Archives: Anonymous Wheatley and the Archive in Plain Sight: A Tentative Attribution of Nine Published Poems, 1773–1775

When as part of my research into Wheatley I read extensively in contemporary newspapers and magazines that Wheatley and her circles might have read, I stumbled on a surprising, and striking, number of poems that read as if they not merely could be Wheatley's, but seem extremely likely to have been written by her. This essay presents those poems and makes the case for attribution in biographical and historical as well as lexical terms, and explores the implications of Wheatley having had especially strong incentives to publish some work anonymously, especially for a specific period after the publication of her book and her emancipation. In the wake of her fame and the politicization of slavery in the midst of the imperial controversy, anonymous and pseudonymous publication would have allowed her more control over the present and future of her writing than she had actually had before 1774 or possessed later, during the straitened literary and publishing scene of the Revolutionary War years.