Wheatley, Phillis
Wheatley, Phillis( 1753?–84),as a black child from Africa was purchased into slavery by a Boston merchant, John Wheatley, who with his wife treated the girl almost as a daughter and encouraged her education and poetic talent. In 1773 they even sent her to England, accompanied by their son, and there, as previously in the colonies, her deportment, intelligence, and poetry were appreciated. Her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was published in London (1773) with a foreword by various distinguished Massachusetts men testifying that she indeed had the powers to write the poems signed by her, although Jefferson elsewhere declared her verse was beneath the dignity of criticism. It was conventional in the neoclassical mode of the time and concentrated on the matters cited in the book's subtitle.
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