Wheatley’s affinity with Milton’s “liberatory poetics,” why would Wheatley embrace the poetic form that Milton condemns so vehemently? And is it merely coincidental that Wheatley’s only indisputable reference to Milton occurs in a poem published not in 1773 in her Poems, but in 1775, eighteen months after she was given a copy of his works during her trip to London?

Loscocco often assumes a Miltonic influence rather than considering a possible, even probable, common or alternative source. For example, Longinus goes unmentioned in her discussion of Wheatley’s use of the sublime. Milton’s use of the Bible, rather than the Bible directly, influences Wheatley, according to Loscocco. Thus, “[t]he exact phrase Wheatley uses, however, is not Paul’s ‘temple of the living God’ but Milton’s ‘living temples,’ which derives from a passage in Paradise Lost...