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

Paula Loscocco’s Phillis Wheatley’s Miltonic Poetics is an ambitious work. Unlike any previous scholarship on the Revolutionary-era enslaved poet, Loscocco’s monograph offers a comprehensive reading of Wheatley’s 1773 Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral that “[u]nderstand[s] Wheatley’s POEMS as a self-contained whole with a single metapoetic narrative” on “the nature, limits, and possibilities of inspired song” (8, 4). Loscocco divides Wheatley’s collected poems into five (not at all self-evident) “thematic sections” that tell this metapoetical narrative. Section 1 posits a “Christian, African, and American ministerial authority” that is “radically destabilized” by elegies that fail to console the grieving; section 2 develops “a poetics of the imaginative and fanciful sublime” that can benefit Wheatley’s “educated and evangelical transatlantic community”; section 3 “bear[s] witness … to the pain and sorrow of transatlantic trauma and loss”; section 4 presents “poetical responses” to trauma that can provide consolation; and section 5 ends the collection “by pointing readers toward the rising possibility of ‘Britannia,’ an ideal vision of an inspired Anglo-America that she and her African, Native, and British American peers might imagine into being” (8–9). In Loscocco’s view, every poem in the collection plays an intricate and crucial role in telling Wheatley’s story 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’s synoptic analysis of Wheatley’s Poems depends on her argument that the writings of English poet John Milton constitute “the deep grammar of Wheatley’s poetics” (9). His influence is foundational; it shapes content, structure, methodology, and metapoetic narrative. Wheatley draws from Milton the concept of a poetic voice that initially cannot effectively address trauma, and then both consoles and provides a utopian vision of national belonging. She “uses” Milton “to develop a sublime, consolatory, and visionary poetics, one that enabled her to present herself to a splintered America in 1773 as Milton did to a divided England in 1645—as the voice of a potentially inclusive community engaged in the liberation project of national reformation” (13). Phillis Wheatley’s Miltonic Poetics positions itself in the vanguard of scholarship on Milton in America that also includes John Shawcross’s 2009 bibliographic database of Miltonic references in early American literature and Reginald Wilburn’s 2014 survey of Milton in African American literature. This scholarship challenges a general “animus against the idea of Milton in America,” and, more significantly, braves what Loscocco identifies as “a deep-seated critical unease” about tracing the influence of the Miltonic literary tradition on early American literature, and African American literature in particular (12–14). If we don’t read Wheatley in the context of Milton, according to Loscocco, we cannot adequately appreciate her literary achievements or calculate her importance to the American literary tradition as “the founding mother of emergent Anglo-American culture” (7).

The first of the book’s three chapters is devoted to an exploration of “multi-disciplinary resistance” to reading Milton in Wheatley (6). In this meticulously researched and argued chapter, the author reviews literary histories of seventeenth-century English poetry in early America, of Wheatley in a transatlantic context, and of Wheatley’s significant place in the culture of Revolutionary America in order to document a widespread and systematic neglect of Milton’s influence (12). Leonard Tennenhouse’s “notion of a diasporic community countering its centrifugal divisions with a centripetal turn to English literary culture” is crucial to Loscocco’s argument about Wheatley’s turn to Milton, but Tennenhouse himself “steer[s] clear” of Milton. And like literary histories of Milton in America, Tennenhouse’s narrative also omits discussion of Wheatley (16–17). Meanwhile, Wheatley scholars are under the sway of a “postcolonial suspicion” of Miltonic discourses rooted in an understanding of them “as imperial or metropolitan traditions that circumscribe, distort, silence, or ignore the oppositional and culturally distinct voices of colonial or provincial American writers, whether British, African, or...