“An underrated part of Wheatley’s story”

This year seeing the Sestercentennial of the publication of Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, we continue to see more discussion of her.

Here’s an extract of Deborah Kalb’s interview of David Waldstreicher, author of the new biography The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley:

Early on I decided I needed to read anything and everything Phillis Wheatley read, especially anything she referred to or I could be sure made an impression on her.

That meant getting myself an education in Greek and Roman classics that I never had previously (and which I now think of as a gift that Phillis gave me).

At a certain point, listening to the Fagles translation of Homer’s The Odyssey on a cassette tape in my old car while commuting, I realized that this Mediterranean world, replete with a traffic in women, long dangerous voyages, shipwrecks, and poets who tell the tale, may have seemed to her not so much ancient and strange as familiar.

As I put it eventually, “the classical revival provided her with a way of talking about her experience as an enslaved woman without talking about it directly.”

I knew that an underrated part of Wheatley’s story was that she propelled herself, much like a Homeric bard, into interactions with leading men of her day: Lord Dartmouth, Franklin, George Washington, leaders in Boston, and others she wrote poems about, such as the evangelist George Whitefield (the elegy she wrote after his death made her famous outside Massachusetts).

But the book really came together when I began to read the Boston newspapers. Knowing when she wrote various poems, I began to be able to plot her responses to events in real time.

Waldstreicher proposes that over a dozen poems in those newspapers might have been written by Wheatley.

Also recently, the Newport Historical Society shared Amelia Yeager’s essay on reading between the lines of Wheatley’s letters to Obour Tanner to learn more about that enslaved resident of Newport than sparse home-town records supply. Tanner was about the same age as Wheatley, also born in Africa and kidnapped across the ocean, and the two young women appear to have bonded quickly.

Wheatley died young, with her second book manuscript and any letters she’d saved soon lost. In contrast, Tanner lived for a long time and kept her letters from Wheatley. In 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, the Massachusetts Historical Society discussed Wheatley’s life and letters, and those documents are now part of the M.H.S.’s collection.