SOURCE: "Unprecedented Liberties: Re-reading Phillis Wheatley," MELUS, Vol. 18, No. 3, Fall, 1993, pp. 71-81.

[In the essay that follows, Flanzbaum identifies in Wheatley criticism a problematic mixture of apology for the supposed mediocrity of her poetry's literary merits, and an unreflective astonishment that she was able to produce poetry at all. Flanzbaum's own commentary examines the emancipatory bargain that allowed Wheatley to write and publish her work.]

The very fact that Phillis Wheatley, a black female slave, wrote at all has attracted more attention, prompted more theories, and inspired more heated debate than any line of her poetry ever has. From its very publication in 1773, Wheatley's book, Poems on Various Occasions, Religious and Moral, has served to signify more than itself. In the eighteenth century, Voltaire advertised her poetry as evidence of "genius on all parts of the earth" and the perfectibility of the Negro. When Thomas Jefferson claimed her writing proved that the Negro lacked imagination and was dull, tasteless, and anomalous, the tenor of the debate was set for over two centuries.¹

In addition, Wheatley's biography has achieved legendary status. The story of the little black girl, stolen from her parents and sold as a slave to the kind family that furnished her with pen and paper, taught her to read and write, and distinguished her at mealtimes by not permitting her to eat with the other slaves, is familiar to most of us. Also familiar is the account of what transpired in 1774 when her book first appeared. Afraid that no one would believe a female slave had actually written these poems, her publishers enlisted twelve of the most distinguished men in Boston—including John Hancock and the Reverend Charles Chauncey—to swear that she had.

After the publication of her book, which included this testimony of authenticity, Boston and London society paraded Wheatley from one genteel drawing room to another where she entertained, simply by reading her work aloud. She performed with charm and poise, assets that contributed to her growing fame. For those assembled to watch a young black female slave read poems that she had written, Wheatley seemed to be a miracle. Neither the content nor the quality of these poems was ever at issue: merely the fact that she had written them constituted a major event.

It is no tribute to literary scholarship that succeeding generations of critics did not substantially distance themselves from the response Wheatley's poetry elicited in those eighteenth-century drawing rooms. While contemporary scholarship no longer regards Wheatley as an anthropological test case, the seemingly debatable quality of her work juxtaposed to the fascinating details of her biography have continued to dominate the critic's attention. Even in the second half of the twentieth century, when scholarship begins to examine African American authors more fully, the actual substance and language of Wheatley's poetry has been overlooked in favor of a discussion of her historical significance.

I would argue that the reticence to bestow on Wheatley a legitimate place in the canon can best be perceived as a function of the critic's inability to find a constructive way in which to discuss the actual poetry itself. First, this essay will give a briefoverview of the twentieth century's misreading of her career; second, it will closely read several of Wheatley's poems in order to expose key themes that have been overlooked in the sociological and political mayhem generated by a black female slave having taken up the pen.

Benjamin Brawley's judgments in The Negro Genius: A New Appraisal of the Achievement of the Negro in Literature and the Fine Arts (1930) illustrate the classic pose of the Wheatley critic in the first half of the twentieth century. While Brawley first writes that Wheatley stands as a "shining example of Negro genius," he concludes that she "has historical significance far beyond what the intrinsic merit of her verses might warrant" (Brawley 19). Seven years later, Sterling Brown had similar reservations.² In his anthology, Negro Poetry and Drama, Brown calls her verses "polished and elegant," yet ultimately claims that they lack "any real emotion" and that Wheatley's position in American literature "remains one solely of curiosity" (Brown 6).

In 1966, Julian Mason furnishes a thoroughly ambivalent introduction to a first complete collection of Wheatley's work. Mason equivocates, claiming that while Wheatley has now become worthy of such concentration, "primarily because of current interest in Negro culture, the poems are not exceptional in quality. It is quite clear she is not a great poet." According to Mason, "these poems are of little interest, except historically, and they exhibit wretched syntax, trite devices, run-away rhythm and an overemphasis on religion" (xxvii).³

Similarly, Schomberg's defense of Wheatley's poetry smacks of defeat. "There was no great poetry in the eighteenth century, and Wheatley's poetry was as good as the best American poetry of her age," he wrote (Richmond 59). Characterizing Schomberg's statement and other previous criticism as well, Merle Richmond astutely observes that "there is a depressing element in the literary argument to the degree that it hinges on whether she was a non-poet or a mediocre one" (59).

Richmond's trenchant summary sheds light on the abiding problems in Wheatley's reception: first, that criticism of her work has been fraught with apology, reservation and equivocation; second, that the critic has set the terms "historical significance" and "intrinsic merit" in opposition to each other. Deciding that Wheatley's poems are mediocre yet nonetheless important to black literary culture, the critic acceded to an evaluative, rather than an interpretive, framework. Consequently, important aspects of Wheatley's poetry were left unexplored while critics debated whether or not the poetry even warranted close examination.

In the 1960s, the birth of the Black Aesthetic movement provided further obstacles to a positive reception of Wheatley. Designed to herald the virtues of a uniquely black art and establish positive models for the community, the Black Aesthetic movement dismissed-Wheatley. Because advocates of the Black Aesthetic could not read Wheatley as inspiring black identity or pride, their formulations almost triggered the demise of Wheatley studies. Addison Gayle, a prominent voice of the Black Aesthetic movement, wrote:

In the main, black writers have traveled the road of Phillis Wheatley. They have negated or falsified their racial experience in an attempt to transform the pragmatic of their everyday life into abstract formulae or theorem. She writes as a Negro reacting, not as a Negro.

(Gayle 409)⁴

In the twenty-five years that have passed since the height of the Black Aesthetic movement, and since Mason wrote his original introduction to Wheatley's work, critics have made some strides in the revitalization of the poet's reputation. In Phillis Wheatley in the Black American Beginnings, William Robinson recognizes recurrent pitfalls in the poet's reception. "Almost always," he writes, "her work was valued in terms of how it could be contorted into cultural anthropology" (24). His book corrects this error by furnishing a thorough account of Wheatley's biography and, more important, the historical contexts of many of the poems.

And yet, just as recent editions of the Norton Anthology of American Literature do include three of Wheatley's poems, the editors insist that her work is of historical significance only. They state, "She is a thoroughly conventional poetic talent, tied too strongly to Miltonic cadences—but given the stringencies of her time and her situation, it would be unrealistic to expect anything else" (Baym et al. 670).⁵ In the most recent edition of Random House's American Tradition in Literature, the editors write, after furnishing a conventional biographical sketch, "None of her poems is great. Their range and subject matter is small … and all too often her sentiments were conventional and her expression stilted" (155). Notably, the most recent Harper and Row anthology of American literature neither apologizes for, nor attempts to evaluate, Wheatley's work.⁶

Several recent articles on Wheatley have unveiled another avenue of inspection. Responding to the formulations of the Black Aesthetic, as well as to those who could only describe her work as historically significant, the first task for critics wishing to resurrect Wheatley's reputation in the eighties has been to find either the "race-consciousness" or the "intrinsic merit" in the poems. It is no coincidence that finding the race-consciousness in these poems has occurred simultaneously to finding the intrinsic merit: in order to read Wheatley's poetry as race-conscious, the critic has had to find a layer of ambiguity and density that has previously gone unrecognized.⁷ Because early African American writers could say only that which was permitted them by white culture, critics commonly hold that writing by blacks sings a dual song.⁸ To establish Wheatley as a legitimate presence in African-American letters, then, several contemporary critics have viewed Wheatley's texts as rife with ambiguity and irony.

Lynn Matson's article "Phillis Wheatley—Soul Sister," first published in 1972 and then reprinted in William Robinson's Critical Essays on Phillis Wheatley, typifies such an approach to Wheatley's work. Matson begins her essay by stating, "Wheatley has been condemned for more than a century by whites and blacks alike for failing to espouse in any way the plight of her race" (113). Clearly, she seeks to change this prevailing problem. About the poem, "To the Right Honourable Earl of Dartmouth," Matson writes, "Wheatley's use of double-meaning and ambiguity becomes more and more clear to the close reader." Matson quotes from "Dartmouth": "1, young in life, by seeming cruel fate / Was snatched from Afric's fancy'd happy seat." These personal references in the middle of the poem, Matson argues, provide a curious juxtaposition to Wheatley's apparent servility in the first stanza and actually make the poem "forceful and even angry" (Robinson 119).⁹

While such readings of Wheatley have supplied new routes of access into her poems, I would argue that their single-minded approach only partially reveals the issues at stake. In her essay, "Afro-American Poets—A Bio-Critical Survey," Gloria Hull has advanced the claim of Wheatley's ambiguity by suggesting that her poetry may be read for how it discloses a "shrewd accommodationist under Puritan petticoats" (Hull 167). Hull's argument should be well-noted; in fact, I would further Hull's thesis by arguing that Wheatley's ability to carve out a niche for herself in a hostile marketplace contributes to her distinction. Critics have been slow to observe that Wheatley's writing was currency for her—better than dollars would ever be to negotiate her way out of the hardships of slavery. And although Wheatley's occasional poems reinforced her position as slave by providing a service for her masters, they are also a handy means by which the poet usurps power from the white patriarchy. Indeed, Hull's remarks are quite suggestive, yet as seems typical of so much of Wheatley's reception, the critic does not put her theory to the test by offering a reading of the poems.

This essay will not contain a similar omission; as I have been suggesting, much still remains to be said about the language in the poems themselves. Re-reading Wheatley and her critics, one finds a wealth of unexplored topics, perhaps none more neglected—or more elucidating when tapped—than her recurring invocation of the muse. Critical commentary about Wheatley's use of this convention has been minimal. Scholars have concluded that she was only imitating the neo-classical writers given her to read, especially Milton and Pope. The persistent presence of a muse is generally interpreted as mere conformity to Augustan convention. I will argue, however, that far from being titular or merely imitative, Wheatley's invocation of the muse is the very means by which she usurps power for herself and claims a berth for her own thoughts, emotions and desires. And while some may claim that these functions accompany any appearance of the muse, when the muses bestow their power on a black female-slave, they transport Wheatley to a domain surprisingly free of restriction and previously forbidden.

As critics have noted, the preponderance of poems in Wheatley's first volume do not exhibit any such emancipatory tendencies; rather, they mark events in the white community while reinforcing the lessons of the Bible and the patriarchy. Poems like "To a Lady on her Remarkable Preservation in an Hurricane in North Carolina" or "To the Rev. Dr. Thomas Amory on Reading his Sermons on Daily Devotion, in which that Duty is Recommended and Assisted" reiterate the severe limitations placed on Wheatley's expression. Significantly, no version of the muse surfaces in these occasional poems. The muse materializes only when the ensuing poem has no designated audience, market function, or carefully planned route of reception. These poems offer no ostensible service to the white community. While one could argue that Wheatley's muse poems also reinforce patriarchal structures, they more persuasively treat issues of her own power, freedom and governance. Wheatley exploits the typical neo-classical convention of invoking the muse to cross boundaries; in fact, with the muse's help, she charts territory that her white master cannot violate.

The first poem in Wheatley's volume of 1773, entitled "To Maecenas," opens with an invocation to a muse whose very presence addresses the severity of Wheatley's material restraints as a black female slave. Wheatley must invoke the muse because she must get permission to speak. Far from existing solely as evidence of her mimicry of classical writers, for Wheatley, the gesture has an entirely different intent. This is more than a rhetorical flourish, more than a Miltonian projection of the internal imagination, more than a Popelike satire of eighteenth-century mores. Indeed, it should surprise no one that Wheatley addresses her muse as "Sire," or that she imagines him to be Maecenas.

Unlike the heavenly muse that we expect in classical poetry, Maecenas was not divine; he lived in 70 B.C. and was a wealthy friend of the Emperor Augustus. Known to dabble in the arts and liberally patronize the poets Horace and Virgil, Maecenas embodies a different kind of inspiration. Maecenas never sat invisible on any poet's shoulder; rather he provided quite discernible economic incentive. That she invokes this white, male, wealthy Roman as her muse instead of a celestial phantasm freshly descended from an Olympian hill betrays the materiality of Wheatley's needs.

In "To Maecenas," her owner's dominion over her physical body parallels the muse's control of her pen: in choosing the term "sire," Wheatley conflates these two rulers and suggests, not the imaginary, but the actual physical restraints to which she is subject. If the poet purports to be helpless without the authorization of her white male master and muse, this is quite literally true. Wheatley must first submit in order to clear a space for personal expression. First, she pleads with Maecenas tohelp her find her voice:

Great Sire of verse, before my mortal eyes
The lightning blaze across the vaulted skies
And as the thunder shakes the heav'nly plains
A deep-felt horror thrills through all my veins
With gentler strains demand thy graceful song
The lengthn'ning line moves languishing along.
When great Patroclus courts Achilles' aid
The grateful tribute of my tears is paid.
(49)

The reader of eighteenth-century literature is accustomed to such figurative appeals to the muse, but Wheatley's position as a slave dramatically alters the stakes. While the white male poet wonders whether inspiration will visit him, for Wheatley, the question of permission supplants that of inspiration and reinvigorates the neo-classical convention. Without her "Sire"'s consent, her work will never reach an audience, nor will she even have access to a pen. Unless she is responding to precise prompting from the white community, or producing poetic homilies, Wheatley cannot justify her desire to write.

By giving a white male the responsibility for her own creativity, Wheatley shrewdly disavows her own inclination and ability. In order not to transgress the social order of which she has been so forcefully made a part, her freedom, paradoxically, must be imposed upon her. Thus, in "To Maecenas" we see she can offer no resistance; two gods have teamed up to vanquish her. The result is "a lightning blaze across the skies"—a divine sign to which she must respond. Celestial gods appear and "heav'n quakes"; the muse, celestial and sublime, overpowers her. Yet in his thrall, she finds unprecedented liberty.

Such paradox incorporates the material constraints of Wheatley's expression. The muse, she claims, controls her, and to him, she must surrender. Wheatley acquires power by subjugating herself to these stronger forces. She admits that she will prostrate herself for her sire's leave—"But here I sit, and mourn a grov'ling mind" (50)—and imagines that if her sire abandons her she will be voiceless. The poet is "less happy" and "cannot raise the song / the faltering music dies upon her tongue." Wheatley, however, revives as she remembers Terence, the classical poet of African origin, that "all the choir inspir'd." Realizing that celestial muses may indeed one day attend her, and that such a visit "replenish'd Terence," encourages her to propose a deal with the Master: "Thy virtues, great Maecenas! shall be sung / In praise of him, from whom thy virtues sprung" (50).

These lines neatly describe the bargain Wheatley proposes. If the white patriarchy permits her to write, she will serve that culture. But this positioning of the muse also suggests she will serveherself; after all, Maecenas is not the only muse—according to classical mythology, he is not a muse at all. Once he gives her license, however, she, like Terence, may become a willing captive of the original nine. This deal that Wheatley strikes permits her "to snatch a laurel from thine honour'd dead / while you indulgent smile upon the deed" (51).

By getting permission from the white male "Sire" Maecenas, she clears a path for a visit from other, more heavenly muses. Wheatley's bifurcation of the muse in "To Maecenas" prepares the ground for her own meditations and locates clandestine sources of liberty. In one sense asking permission for her voice, "To Maecenas" also implies that in the world where divine muses reign, even her white masters will have to bow to a higher authority.

By submitting her master's power to the muse's power, Wheatley can render a universe where her imagination ranges unbridled. In "On Recollection" (76), Wheatley is carried away by the flight of her own memory—conveniently, there is a muse to blame for such a seditious assertion. Mneme, whom Wheatley addresses at the beginning of this poem, is the mother of all the muses; in Mneme's care, the poet can find "ample treasures and secret stores." Maecenas, her first muse of permission was male; now the muse has been restored to its classical female incarnation. The gentle, maternal Mneme draws Wheatley into a universe where she feels "high-raptured," "ventrous," playful and independent. Such liberties pervade Wheatley's poetic domain. The poet travels joyfully through "unbounded regions" of the mind. Through the vehicle of recollection and glad compliance to this "heavenly phantom," Wheatley issues a keen account of her own dominion and possessions. She states, "Of Recollection such the power enthroned / In every breast, and thus her power is own'd." If nothing else, Wheatley owns her own memory. Indeed, the language here—words like "unbounded" and "enthroned"—not only suggests that issues of enslavement and empowerment are not as far from Wheatley's consciousness as readers have usually maintained, but that through the appropriation of this classical convention, the poet gains access to her own agency.

In subsequent poems in the volume, Wheatley continues to couch her assertions of liberty in carefully negotiated terms of compliance; as always, Wheatley "obeys." In "An Hymn to the Morning," "Bright Aurora demands her song" (73). Wheatley takes care to say she is not free, only subjugated to a force more powerful than her master's. Surrendering to another female muse in "On Imagination," Wheatley describes her sovereign as an "Imperial queen … about whom all attest how potent is thine hand" (78). This poem too begins with the standard abdication: Wheatley professes impotence before the divine compulsion. It is not long, however, before Wheatley's imagery transforms slavery into freedom. The reader discovers that the "fetters" that have tied the poet's hands are only "silken," that Wheatley's mind is only in "soft captivity" andthat imagination carries her to a place beyond the oppressive restrictions of the universe. The poet soars from star to star, measures the skies, traverses new worlds. "Under Imagination's command," joy rushes on the heart. Wheatley happily succumbs to this celestial, mighty and altogether auspicious authority. Her soul is again "unbounded," "gay scenes arise," even the "frozen deeps break their iron chains." If the natural world can, under the influence of imagination, defeat the iron chain of winter's chill then, in a singular moment of heady liberty, Wheatley questions what other iron chains may be broken. "Such is thy power," Wheatley states.

At the end of "On Imagination," however, Wheatley recovers from this intoxication and realizes she must reluctantly leave "the pleasing views of Fancy." She discovers that "winter austere forbids her to aspire" and "northern tempests" are chilling the "tides of Fancy's flowing sea" (80). The flight of imagination is over; she can defeat neither nature nor bondage, and Wheatley—nothing if not a realist—acknowledges that her ascent into the heavens has been only temporary.

Back on the ground, Wheatley must continue to negotiate her way through the precarious avenues of her success. Just as no one understood better than Wheatley how much skillful indulgence of the white patriarchy could improve the material conditions of her existence, no one could have more reason to suspect that her celebrity and success were short-lived. The details of Wheatley's later life, much less frequently recounted than her rapid rise to fame, confirm the precarious nature of even the minimal personal control she eked out.

Given freedom by the Wheatleys at their deaths, abandoned by her husband, Wheatley launders clothes to survive, all the while frantically writing poetry to George Washington—hoping once again to be delivered from her economic enslavement by charming the white fathers with an occasional poem. Several years earlier she had sent a complimentary poem to Washington and he had responded enthusiastically, thanking her and inviting her to meet him. In that gracious response, he too understood the cultural restrictions imposed on Wheatley and phrased his note in a way that suggests that Wheatley's talents are not her own: He wrote, "I shall be happy to see a person so favored by the muses."

The second time Wheatley tried to engage Washington's affections, however, he did not respond. Perhaps Washington never saw the poems, or if he did, he never acknowledged them. Wheatley attracted no further publicity from securing such a distinguished audience. No longer a revelation, unable to successfully commodify herself again, she died penniless and forgotten.

By writing occasional poems, Wheatley manages to temporarily transcend the conditions of her bondage. Yet by enlisting the classical and academically sanctioned muse, Wheatley can liberateher own voice—if only for a short time. It is through her appropriation of this convention that the reader can glimpse another Wheatley, a previously undiscovered Wheatley—a poet for whom issues of self-governance and control are central—a black woman slave who cautiously but persistently tugs at the chains of her enslavement.

Notes

¹ See Henry Louis Gates's essay "Phillis Wheatley and the Nature of the Negro" (reprinted in Critical Essays on Phillis Wheatley) in which he explains that Wheatley's appearance in the eighteenth century provided Thomas Jefferson and others with evidence of the African's "potential for civilization." Gates explains how "her slim volume of verse" was "utilized as prima facie evidence in a fundamentally secular debate over the rights of man," and continues, "It would appear that, had Phillis Wheatley not published, another African slave's poetry would have served equally well as a refutation of certain commonly repeated assumptions about the nature of the Negro" (Robinson, Essays, 225).

² Brawley's The Negro Genius was republished in 1972, and Brown's anthology was reissued in 1969.

³ This quote is taken from Wheatley's Collected Works, edited by Julian Mason and published in 1966. In 1989, this collection was reissued and Mason wrote a new introduction. In this edition, Mason is no more enthusiastic about Wheatley's work than he had been earlier. He states, "She was not a great poet; but in her way, in her time, and in her locale, she was a fairly good writer of poems generally in imitation of the neoclassical mode made popular by Alexander Pope" (22).

⁴ Gayle viewed Wheatley's (and others') work as troublesome because it accepted "images and symbols of degradation" and proved that earlier black writers had been "seduced by their image makers" (Gayle 3). As Amiri Baraka exclaimed, black culture needed "Mirrors, beautiful mirrors!"

Although Gayle was one of the most vocal speakers for the Black Aesthetic movement, he was by no means the most critical of Wheatley. J. Saunders Redding wrote, "Some soft-headed whites and blacks have been led to believe that her poetry deserves to be considered as something more than a historical relic and everyone's been trying to make excuses for her ever since" (Gayle 71).

Wheatley's work now began to suffer an even more serious setback than it had earlier in the century: it was ignored. Referring to a ground-breaking anthology compiled in the late sixties, Dark Symphony, one critic observed, "one of the most recent and perhaps most devastating condemnations of Phillis Wheatley [was] shown by her exclusion from the … anthology by Negroes." Dark Symphony, edited by James Emanuel and Theodore L. Gross and published by the Free Press of New York, is no longer in print but is representative of the many literary anthologies in the late sixties that attempted to offer new ideals for African American literature.

Several anthologies of this period did include her. See, for instance, MacMillan's Black Writers of America (1972); yet I believe it would be misleading to describe the black literary anthology of this period as hospitable to Wheatley. Sample titles in these collections include "The Black Revolutionary Artist," "Revolutionary Nationalism," and "Reclaiming our Lost African Heritage.

⁵ It is not unusual that the editors of Norton designate Wheatley's poetry as historically significant only. Indeed, in the anthologization of colonial literature, the practice of including only what is conventionally perceived as "literary" is often waived. Including letters, diaries, logs of voyages is customary—this perhaps due to the scarcity of existing literature from that period, or as anthologists have justified their selections, a need for students to understand the basis for the emerging themes and trends in subsequent American literature. Yet the treatment that Wheatley receives breaks this pattern in one key way. Editors find, for instance, that William Bradford's diaries exhibit "both moral restiveness and a desire for worldly goods … the story is emblematic of the Puritan experience … we see in his account the first announcement of one of the richest themes in literature." The editors add: "The theme is present in Henry Adams and William Faulkner to name just a few" (Baym et al. 59). The description of Bradford's centrality to American literature contrasts sharply with the description of Wheatley's significance. The anthologists include her but do not establish Wheatley as a precursor to other American writers.

⁶ See The Harper Anthology of American Literature, (McQuade et al., 482).

⁷ Merle Richmond has written that "while white society was willing to accept elegies and panegyrics to its famous men from a slave poet, its tolerance of black wit at the expense of white sensibilities was dubious" (22).

⁸ Henry Louis Gates's work on "signifyin" has been instrumental here, reminding us that it would be grossly naive to ignore the material constrictions placed on Wheatley's expression. I refer the reader to Henry Louis Gates's essay "The Signifyin' Monkey," reprinted in Black Literature and Literary Theory, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. For an illuminating discussion of "signifyin"'s relation to the methodology of the New Criticism, see in particular 285-288.

⁹ Reading Wheatley's poetry to find this ambiguous, and thus angry, voice has become increasingly common. Betsy Erkkila's 1987 article, "Revolutionary Women" in Tulsa Studies relies heavily on such an approach. According to Erkkila, who quotes contemporary poet Naomi Long Madgett, Wheatley learned to sing "a dual song." Her poems are "loaded with irony … and ironic inflection.… Her words are protectively ambiguous" (Erkkila 202-4).

Works Cited

Adoff, Arnold. The Poetry of Black America. New York: Harper and Row, 1973.

Allen, William G. Wheatley, Banneker and Horton. Boston: P of Daniel Lang, 1849.

Baym, Gottesman, Holland, Kalstone, Murphy, et al., Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume I. "Introduction to Phillis Wheatley." New York: Norton P, 1984.

Brawley, Benjamin. The Negro Genius: A New Appraisal of the Achievement of the American Negro in the Fine Arts. New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1972.

Brown, Sterling. Negro Poetry and Drama and the Negro in American Fiction. New York: Athenaeum, 1972. Emmanuel, James, and Theodore Gross. eds. Dark Symphony. New York: Free P, 1968.

Erkkila, Betsy. "Revolutionary Women." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature. (Fall 1987) 6.2: 189-223.

Gates, Henry Louis Jr. "Phillis Wheatley and the Nature of the Negro" in Critical Essays on Phillis Wheatley, ed., William H. Robinson. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1982.

——. "Criticism in the Jungle" and "The Signifyin' Monkey" in Black Literature and Literary Theory. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Methuen P, 1984.

Gayle, Addison, Jr. "The Function of Black Literature at the Present Time," in The Black Aesthetic. Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1971.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1979.

Mason, Julian. The Poems of Phillis Wheatley: Revised and Enlarged. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1989.

Matson, R. Lynn. "Phillis Wheatley—Soul Sister?" in Critical Essayson Phillis Wheatley. Ed. William Robinson. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1982.

McQuade, Atwan, Banta, Kaplan, Minter, Tichi and Vendler. The Harper American Literature. New York: Harper and Row, 1987.

Perkins, Bradley, Beatty and Long. The American Tradition in Literature, Seventh Edition. New York: Random House, 1990.

Redding, J. Saunders. To Make a Poet Black. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1939.

Richmond, Merle. Bid the Vassal Soar. Washington D.C.: Howard U P, 1974.

Robinson, William, ed. Critical Essays on Phillis Wheatley. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1974.

——. Phillis Wheatley in the Black American Beginnings. Detroit: Broadside P, 1975.

Wheatley, Phillis. The Poems of Phillis Wheatley. Ed. Julian D. Mason, Jr. Rev. and eni. ed. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1989.