SOURCE: "A Classic Case: Phillis Wheatley and Her Poetry," Early American Literature, Vol. 31, 1996, pp. 103-32.

[In the essay that follows, Watson examines the neoclassical blend of conventional diction and imagery in Wheatley's poetry. She argues that the innovative use of these elements becomes a "weapon of racial memory," despite the critical considerations of her work as imitative of or subordinate to Western literary traditions.]

I

Following the death of her mistress in 1774, the recently manumitted American colonial poet Phillis Wheatley wrote to philanthropist John Thornton concerning advice he had just given her regarding her future:

The world is a severe schoolmaster, for its frowns are less dang'rous than its smiles and flatteries … I attended, and found exactly true your thoughts on the behaviour of those who seem'd to respect me while under my mistresses patronage: you said right, for some of those have already put on a reserve …

You propose my returning to Africa … Upon my arrival, how like a Barbarian shou'd I look to the Natives; I can promise that my tongue shall be quiet / for a strong reason indeed / being an utter stranger to the language …¹

Wheatley's letter registers many things, not the least of which is her self-assertion and talent for eloquent and mannered diplomacy. But the letter also resonates with chagrin, almost to the point of bitterness. Thornton had been "exactly right," Wheatley writes, in predicting the false behavior of fair-weather friends—but the letter also suggests her clear grasp of Thornton's own betrayal. "You propose my returning to Africa …"; by preceding such a statement with a discussion of the way the most "dang'rous" treachery is masked by "smiles and flatteries," Wheatley implies that Thornton has perhaps not acted like a true friend himself in advising her to leave America and return to Africa. In giving such advice, Thornton exposed his opinion that Wheatley was not and never could be really at home in America—that her African heritage was an imperative and unchanging, essential quality.

Wheatley understands and rejects this assumption with a telling turn upon the conventional wisdom of the time: she notes "how like a Barbarian" an English speaking person would appear to the "Natives" of Africa. But significantly, it is language, not some notion about race or national origin, that Wheatley sees as defining an alien status; she declares that she must appear a "Barbarian" because she is "an utter stranger" to the indigenous language. Wheatley's "tongue shall be quiet" in Africa because she has laid claim to English as her native language, and as a published, neoclassic poet (her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was published in England in 1773) she sees herself as sharing in the western cultural heritage. For Wheatley, shared language implies a shared culture; by advising her to "return" to Africa, Thornton disregarded what Wheatley felt was her right to social and cultural kinship in the English speaking world.

Thornton's presumption that Wheatley really belonged in Africa was probably based almost entirely upon the fact that she had been kidnapped from her African home and forced into slavery in theAmerican colonies as a young child, either ignoring or rejecting the fact that Wheatley had since then assimilated the English language and western cultural tradition. With the best of intentions, and most likely convinced of the magnanimity of his gesture, Thornton gave Wheatley advice that exemplifies the kind of unexamined duplicity characteristic of the commentary Wheatley and her work would be the objects of from the publication of her first poem to the present.

When looking over the history of Wheatley's critical reception, one finds that virtually any non-derogatory comment on Wheatley's work has coincided with observations about the "unusual" mental abilities of the poet. Echoing Thornton's debilitating kindness, the racism inherent in such arguments reveals what a close connection there has always been between "critical denigration" and "critical acclaim" in Wheatley's case (Robinson, Beginnings 11).² Whether the commentator was inclined to read Wheatley's work through the lens of white supremacy or from a perspective that claimed to promote African American empowerment, the judgments that resulted have been surprisingly similar. For example, in 1913, William J. Long wrote:

Here is no Zulu, but drawing-room English; not the wild, barbaric strain of march and camp and singing fire that stirs a man's instincts, but pious platitudes, colorless imitations of Pope, and some murmurs of a terrible theology … she sings like a canary in a cage, a bird that forgets its native melody and imitates only what it hears.³

(in Robinson, Critical Essays 59)

Like Thornton's, Long's remarks reveal his assumptions about what it means to be an African American writer. Not only has he elided the many and diverse peoples of Africa under the signifier "Zulu," but Long makes it clear that, in his opinion, the "drawing-room English" of Wheatley's poetry constitutes the exact opposite of what it means, to him, to be African. And to be black means to be African—not assimilated, not even African American. It is not only the mannered qualities of Wheatley's neoclassic poetry that Long objects to, but what he calls its "colorless imitations"—the effort of the poet to situate herself within western tradition. That this effort is described by Long as pale, "colorless," only points up his presumption that all such poetry must be by definition white poetry.

Long's scathing indictment anticipates the kind of critical assessments that were most numerous during the Black Aesthetic movement of the 1960s. Because proponents of the Black Aesthetic movement, as Hilene Flanzbaum argues, "could not read Wheatley as inspiring black identity or pride," they "dismissed" Wheatley and her work (Flanzbaum 73). Relying upon skin color and national origin as the essential means of categorizing art, these critics saw Wheatley's assimilation of the eighteenth-century westernliterary tradition in much the same way that Long did—as a "colorless imitation." From the perspective of a Black aesthetic so conceived, Wheatley's absorption of a neoclassic, Anglo-European tradition seems a betrayal of her potential status as a representative African American artist. As John C. Shields has noted, "[Wheatley] and her works were (and continue to be) viewed as typical of eighteenth-century blacks who sold their blackness for a pottage of white acceptability" (xxvii).⁴

Wheatley scholars have bemoaned the limitations of a criticism that virtually ignores the poetry and focuses instead on the poet.⁵ For instance, William H. Robinson remarks that "[v]ery rarely was Phillis' poetry viewed for its intrinsic literary worth," noting that critics all too often "have more to say about Phillis' race than they do about her work" (Beginnings 23-24, 26). Similarly, Shields has more than once lamented the frequency of studies in which Wheatley's work is "subsumed in some socioanthropological argument," and has called for more attention to the explication and recovery of Wheatley's poetry and prose (Collected Works XXVii).⁶ Shields's "objective" in making such a call is, as he puts it, "to provoke serious interest in reading the fine poetry and prose of this harshly underrated black American poet" (Collected Works xxviii). Unfortunately, however, the writings of these same scholars persistently reveal a priori notions of Wheatley's work as second-rate poetry limited by its entrenchment in a neoclassic aesthetic—perspectives that replicate in part the assumptions pervasive in earlier "critical denigrations" of Wheatley's work. For instance, Robinson's writing suggests that he sees Wheatley's art as essentially inferior and flawed—he seldom fails to offer apologies or excuses for it.⁷ In his 1984 collection of her work, Robinson concludes:

Weaknesses, limitations, faults and all, Phillis could and did versify on a range of topics beyond Christian piety, and, to a limited extent, she worked beyond her favored heroic couplet.

([my emphasis] Writings 126)⁸

And for all Shields's assertions of noble "objectives" in collecting her poetry and prose,' he too concludes that Wheatley "is not a great poet" (Collected Works 267).

Perhaps more telling, though, Shields proposes that if "one makes the effort to see beyond the limitations of her sincere piety and her frequent dependence on … poetic diction, one is sure to discover in her works a fine mind" (270 [my emphasis]). There are two assumptions behind this statement that are troubling: first, Shields's comments suggest that Wheatley's "fine mind" is not immediately apparent in her work. More devastating, however, is hisassumption that for Wheatley, the use of "poetic diction" is by definition a "dependent" action. Certainly, Shields's use of the term underscores his own Romantic predisposition by invoking Wordsworth's condemnation of "poetic diction" in the "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads. Yet, as it is generally understood today, "poetic diction" also refers to the fundamental elements of poetry itself. Eric Rothstein argues simply that the "term 'poetic diction' applies to all poetry at any time, since the conventions of verse … differ from those of prose" (77). Thus, the contemporary context of Shields's comment implies that all of Wheatley's poetry, at any time, is "dependent"—that is, for Wheatley to write poetry in some way defines her as vulnerable and her art as contingent. Shields's contemporary inclination to read poetry through a post-Romantic lens is fundamentally a viewpoint that finds neoclassic phrasings baroque, insincere, and repetitive.

It is Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who discerns a large part of the problem: "much of the misreading of Wheatley must certainly arise from a blatant unfamiliarity with the conventions of neoclassical verse as well as with the various forms of the elegies she used" (in Robinson, Critical Essays 226).⁹ Furthermore, Gates argues persuasively that "the nature of Wheatley's poetry remains to be ascertained" (Critical Essays 228). Yet Gates is not exactly enthusiastic about Wheatley's poetry. Throughout this same article, Gates comments upon the artificial and secondary nature of her work. For example, he states that "'genius' was not [Wheatley's] province to occupy" since the "formal gap between Milton, Pope, Gray, Addison, Watts, and Wheatley … appear[s] to be a profound gap" (Critical Essays 224). Even as Gates argues that Wheatley's poetry is a hopeless imitation of the real neoclassic thing, he shows that she was highly innovative in the elegiac form, even noting that the "identification of the conventions of her elegies indicates that Wheatley was an 'imaginative' artist to a degree largely unrecognized in critical literature" (Critical Essays 229).¹⁰ The quotation marks that set off the word imaginative here are telling—they suggest that even in the face of his own evidence to the contrary, Gates will not allow that Wheatley could have been an inventive and skilled poet.

This same rhetoric is echoed by Mukhtar Ali Isani when he, too, examines unique aspects in Wheatley's use of the elegiac mode—when, for example, he makes the somewhat puzzling comment that Wheatley's elegies are "almost formulaic in pattern" ([my emphasis] Critical Essays 211).¹¹ As a neoclassic poet, Wheatley must produce her art under heavy formal constraints—such a poet finds aesthetic value in her ability to create art while adhering to "classic" conventions. But from a post-Romantic standpoint, the conventions of neoclassicism devolve into, in Isani's terms, "limited" or "stock" imagery (211). Because she presents her creations in neoclassic terms, Isani ends up arguing that Wheatley's elegiac innovations are actually a "weakening force to those of another day inclined to read her compositions principally as works of art"(211). Isani's comment begs this question: Are such critics really "inclined to read her compositions principally as works of art"? It appears that while they may abhor the denigration of Wheatley's work as "selling her blackness for a pottage of white acceptability," many critics are predisposed to denigrate her work as simply imitative, flawed, and/or passively subordinate to what they already consider an arcane and imitative literary tradition.

A vital problem with the entire range of Wheatley studies, something almost wholly unrecognized until quite recently, has been the way Wheatley or her poetry (or both) has been diminished by critics on both sides of the debate. Whether this entails seeing Wheatley herself as exemplary of what antislavery advocate Benjamin Rush called "African capacity," or her poetry as inherently imitative or flawed, the effects are the same: Wheatley's accomplishments, her life, and her poetry are flattened out—compressed and conventionalized in order to fit into preexisting categories.¹² What is needed is a critical perspective that embraces the complexities and paradoxes of Wheatley's case—that takes into account the fact that the realities of Wheatley's life are as inseparable from her poetry as are the dictates of neoclassic aesthetics, the language of Christian piety, the major texts of the western European literary tradition, and so on.

Sondra O'Neale has argued that "[a]ny evaluation of Phillis Wheatley must consider her status as a slave" (144). O'Neale's argument is based upon a commonsensical, yet cogent observation—that slaves did not have the freedom to voice their real opinions about their status in public; an observation that leads O'Neale to assume that Wheatley's art suggests at the very least two different levels of meaning. While this might seem to be rather a commonplace notion in the traditional study of literature, it in fact comprises a somewhat radical position in Wheatley studies. It has become something of a critical habit to read Wheatley's work as either a counterfeit poetry, lacking any real substance or depth, or as a sort of embellished memoir, to be read literally as a record of specific events and affective responses. To read Wheatley's poetry as metaphoric discourse is to take a new and mostly unmarked path, a recent "avenue of inspection," as Flanzbaum puts it, which requires a critic to "find a layer of ambiguity and density" in Wheatley's work "that has previously gone unrecognized" (74). It seems to me that the blinders that have kept Wheatley critics in the dark about the "nature" of her poetry have in large part been fashioned by the politics of canon formation combined with a twentieth-century predisposition to favor a Romantic aesthetic—a combination that has worked very well to obscure and even bury the most meaningful aspects of Wheatley's work.

The legacy of the Black Aesthetic movement, according to Flanzbaum, has been a reactionary insistence on finding evidence of "race-consciousness" or "intrinsic merit" in Wheatley's poems—terms that are usually, in practice, considered synonymous (74).Flanzbaum points out that the readings that have resulted from this practice have at times become "single-minded approaches which only partially reveal the issues at stake" (74). It appears that the kind of single-mindedness Flanzbaum observes most often accompanies a narrowed perspective that ignores or rejects one of two things: the aesthetic dictates of neoclassicism or the historical realities of Wheatley's life. O'Neale's and Flanzbaum's studies are only two examples of recent attempts to weigh aesthetic considerations against the cultural and historical realities Wheatley lived. If for no other reason, such arguments are justified by the well-documented fact that Phillis Wheatley went to great lengths to make both neoclassicism and the historical reality of her race and status equally manifest in her work. Francis Smith Foster maintains that Wheatley "encouraged" in her audience "racial awareness by repeatedly referring to her African heritage in her poems, calling attention to her 'sable race' and identifying herself as 'Afric's muse'" (33). And finally, Anita Silvers points out that Wheatley herself began the tradition of presenting her poetry as "remarkable for the reason of the history of its author" by actively marketing the volume as written by an African female slave (481).

However, the preferences of a post-Romantic critical sensibility can often limit the recovery work that such studies may do. For instance, O'Neale's analysis works at deciphering Biblical symbolism in Wheatley's poetry at the expense of not only formal considerations, but a great deal of content. O'Neale suggests her own a priori rejection of neoclassic aesthetics when she argues that Wheatley was "more than just" a neoclassic poet ([my emphasis] 157). Even if critics do not necessarily reject the formal requirements of Wheatley's neoclassic poetry, a lack of familiarity with the contexts of neoclassic conventions can create misunderstandings and misreadings. In Flanzbaum's valuable "re-reading" of Wheatley's poem "To Maecenas," for example, she mistakes Wheatley's phrase "Great Sire of verse" in the second stanza as addressing Maecenas, although the subject of the entire stanza is actually Homer, a detail that an intertextual analysis of the poem can reveal.¹³

Carolivia Herron consciously seeks to avoid these pit-falls in her work, studying carefully the textual connections that African American writing has to western literary tradition. Aware that when considered beside the works of the Anglo-European tradition, the literary work of African Americans is automatically and arbitrarily assigned a secondary rather than a primary status, Herron argues that "studies of relationships between black writings and prior works in western tradition have been used almost exclusively to affirm that Afro-American literature lacks creativity" (279). Herron's remarks suggest that the interpretation of many African American writings has been limited by a prevailing notion that there can be no case in which an African American writer may assimilate the works of western tradition without being annihilated by them. Fears that the acknowledgement and study of relationships between African American writings and the western Anglo-Europeantradition will be "converted into discussions of black intellectual dependency on white accomplishment" are symptomatic of the assumption of the absolute power of tradition; the very notion of "black intellectual dependency" relies upon an unquestioning assumption of the monolithic force of a white tradition (Herron 279).

The history of Wheatley's literary reception brings into sharp focus certain critical matters: first, a priori assumptions about Wheatley's race and status propose a specific and limited relation to the Anglo-European literary tradition—a relation defined as secondary, powerless, and submissive. Secondly, those notions of submission and powerlessness imply that any engagement with the tradition is equivalent to absorption by it, hence, assertions of imitation even in the face of transformation. This further suggests that, as Silvers argues, tradition "monopolizes innovation" and "forecloses" on "artistic futures" (479).

However, engaging the received tradition need not necessarily mean submission to it. Julia Kristeva, arguably the first theorist of intertextuality, claimed that intertextual writing is inherently a "rebellious" and "subversive discourse"—that it is writing that is "murderous, cynical, and revolutionary in the sense of dialectical transformation" (79, 80). The term 'intertextuality' has come to be used to signify a range of textual functions that have been commonplace in the practice of literary interpretation for centuries. Most theorists conceive of intertextuality as an "intersection of textual surfaces"—a dynamic convergence that is not restricted merely to alluding to past writings, but is described by Kristeva as a "dialogue among several writings"—an exchange between the author, the reader, and the "contemporary or earlier cultural context" (Kristeva 65). But such highly metaphoric conceptual frames are not easy to pin down in practice—it becomes very difficult to distinguish "intertextuality" so defined from textuality in general, and I want to use this term in a fairly pragmatic and restricted way. So, for the purposes of this discussion, I will use intertextuality in general to mean texts that refer to other texts, and specifically, texts that refer and allude to the texts of the canonical, Anglo-European tradition. Even within this limited frame, though, it seems to me that the mechanisms of intertextuality (i.e., reference and allusion) can and do retain Kristeva's revolutionary and transformative definitions.

If one assumes artists are consumed by tradition, however, intertextuality as Kristeva defined it—that is, as "dialectical transformation"—could not be possible. In other words, no artist could ever absorb a tradition, nor could any artist act within that tradition as a mechanism for change; such a position suggests that artists are incapable of innovation because the irresistible force of tradition simply rolls over them. Yet clearly, artistic innovation is not only possible but common, even within an aesthetic that defines itself in terms of tradition; one mechanismfor such change in literary traditions is intertextuality. Kristeva points out that intertextuality is the "absorption and transformation" of other texts—that it is the function through which "poetic language is read as at least double" (66). What I am trying to suggest, then, is that in refusing to acknowledge the multiple layers of Wheatley's neoclassic poetic language, critics have refused to acknowledge her intertextuality, instead deeming her interaction with Anglo-European authors "imitative."

To the post-Romantic reader of poetry, the word "imitation" is akin to "bogus"; when used to describe poetry it suggests something like a cheap copy of a superior, "original" artistic expression. But to eighteenth-century readers and writers, imitation was a complex artistic endeavor; as Rothstein puts it, "the use of the past" was at its core a social action, as well as a means by which an artist shared in the power and cultural currency of the western literary classics. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, Rothstein argues, neoclassic poets began to "renew a compact between poet and reader" that called for "the reader to join the [poetic] speaker in looking and/or feeling, so as to demand a certain social kinship" (100). Furthermore, an artistic relationship with the classics insured this "compact" by "engaging the writer and reader in a shared discipline, a shared cultural form" (100). Rothstein's point is that the practice of eighteenth-century poetry is not imitation in the sense of "idolatry," but rather "a considered and flexible employment of the past in the interests of the present" (91).

So a dilemma appears when one considers the notion of imitation in this context. As twentieth-century readers understand imitation, it is directly opposed to the innovative possibilities of intertextuality. However, when considered in the way eighteenth-century writers and readers understood it, imitation is closely analogous to Kristeva's concept of intertextuality as absorption and transformation. The changes in the way that making artistic use of tradition is understood follow closely the history of changes in aesthetics in western culture—as readers have become disengaged from the aesthetics of neoclassicism, we have lost the thread of what it meant to these artists to make use of the past. It seems to me that this thread may be taken up once again through intertextual criticism, and used to reestablish, or at least to begin to understand, the "nature" of poetry like Wheatley's. For in disregarding Wheatley's intertextual work, critics have refused to value not only her connection to the Anglo-European literary tradition, but her control and creative manipulation of its precepts—in short, her active transformation of it.

II

Thy mighty Scholiast, whose unweary'd pains
Made Horace dull, and humbled Milton's strains.
Turn what they will to Verse, their toil is vain,
Critics like me shall make it Prose again.¹⁴

The name of Alexander Pope time and again emerges in discussions about Wheatley and her poetry. Biographical information alone suggests that Pope's works, including his translation of Homer's Iliad, are major intertexts of Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects. For example, in her 1838 memoir, Margaretta Odell writes that "Pope's Homer seems to have been a great favorite with [Wheatley]" (20). Wheatley's extant correspondence documents the fact that she took great pride in owning "the whole of Mr. Pope's Works."¹⁵ But the connection between Wheatley and Pope is still readily apparent without these details, because Poems on Various Subjects is replete with direct allusions to Pope's work, as many critics have noted over the years.¹⁶

One cannot help but be struck by the fact that Pope's translation of The Iliad has had almost as uneven a critical reception as Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects. To sum up briefly, critics have long been divided about Pope's translation because it is realized in English neoclassic verse. It seems that in order to create what he conceived. of as a "Homeric" poetry in the English language, Pope was forced to take certain liberties with his translation. Scholars like Richard Bentley were outraged over Pope's translation from the moment of its publication because of the extent of those liberties; other critics, however, have found the craft and vision of Pope's poetry more faithful to the original than any prose translation could be.¹⁷ The wide gap between these two perspectives has allowed for a variety of interesting middle-ground opinions as well. For instance, in his 1899 edition of Pope's translation, William C. Wilkinson argued that "Pope's Iliad is brilliant; but it is too brilliant … [the reader is] surfeited with an excess of art" (xi).

The problem, however, was neither an "excess" nor even a shortage of "art," but rather a disagreement over the big picture: Pope felt that scholars like Bentley had failed to grasp it; that they had in effect cut up Homer's Iliad in little pieces, destroying its heart by trying to capture each word in translation. In the epigraph that opens this section, Pope attempts to get that same point across. In these four lines from The Dunciad, the poetic speaker is Richard Bentley. A contemporary of Pope's, Bentley was a renowned British classical scholar who was much criticized by Pope for his "unwieldy erudition" (Barnard 319). Long before those criticisms appeared publicly, however, Pope reportedly asked for Bentley's opinion of his translation of Homer, a question to which Bentley is said to have replied "it is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope; but you must not call it Homer" (Mason 2).¹⁸ "Pretty" was probably the last adjective Pope expected Bentley to use, considering the implications of frivolity, diminution, and it carries in this context. Bentley's remarks imply that as he saw it, Pope's Iliad was fluff—not Homer. Unlike Bentley, what was essentially "Homer" for Pope, and what he most of all sought to deliver in translation, was Homer's "Poetical Fire" (Williams 440).¹⁹

Five years before he began work on his translation, Pope wrote in a letter that Homer's real "Excellency" is found "in that which carries you away with him … no man who has a true Poetical spirit is Master of himself, while he reads him."²⁰ As Pope saw it, Homer's "Poetical Fire" was extinguished in the vain attempt by "mighty Scholiasts" like Bentley to permanently secure Homer's words through scholarly commentary. Pope vowed to "continue to read carefully all that I can procure, to make up, that way, for my own want of a Critical understanding in the original Beauties of Homer."²¹ Pope set out to assimilate as much of Homer as he could through reading, because he saw this as the only way to transmute Homer's Poetical Fire into English verse; Pope believed that "the chief reason why all Translations fall short of their Originals, is, that the very Constraint they are obliged to, renders 'em heavy and dispirited."²² Pope hoped to limit the effects of his own "Constraints" by immersing himself—in a sense; losing his self—in Homer's work, only to reemerge in his own world fused with Homer's Poetical Fire, able then to carry the "nature" of The Iliad with him. In imagining translation as a process of immersion, fusion, and metamorphosis, Pope conceived translation as an intertextual act.

While the argument over the merit of Pope's Iliad began as a disagreement over what constitutes a good translation, it has emerged in recent decades in large part as a disagreement over aesthetic principles. Pope's trnaslation is now often disparaged primarily because it transforms Homer's Greek poetry into Christianized, neoclassic art. H. A. Mason points out that in his version of The Iliad, "Pope was making Homer modern," and that "what was modernity for Pope is what now strikes us as the parochial Augustanism that we have no use for" (41-42).²³ Clearly, Pope's translation and Wheatley's work, in this regard, share a similar fate in part because they share a particular and currently unpopular aesthetic. Mason argues an audience's enjoyment and understanding of a work of art ends when the art "fails": "[readers] should regard those places where all we can find in Pope is a fossilized modernity as the places where he has failed … to do what he set out to do as a highly conscious artist" (42). For Mason, Pope succeeds—art succeeds—when what "bound [Pope] to Homer … links him to us" (42). In Mason's view, however, that link is forged by what he calls a "timeless nature"—certainly a slippery and suspect notion, and one that itself seems, at this moment at least, a "fossilized modernity." But I do not think Mason's point should be dismissed out of hand; rather, I would argue that links are (re)forged when readers are able to suspend their dislike of an alien aesthetic long enough to allow the multiplicity of a poetic language to unfold. The link that would "bind" us, as readers, to Wheatley may very well be revealed by what bound Pope to Homer, and Wheatley to Pope.

Pope's "modernization" of Homer rested upon the neoclassic distinction between, as Mason puts it, "nature as fact" and "nature as value" (69). In An Essay on Criticism (EC), Pope explores thisdistinction, defining nature as fact in this way:

Unerring Nature, still divinely bright,
One clear, unchang'd and UniversalLight,
Life, Force, and Beauty, must to all impart,
At once the Source, and End, and Test of Art.
(EC II. 70-73)

Timeless, universal, "Unerring"; the "Source, and End, and Test of Art"; this description of nature is analogous to the concept of the Christian God.²⁴ Mason points out that in Pope's opinion, "there was no more sacred name than Nature. Certainly God was a poor synonym" (42). Because nature as fact was conceived of by the neoclassic artist as divine, there could be neither the desire nor the need to alter it. Nature as fact constitutes Homer's "Poetical Fire"—his genius; for Pope, "Nature and Homer were, he found, the same" (EC 1. 135). On the other hand, nature as value was alterable, existing as elements of the world which neoclassic artists perceived around them, a world in need of refinement. While Pope characterized nature as value as "Nature Methodiz 'd," today one might describe it as Nature Historicized—the divine expressed in a historical context (EC II. 88-91). Pope's Iliad is Homer's art situated in an eighteenth-century English context; to Pope and Wheatley it is Homer with, to borrow a phrase from Wheatley, "softer language and diviner airs."

What Mason calls "links" or "bonds" not only exist between texts, but between readers and writers and texts. The comments of one reader of Wheatley's work, Thomas Jefferson, point up the complex bond that exists between Pope and Wheatley. This founding father's remarks may very well be the single set of comments most frequently cited by Wheatley scholars. The fact that they reappear or are referred to so often suggests the cultural authority they still carry:

Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry. Among the blacks is misery enough, Gods [sic] knows, but no poetry … Religion, indeed, has produced Phyllis Whateley [sic]; but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism. The heroes of the Dunciad are to her, as Hercules to the author of that poem.²⁵

On the surface, Jefferson's final sentence seems to be just one last insult, coming as it does at the end of such a harsh assessment of Wheatley's published work. But the closer one looks at it, the more interesting that sentence gets. For instance, consider the fact that in the upside-down, mock-epic world of Pope's The Dunciad, mythic "heroes" are dunces, dullards, and fools—and the monarch of all duncery is an actor, playwright, and "buffoon" appointed England's poet laureate by George III (Williamsxxiii). Furthermore, "Hercules" was a demigod (who was for a time a slave) renowned for his extraordinary physical strength—an image directly opposite the realities of Pope's frail health and twisted frame. This final statement then, considered intertextually, appears to set Wheatley and Pope in a relationship of equality through a system of oppositions: mythic dullness is to Wheatley as masculine physical vitality is to Pope. It seems to me that this now rather cryptic remark suggests at least two things: first, Jefferson understood that an apparent and appropriate relationship of some sort existed between Wheatley and Pope, even in the midst of a racist attack upon her abilities and her work. Second, but more important, Jefferson must have also recognized that there was a correspondence between Wheatley and Pope that he could neither articulate nor understand, yet could not ignore. The push and pull of Jefferson's comments on Wheatley and her poetry exemplifies the complex and enigmatic relationship that is revealed whenever the subject of Wheatley's literary relationship with Pope is broached.

Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects opens with the poem "To Maecenas." Several critics have argued that Wheatley "must be referring to aliving person" in this poem (Shields, Collected Works 277).²⁶ Shields argues that that person is "a conflation" of Pope and Mather Byles (Collected Works 277).²⁷ While Shields discerns a close connection to Byles in "To Maecenas," he admits that the poem "draw[s] consciously from Alexander Pope's poems" (Collected Works 276-77). Looking intertextually at Wheatley's "To Maecenas" shows that it has a very strong relationship with Pope's work, including not only his translation of The Iliad, but An Essay on Criticism, a comprehensive and exemplary articulation of eighteenth-century English neoclassic aesthetics as Pope understood them. Whether or not there is direct reference in the poem to some actual contemporary of Wheatley's, it seems to me that "To Maecenas" works hard to communicate to the reader Wheatley's conscious contemplation of Pope and his work.

In formal terms, "To Maecenas" is an invocation to the muses, an introduction to the poetic whole—setting the tone for the volume, as well as establishing patterns of imagery, symbolism, and (inter)textual bonds. Shields notes that "To Maecenas" is one of a number of poems that did not appear in Wheatley's original proposal for the volume in early 1772 (Collected Works 276). In Shields's opinion, these later pieces are "particularly polished and sophisticated, suggesting that the year preceding the appearance of her Poems was indeed a productive and creative one, marked by maturation of poetic theory and praxis" (276). The fact that "To Maecenas" ("TM") was composed in retrospect and placed at the head of the already complete volume, I would argue, emphasizes the poem's function as a comment upon, and therefore a source of understanding the "nature" of, the poetic whole of Poems on Various Subjects (POVS).

Even as Wheatley appears to conform to formal conventions, though, she rewrites them. Rather than a meditation in which the poet expresses herself as a supplicant—calling for inspiration from the imaginative power of the muse—Wheatley commands the muse, completely reversing the formulaic relation to the power of tradition. The poem opens not with an address in which the speaker pleads or implores, but with Wheatley's speaker insisting that the muse consider the poetry of the past: "Maecenas, you, … / Read o'er what poets sung" ("TM" 11. 1-2). Flanzbaum argues that "Wheatley must invoke the muse because she must get permission to speak" (75). It is certainly true that at the time Wheatley composed this poem she was a slave, and therefore had no legal or cultural permission to read, write, or publish. But where Flanzbaum contends that Wheatley "must first submit in order to clear a space for personal expression," I would argue that Wheatley actually hits the ground running (76). Wheatley simply asserts her authority to command the muse from the outset, blatantly disregarding supposed "rules" of poetic expression, just as she asserts her authority to write and publish in flagrant indifference to the reality of her enslavement.

Flanzbaum also argues that in "To Maecenas," Wheatley "acquires power by subjugating herself to [the] stronger forces [of the muses]" (77). 1 essentially agree with Flanzbaum, but I disagree about how Wheatley goes about acquiring power; moreover, it seems to me that Wheatley goes one step further—having asserted and enacted individual power in the poem, Wheatley legitimates that power by rewriting western literary tradition. As I read it, "To Maecenas" has a five-part argumentative structure in which Wheatley affirms through western tradition a link to authorial power and a rightful place in the social and cultural kinship established by that tradition.

Stanza I achieves the first movement in the structure by establishing the authority of Wheatley's speaker, and by underscoring the value of textual bonds as a link to the cultural authority of past works. The speaker informs Maecenas that his "genius" equals the Fire evident in the works of previous artists: "What felt those poets but you feel the same? / Does not your soul possess the sacred flame? / Their noble strains your equal genius shares" ("TM" 11. 3-4). Here the speaker tells Maecenas that he possesses the same "sacred flame" as the poets of the past, affirming a link to past works through a notion of Poetical Fire. In the last line of the stanza, Wheatley also suggests that Maecenas expresses his "equal genius" in terms of nature as value—i.e., as neoclassic art—when she claims that Maecenas's poetry, though it "shares" the Fire of past works, expresses that "sacred flame" in "softer language and diviner airs" ("TM" 1. 6).

In her second structural move, Wheatley's speaker identifies the source of Poetical Fire, as well as the links that allow her and Maecenas to share in it. The source of art, as Pope articulated itand as Wheatley's speaker expresses it, is nature as fact, and that nature is Homer: "While Homer paints lo! circumfus'd in air, / Celestial Gods in mortal forms appear" ("TM" 11. 7-8). As divine nature incarnate, Homer need only articulate to create; for Homer to "paint" poetically is to give mortal form to the gods. Homer's poetic painting creates not only mortal images and forms for the gods, but the physical reality of their presence—the reader "hear[s] each recess rebound" when the gods move, feels "horror" as the heavens and the earth shake, and sees the night sky erupt with lightning:

Swift as they move hear each recess rebound,
Heav'n quakes, earth trembles, and the shores resound,
Great Sire of verse, before my mortal eyes,
The lightnings blaze across the vaulted skies,
And, as the thunder shakes the heav'nly plains,
A deep-felt horror thrills through all my veins.
("TM" 11. 9-14)

Wheatley argues that poetry immerses the reader in the poet's imaginative world; the speaker physically experiences Homer's world as it is created in Pope's translation, affirming the community made possible through poetry. Wheatley tempts the reader to join her speaker in such experiences, establishing that same kinship system in her own work.

Wheatley's spiritual and experiential link to Homer is established through Pope's Iliad, which becomes a very strong presence in the second stanza, through direct allusions to the text of the translation. Wheatley establishes this link because it confirms her "poetic citizenship"—it locates her in the same poetic community with Pope. Rothstein points out that eighteenth-century poetry was all about placing things in their contexts, noting that "[s]uch works announce their poetic citizenship not out of caution or awe for the past but out of a desire for location within the shared, understood esthetic space that poetry, as a social heritage, occupies" (50-51). Wheatley insures that the intertextual bond with Pope's translation is readily apparent to readers with whom she shares this "esthetic space" by specifically invoking the world of Pope's Iliad in the last lines of the stanza:

When great Patroclus courts Achilles' aid,
  The grateful tribute of my tears is paid;
  Prone on the shore he feels the pangs of love,
  And stern Pelides tend'rest passions move.
("TM" 11. 17-20)²⁸

Finally, in this same stanza Wheatley suggests a direct link to Pope's critical legacy through a particularly Popean couplet: "When gentler strains demand thy graceful song, / The length'ningline moves languishing along" ("TM" 11. 15-16). Shields has observed that these two lines "appear to be a demonstration of Pope's justly famous dictum [from An Essay on Criticism], 'The Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense'" (Collected Works 277).²⁹

But it is the third stanza of "To Maecenas" that firmly establishes the link to Pope's An Essay on Criticism through a direct reference to Pope's poem in the first four lines—a connection that strengthens Wheatley's claim that she shares the same critical and artistic heritage as Pope.³⁰ This stanza also begins to develop the third movement in the argumentative structure of "To Maecenas"—addressing Maecenas, the speaker confirms that if she possessed the same Poetical Fire that Maecenas shares with Virgil (and so the rest of the classic western poetic tradition), then she, too, would possess an "equal genius" to Homer:

O could I rival thine and Virgil's page,
Or claim the Muses with the Mantuan Sage;
Soon the same beauties should my mind adorn,
And the same ardors in my soul should burn
("TM" 11. 23-26)³¹

However, Wheatley's speaker defers to Maecenas at this point in the poem, claiming to be limited by a "grov'ling mind" and the fact that she is "less happy" than Maecenas ("TM" 1. 29, 35). Wheatley must defer to Maecenas as long as he is her only link to Homer. In England and the American colonies in the eighteenth-century, "heritage" and "inheritance" were still conceived of as patriarchal—primogeniture was still a fact of life in Wheatley's generation. Heritage could only be claimed through forefathers; to claim a clear and direct inheritance in western tradition, Wheatley must somehow find an African "father" in company with Homer.

Which is exactly what she does. Or to be more precise, Wheatley reshuffles western literary history to reveal an African sharing esthetic space with Homer as "To Maecenas" reaches an apex:

The happier Terence all the choir inspired,
His soul replenish'd, and his bosom fir'd;
But say, ye Muses, why this partial grace,
To one alone of Afric 's sable race;
From age to age transmitting thus his name
With the first glory in the rolls of fame?
("TM" 11. 37-42)

Wheatley takes pains to point out to the reader that Terence was "an African by birth," attaching one of her rare notes to thepoem to make certain the fact is not missed (POVS, lln.). A somewhat obscure Roman playwright, Terence was himself enslaved, but, as Shields notes, he was eventually "freed by the fruits of his pen" (279). That Wheatley mined western literary history until she uncovered Terence—a poetic African forefather who was able to free himself from slavery through artistic endeavor—is significant.³² The effort itself suggests how very important establishing a claim to western heritage was to Wheatley.

This stanza is the turning point of the poem—its heart, if you will. Crucially, in lines 41-42, Wheatley has slipped Terence into Homer's place—Terence now has the "first glory in the rolls of fame"; it is his name, not Homer's, which will be "transmitted" across time. Furthermore, Terence and Homer become indistinguishable in the grammatical ambiguity of the subsequent couplet, which opens stanza 6: "Thy virtues, great Maecenas! shall be sung / In praise of him, from whom those virtues sprung" ("TM" 11. 43-44). It is impossible to determine here whether Terence or Homer is the subject of the line "In praise of him, from whom those virtues sprung." Wheatley appears to have fused Terence, "an African by birth," with Homer, and so with Poetical Fire—with nature as fact. Wheatley has found in western literary history an African poet whose "soul possesses the sacred flame," and rewrites that history to create an artistic community in which, as an African herself, she may now claim an inheritance.

The "sacred flame" of poetic genius is the means through which Wheatley's speaker expresses, at the very least, membership in that community. Poetical Fire is not only described in "To Maecenas" as a fully developed imaginative faculty possessed by the artistic "soul," but as a spark smoldering in the "bosom" of an artist, which can be fanned into the "sacred flame" by the nine classical muses: "The Nine inspire, and all the bosom glows" ("TM" 1. 22). Wheatley's speaker points out that Maecenas has not only been visited by the muses, but that they actually reside within him, defining his Poetical Fire as eternal and divine: "you, whose bosom is the Muses home / … They fan in you the bright immortal fire" ("TM" 1. 32, 34). In Wheatley's version of western literary history, Maecenas's "bosom" is "fanned" into a Poetical Fire by a nature which is, in part, African. In an equally radical move in the last two lines of stanza 6, the final stroke in Wheatley's argument, Wheatley's speaker imagines herself in the role of what Pope calls a poet with a "Master-Hand"—a poet who innovates, transforming the tradition. Pope argues in An Essay on Criticism that a poet in whom the Poetical Fire burns most bright "May boldly deviate from the common Track" (EC I 151):

Great Wits sometimes may gloriously offend,
And rise to Faults true Criticks dare not mend;
From vulgar Bounds with brave Disorder part,
And snatch a Grace beyond the reach of Art
(EC II. 152-55)

Alluding to these very lines by modeling upon the phrase "snatch a grace," Wheatley's speaker somewhat mischievously tells Maecenas that she plans to seize a portion of his accolades for herself: "I'll snatch a laurel from thine honour'd head, / While you indulgent smile upon the deed" ("TM" 11. 46-47).³³ The image developed here of an indulgent father smiling upon a favored child is intensified by the last couplet in the poem, where Wheatley's speaker again implies that she is the offspring of Maecenas and asks for his protection: "Then grant, Maecenas, thy paternal rays, / Hear me propitious, and defend my lays" ("TM" 11. 54-55). If Terence shares the same "sacred flame" burning in Maecenas's bosom, and Wheatley's speaker is Maecenas's offspring, then Wheatley's speaker herself is the inheritor of the "sacred flame."

An intertextual analysis of "To Maecenas," the poem that Wheatley chose to introduce her volume of poetry, reveals a great deal about the poetic aggregate of Poems on Various Subjects. Among other things, such a reading reveals that Wheatley's respect for neoclassic dictates is not by definition an indicator of blind adherence, but rather suggests a license for innovation. Also, intertextual links present Wheatley with an opportunity to rewrite classical western literary history, finding an African poet directly linked to its supposed origins, and marking herself as that poet's heir-apparent. Finally, Wheatley invokes an eternal and divine nature through Terence and claims it as her birthright; through neoclassicism, Wheatley claims a right to a divinity that is closely aligned with the Christian God.

III

[I]t is most unlikely that we would succeed in getting much out of a work of the remote past unless we needed it very badly in the present … Our needs, we can say, are for paradoxical states: for Another that is still Ourselves. That would be my definition of a classic, of a classic that can enter our lives. It must be alien and it must be familiar.³⁴

Shields has observed that a "characteristic of Wheatley's invocations" is a "conscious syncretism" that combines "christian and classical elements" in a unique way ("Classicism" 104). For Shields, Wheatley's "syncretism" reveals her as a sun worshipper at heart, something she "brought with her from her African homeland" ("Classicism" 103).³⁵ But Shields does not take into account the fact that Wheatley's fusion of pagan and Christian traditions is characteristic of eighteenth-century English neoclassic art. Rothstein points out that the Bible offered English eighteenth-century poets social and cultural kinships in much thesame fashion the classics did; "biblical texts" he argues, presented "the sort of allusory strength and force of cultural self-assertion" found in the classical works of western literature.

The fusion of pagan and Christian myths in Wheatley's poetry, I would argue, suggests something more complicated than either the mere formalities of convention or submerged cross-cultural religious impulses. It seems likely that what is revealed is another means by which Wheatley attempts to rewrite the contemporaneous, received "wisdom" about her people. For instance, the mythology that undergirds The Iliad grants that the gods had a special relationship with the "Ethiopians":

The sire of gods, and all th' ethereal train,
On the warm limits of the farthest main,
Now mix with mortals, nor disdain to grace
The feasts of Ethiopia's blameless race
(Iliad I. 554-57)

At this point in The Iliad, the speaker is the goddess Thetis, and she is telling Achilles that she can't intercede for him until Jove and the rest of the gods return from Ethiopia, where they've gone to celebrate, to "feast," with the Ethiopians. This seems an unprecedented honor for the (mortal) Ethiopians, and suggests a special relationship to the gods, one significantly different from that endured by the Trojans and Greeks. The gods don't show much respect to the Trojans or Greeks; quite the opposite, in fact. The gods frequently make unreasonable demands upon them and meddle in their affairs, usually with fatal and chaotic results (The Iliad itself chronicles such turmoil).

One could argue that Pope's use of the phrase "nor disdain to grace" here implies the contrary—that to "not disdain" to do something is quite different from unreserved and enthusiastic participation. But the phrase actually reveals what Pope is thinking, not Homer; Pope carried his Anglo-European eighteenth-century racist assumptions into his translation. In their 1930 prose translation of The Iliad, Lang, Leaf, and Myers interpret the same lines as: "for Zeus went yesterday to Okeanos, unto the noble Ethiopians for a feast, and all the gods followed with him" (Lang et al. 13). Robert Fagles concurs with Lang, Leaf, and Myers, rendering his 1990 verse translation of the same lines in the following manner: "Only yesterday Zeus went off to the Ocean River / to feast with the Ethiopians, loyal, lordly men, / and all the gods went with him (Fagles 11. 505-7). It is important to note, however, that Pope apparently did not miss the difference between his own and Homer's notions about feasting with Ethiopians—Pope uses the phrase "blameless race" to describe the Ethiopians' moral integrity in the same couplet. The difficulty of what must have been, for Pope, a paradoxical moment in his translation, is indicated by his choice of the word "blameless"—a word that implies innocent, childlike qualities. Racism prodded Pope to infantilizethe Ethiopians at the same moment he confirms their moral integrity. Adding to the tension created by the clash of cultural assumptions, Pope takes care to observe in his own note at this point that the Ethiopians' "character of piety is here celebrated" in the original Greek.

While the mythology of The Iliad is useful to Wheatley in her effort to rewrite western literary history and establish her race's "character of piety," it cannot replace Christianity in her imagination, at least in part because it is a mythos that holds neither the promise of spiritual redemption nor the hope for an end to physical human suffering. As Mason points out, there is no "for God so loved the world" here; in the world of The Iliad, mortals are at the mercy of immoral gods. In his "Preface to the Iliad," Pope wrote that the subject of the poem "is the Anger of Achilles, the most short and single Subject that was ever chosen by any Poet" (Williams 441). But what emerges from even Pope's "softer language and diviner airs" is beyond anger—it's more like rage, even brutality—the amazing capacity people have to be brutal to one another. In this poem, Homer repeatedly explores the consequences of human rage, asking where did it all start? The answer in The Iliad is always that it started with a god.³⁶

On the other hand, the Christian God, defined as moral perfection, is conceived of as a refuge from human brutality; the journey of the soul can relieve the suffering of the flesh, through the mediating and redemptive power of Christ. It is in the interests of exploring Wheatley's characteristic relation to Christianity in her poetry that I now turn to the shortest, but perhaps the most famous, piece in Poems on Various Subjects, "On being brought from AFRICA to AMERICA" Twentieth-century critics, predisposed to read Wheatley's poetry literally rather than metaphorically, have often wrestled with this poem. Read literally, the first quatrain has struck many critics as a shocking example of Wheatley's willingness to "sell her blackness for a pottage of white acceptability." But read metaphorically, as multilayered discourse, "On Being Brought" chronicles Wheatley's metaphysical, poetic journey from the hopeless and powerless mortality of an ancient pagan mythos, to the Christian promise of ultimate spiritual liberty and redemption:

'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there's a God, and there's a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
"Their colour is a diabolic die."
Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,
May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.

In the first quatrain, Wheatley's speaker is describing how her soul has traveled from a "Pagan land" to "redemption"; it wasthe "mercy" of the Christian "Saviour" that transported her spiritually. However, the journey was also brought about by "understand[ing]"—in coming to understand that her soul was "benighted," Wheatley's speaker has learned that there is a spiritual darkness that ceases at the dawn of "redemption"—and that the soul's journey from darkness to light is made possible through the merciful and morally perfect Christian God.

The second quatrain, however, sharply contrasts the metaphysical with the historical, denying any connection between spiritual darkness and skin color. The dissociation of the spiritual and the physical is underscored by the sudden turn of the poem, signalled by the speaker's abrupt change in perspective from the internal and confessional "Once I redemption neither sought nor knew," to the external and prosecutorial "Some view our sable race with scornful eye." Also, Wheatley's speaker turns from a meditation upon the incorporeal soul to take on a historical, racialized body. The speaker establishes her historical community by modifying the more conventional neoclassic description "our sable race," with the contemporary and colloquial term "Negroes" in the final couplet.

Finally, Wheatley's speaker openly challenges the simplistic proslavery equations that set black skin equivalent to sin and bestiality.³⁷ In answering the "scornful" charge of "Their colour is a diabolic die," Wheatley's speaker returns with unmistakable sarcasm: the emphasis placed on "Christians" in line 8 suggests they may in fact be no such thing—especially if such Christians make the mistake of equating "Negroes" with the sinfulness of "Cain." Wheatley radically complicates concepts like sin and skin color as a determiner of "race" in this one line. For instance, according to European Christian tradition, Cain was sinful, but was not black. If "Negroes" are as "black as Cain," then they're not "black" at all, or to be more precise, they're Semitic. To be as "black as Cain" is to be part of the same family as Abel, descendants of Eve and Adam.

In this last couplet, Wheatley's speaker is pointing out at least two things: first, race is not essential, it is nature as value, a protean category—it "may be refin'd"; second, like the Ethiopians of The Iliad with whom Zeus and his "ethereal train" feasted, "Negroes" share the divinity of the Christian God and take a seat at the Christian family table when they "join th' angelic train."

Wheatley's speaker's place in that "angelic train" is assured not only through her people's "character of piety," but through her poetry; she journeys in Poems on Various Subjects from engaging the muse of an alien race in "To Maecenas" as a mortal and fallible poet, to naming herself "Afric's muse" in "An Hymn to Humanity" ("AHH"), and so "snatching" poetic immortality. In "An Hymn to Humanity," the speaker poses this question, "Can Afric 's muse forgetful prove?" ("AHH" 1.31). The speaker appears, however, tohave anticipated the question in the volume, by answering it in a structurally anterior poem, "On Recollection." Again defying the convention of an opening appeal, "On Recollection" opens with the speaker's command to "Mneme" (memory) to "begin."³⁸ Also, after she has ordered the initiation of memory, the speaker demands inspiration from the muses—inspiration to continue what she has already planned. Wheatley's speaker demands not ideas from the muses but assistance in "her great design":

MNEME begin. Inspire, ye sacred nine,
Your vent'rous Afric in her great design.
Mneme, immortal power, I trace thy spring:
Assist my strains, while I thy glories sing:
("On Recollection" 11. 1-4)

But there are two other striking gambits here: first, Wheatley's speaker identifies herself as one of the muses, their own "vent'rous Afric," and second, she calls not for inspiration for a single theme or poem, or even a single volume, but for something much bigger—for "her great design." Wheatley's ultimate objective in Poems on Various Subjects is not merely to situate herself in the western poetic tradition but to command and transform it. Tracing a line connecting Homer to Maecenas through Pope gave Wheatley the opportunity to find an African native to western literary tradition. In "On Recollection" ("OR"), Wheatley not only takes on the persona of Terence's poetic heir-apparent but reveals the means through which she exercises power in that role. Invoking the "immortal power" of memory, Wheatley declares that she will "trace thy spring"—that she will search out the origins of memory ("OR" 1. 3). However, the speaker's opening command, "MNEME begin," suggests that memory in fact "begins" here, in this poem, in this volume of poetry. The "immortal power" of memory in "On Recollection" belongs to Wheatley's speaker; because she need only articulate to create the origins of memory, Wheatley's persona exposes her kinship with Homer, the "Source and End" of art.

In "Preface to the Iliad," the Poetical Fire which to Pope is emblematic of the "Source and End" of art, is at times described as the "Warmth of [Homer's] Rapture"; furthermore, Pope argues that "the Strength of this amazing Invention [The Iliad] we are to attribute [to] that unequal'd Fire and Rapture, which is so forcible in Homer" (Williams 446, 440). Poetical Fire, or Rapture, is the source of poetic inspiration for Pope, but in "On Recollection," Wheatley expands that source of inspiration—the poetic inspiration through which a poet creates "brave Disorder"—to include memory:

Mneme in our natural visions pours
The ample treasure of her secret stores
Swift from above she wings her silent flight
Through Phoebe's realms, fair regent of the night;
And, in her pomp of images display'd,
To the high-raptur'd poet gives her aid,
Through the unbounded regions of the mind,
Diffusing light celestial and refin'd.
("OR" II. 9-14)

Wheatley describes memory in this passage as a source of inspiration that stimulates the unconstrained creative processes, arousing the kind of "high-raptur[e]" that can create brave Disorder in poetic expression. Wheatley's speaker depicts memory pouring into the "unbounded regions" of the poet's mind, circulating and dispersing nature as fact and nature as value—the "high raptur'd" poet "diffuses" the "celestial" and the "refin'd."

In "On Recollection," Mneme is the source of the imaginative faculty that blurs the boundaries between the spiritual and the contextual and alters the economy of the eternal and the historical. Memory, a "heav'nly phantom" commanded by Wheatley's speaker, provides the impetus and the power to shape and rewrite poetic tradition. Significantly, Wheatley conceives of a transcendent poetry driven by temporal memory, describing it as a source of divine power in the tangible world: "The heav'nly phantom paints the actions done / By every tribe beneath the rolling sun ("OR" 11. 17-18). For Wheatley's speaker, memory, not Homer, now "paints" poetically—and memory's painting gives artistic form not to the gods but to the historical acts of real people—of "every tribe beneath the rolling sun."

The poetry of memory that Wheatley's speaker describes links together the eternal and the historical—it creates everlasting, always-manifest memories of the very historical actions of a people. As both a source of poetic inspiration and a weapon of "wrath divine," it is welcomed by those who command it but "dreaded" by those who had forgotten its timelessness and power ("OR" 1. 50):

But how is Mneme dreaded by the race,
Who scorn her warnings, and despise her grace?
By her unveiled each horrid crime appears,
Her awful hand a cup of wormwood bears.
Days, years mispent, O what a hell of woe!
Hers the worst tortures that our souls can know.
("OR" II. 25-30)

The speaker implies that long after mortal life has expired, immortal souls can be haunted and tormented by the fury of memory. More importantly though, the speaker also suggests that an entire "race" may be made to suffer for individual "crimes." The "cup ofwormwood" that Mneme can force down a race's collective throat is poisoned by "each horrid crime" their people have committed. Wheatley's speaker warns that memory works through connections "in ev'ry breast." The bonds of social and cultural kinship carry with them bonds of responsibility—and memory, as either inspiration or wrath, is the expression of that responsibility: "Of Recollection such the pow'r enthron'd / In ev'ry breast, and thus her pow'r is own'd" ("OR" II. 41-42).

She who can summon and command "Recollection" not only holds power over individuals as well as "tribes" but specifically wields a weapon of "vengeance":

The wretch, who dar'd the vengeance of the skies,
At last awakes in horror and surprise,
By her alarm'd, he sees impending fate,
He howls in anguish, and repents too late.
("OR" II. 43-46)

Wheatley's speaker has already demonstrated that she can not only command "Recollection" but is in fact the origin of memory itself. Wheatley's poetic persona is the memory of her own "sable race"—she is "Afric's muse," and so she wields the weapon of racial memory, of the "crimes" of "ev'ry tribe." Wheatley's speaker commands what "ev'ry tribe" fears most—the collective memory of, and so collective guilt for, the individual crimes of an entire people. As "Afric's muse," the speaker will wield this terrible weapon in revenge for atrocities committed against her own tribe. Wheatley's speaker had already answered the question "Can Afric 's muse forgetful prove?" before she asked it. Her very ability to remember the "crimes" against her people inspired "her great design," creating this poem and this volume and, once unleashed, will prove to be a potent weapon of vengeance.

That Wheatley's speaker does not recount the "crimes" she will exact revenge through memory for is indicative of Phillis Wheatley's very real, very constricted historical status—yet it does not take a leap of faith to read an indictment here against white American colonists for the crime of brutally enslaving Wheatley and her people. In fact, Wheatley's status as a slave only foregrounds the radical nature of her poetry: in a time when Wheatley could be sure that her readers would be very aware of the conventions of neoclassic art, and well acquainted with texts like Pope's Iliad, she surely risked a great deal in Poems on Various Subjects. Her brave poetic innovations and thinly veiled caveats could not have been missed by all her contemporary readers, or even by most of them.

In conceiving her self as the memory of her people, Wheatley displays her grasp of her own historical singularity and theresponsibility such a position implicitly carries. Wheatley's "great design" in Poems on Various Subjects is to reveal herself as the muse of a new western tribe, a muse named memory—the avenging phantom of a people irrevocably chained to an alien language and history. Setting out to achieve her "great design" by absorbing that hostile tradition, Wheatley ultimately transformed it into the story of her own people—a story built upon intertextual foundations. To really understand the complex and intricate nature of the "great design" of this eighteenth-century American poet, we must recognize and appreciate those foundations. If we "trace the spring" to Wheatley's intertextuality, the memory of "Afric's muse" will be revealed in all its "wrath divine."

Notes

¹ Excerpted from Wheatley's letter to John Thornton, dated October 30, 1774, [reprinted in The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley, edited by John C. Shields], 183-84. The slashes indicate careted material that appeared above the lines.

² William H. Robinson has argued that, from the 1760s on, the commentary on Wheatley has fluctuated between "critical acclaim" and "critical denigration" (Beginnings 11). What Robinson calls "critical acclaim" nearly always characterizes Wheatley's poetry as an exception to the presumed norms of African American writing.

³ William J. Long, "she sings like a canary in a cage," remarks excerpted from Long's American Literature (1913), reprinted in Robinson, Critical Essays 58-59.

⁴ As Shields's remarks imply, the Black Aesthetic movement's opinions about Wheatley and her work did not simply die out by the end of the 1960s. For instance, in 1974, Angelene Jamison argued in the Journal of Negro Education that "[a]fter reading various poems of Phillis Wheatley, the first comment of most students is that she was not Black enough and of course they are correct. But we must move beyond that kind of statement into reexamining the poetry in light of the implications of her lack of race consciousness to the development of black thought" (reprinted in Robinson, Critical Essays 130).

⁵ An interesting twist is added to this critical narrative by Charles W. Akers and James A. Levemier. In his 1975 essay, "'Our Modern Egyptians': Phillis Wheatley and the Whig Campaign" (in Robinson, Critical Essays 159-71), Akers made the opposite—and singular—argument that Wheatley scholarship had "usually concentrated more on the poetry than on the poet" (Robinson 161); in his 1991 "Phillis Wheatley and the New England Clergy," Levernier echoed Akers's claim. In their historical studies, both Akers and Levernier sought to put this perceived inequity to rights.

⁶ See also Shields's Collected Works 267 and 269, as well as his essay "Phillis Wheatley's Use of Classicism," 97.

⁷ See Writings, especially 100-101, and 104-8. Also Robinson's Beginnings, especially 45-62: for instance, here Robinson is wont to note that "on occasions, few enough to be sure, Phillis wrote poems that were completely successful." (56).

⁸ This passage also represents what may well be a crucial indicator of the paternalism critics who study Wheatley and her work often unknowingly assume—their habitual use of the familiar "Phillis."

A telling turn on this convention occurs in Charles Scruggs's, "Phillis Wheatley and the Poetical Legacy of Eighteenth-Century England." In this essay, Scruggs refers to Wheatley in every instance as "Phillis Wheatley." This overkill of formality suggests Scruggs's apparent discomfort with both the familiar and demeaning "Phillis" and the formal and authoritative "Wheatley."

⁹ Gates, "Phillis Wheatley and the Nature of the Negro," in Robinson, Critical Essays 215-33.

¹⁰ Interestingly, in the version of this essay that was later published in Gates's Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self (1987), the single quotation marks on the word "imaginative" in this sentence do not appear, although the line is otherwise unchanged. The difference in the two versions of the essay suggests that Gates sought to avoid exactly this reading in the second edition (79).

¹¹ Isani, "Phillis Wheatley and the Elegiac Mode," in Robinson, Critical Essays 208-14.

¹² Wheatley's "genius" has often marked her as a unique and singular representative of "African capacity"—as Robinson puts it, abolitionists "made special use" of Wheatley's exemplary status early on (Critical Essays 7). Gates points out that in 1773 (the same year Poems on Various Subjects was published), Benjamin Rush first used Wheatley's poetry as proof of African intelligence and fundamental humanity (Critical Essays 220). In a letter written by William Dickinson, dated 17 February 1778, Rush wrote that "the poems of Phillis Wheatley … are so many proofs of African capacity." From Dickinson's Letters on Slavery … To which are added, Addresses to the Whites, and to the Free Negroes of Barbadoes, and Accounts of some Negroes Eminent for their Virtues and Abilities (1789), and reprinted in Critical Essays 45.

¹³ See Flanzbaum 75-77.

¹⁴ Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, Book 4, lines 211-14.

¹⁵ From Wheatley's letter to David Wooster, dated 18 October 1773 (Collected Works 169). The complete, 13 volume set of Pope's Works that Wheatley owned is now in the library Rare Book Room at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (see Shields, Collected Works 314, and Robinson, Writings 59-60).

¹⁶ See, among others, Shields (Collected Works), Vernon Loggins (in Robinson, Critical Essays 88-92), Albertha Sistrunk (in Robinson, Critical Essays 175-87), Gates, O'Neale, Scruggs, and Lucy K. Hayden ("Classical Tidings from the Afric Muse").

¹⁷ According to Steven Shankman, in his "Preface" to Pope's Iliad: Homer in the Age of Passion, the controversy over Pope's translation actually began even before the first of The Ilaid's six volumes was published (xv).

¹⁸ Bentley's nephew Thomas Bentley (also a classical scholar) attempted to answer Pope's Dunciad lampoon of R. Bentley in a broadsise entitled A Letter to Mr. Pope, Occasioned by Sober Advice from Horace, Etc (1735). The following is an excerpt:

You are grown very angry, it seems, at Dr. BENTLEY of late. Is it because he said (to your Face, I have been told) that your HOMER was miserable stuff? That it might be called, HOMER modernised, or something to that effect; but that there were very little or no Vestiges at all of the old Grecian. Dr. BENTLEY said right. Hundreds have said the same behind your Back. For HOMER translated, first in English, secondly in Rhyme, thirdly, not from the Original, but, fourthly, from a French Translation, and that in Prose, by a Woman too, how the Devil should it be Homer? As for the Greek Language, every body that knows it and has compared your Versiori with the Original, as I have done in many Places, must know too that you know nothing of it.

Apparently nephew Thomas also disapproved of Pope's translation (reprinted in Barnard 324-25).

¹⁹ For Pope, "Poetical Fire" is equivalent to poetic imagination; as he explained it in his "Preface to the Iliad," "Poetical Fire" is "Vivida vis animi"—a "lively force of mind" (Williams, "Preface" 440). Pope asserted, however, that this was an uncommon state, one that appeared "in very few" poets: Virgil, Lucan, Statius, Milton, Shakespeare—but most of all, in Homer (Williams, "Preface" 440).

[All quotations from Pope's "Preface to the Iliad" are taken from Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope, edited by Aubrey Williams.]

²⁰ From Pope's letter to Ralph Bridges, dated 5 April 1708 (reprinted in Mason 5-6).

²¹ Ibid.

²² Ibid.

²³ I am indebted throughout this discussion to Mason's insights on both neoclassicism and Pope's The Iliad.

²⁴ See Mason 43.

²⁵ From Thomas Jefferson's "On the Unacceptibility of Blacks in America," reprinted in Robinson, Critical Essays 43, from The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (1903).

²⁶ See Robinson Writings and Julian Mason's 1966 collection of Wheatley's works, Poems of Phillis Wheatley.

²⁷ Robinson does not try to pin down the person to whom "To Maecenas" is written, but is satisfied to note that it was probably a contemporary of Wheatley's (see Writings 217). Julian Mason, on the other hand, suggests that "To Maecenas" was written for her owner, John Wheatley (see Shields, Collected Works 276-77).

²⁸ Achilles (Pelides) is the protagonist of The Iliad, and Patroclus is his dearest friend. Patroclus ultimately dies because Achilles refuses to help Agamemnon at Troy. The scene that Wheatley is referring to takes place at the beginning of the sixteenth book: Patroclus asks Achilles to allow him to help the Greeks wearing Achilles's armor, and with Achilles's troops.

Although he defines reference and allusion in this context as "taking," Shields contends as well that in lines 17-20 of "To Maecenas," "Wheatley almost certainly takes from the opening lines of the sixteenth book of Pope's translation of The Iliad" (Collected Works 278).

²⁹ Shields is here referring to line 365 of Pope's Essay on Criticism.

³⁰ Stanza 3 of "To Maecenas" opens with the following lines:

Great Maro 's strain in heav'nly numbers flows,
The Nine inspire, and all the bosom glows.
O could I rival thine and Virgil's page,
Or claim the Muses with the Mantuan Sage
("TM" II. 21-24)

Wheatley here refers to lines 124 to 140 of Pope's An Essay on Criticism.

³¹ The "Mantuan Sage" is another way of referring to Virgil, who was born near Mantua.

³² Wheatley was herself manumitted shortly after publication of Poems on Various Subjects. Wheatley's correspondence gives a somewhat varying account (no doubt due to the requirements of diplomacy) of the reasons that her owner finally chose to free her. For example, after traveling to England at the behest of the Countess of Huntingdon to oversee the publication of Poems on Various Subjects, Wheatley suggested in a letter to David Wooster (dated 18 October 1773) that John Wheatley was embarrassed into it: "Since my return to America my Master, has at the desire of my friends in England given me my freedom" (Collected Works 170). However, Wheatley later wrote to Thornton that John Wheatley had freed her "about 3 months before the death of my dear mistress & at her desire, as well as his own humanity" (letter to John Thornton, dated 30 October 1774, Collected Works 184).

³³ Among others, Shields has also noted an allusion to Pope in this phrase (although he mistakenly attributes it to Pope's An Essay on Man): "This line may owe something to Pope's famous description in An Essay on Man of the creative mind of genius which occasionally breaks the rules but nevertheless manages to 'snatch a Grace beyond the Reach of Art'" (Collected Works 279 n. 46.

³⁴ H. A. Mason, To Homer Through Pope 114.

³⁵ See also Shields's "Phillis Wheatley and the Sublime," (in Robinson, Critical Essays 189-205).

³⁶ See Mason 20-22.

³⁷ For fuller discussions on this subject, see Gates, in Critical Essays 223-24, and O'Neale 146.

³⁸ Shields questions Robinson's claim that "Mneme" is a shortened form of Mnemosyne, Greek goddess of memory and mother of the muses, by proposing that "Mneme" refers here to one of three much older Greek muses, Melete (meditation), Aoide (song), and Mneme (remembrance) (Collected Works 285).

It seems to me entirely possible that echoes of both references are suggested here, but in any event, from the context of the poem alone it is clear that "memory" is the largest portion of what is being signified.

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