Phillis Wheatley was writing in the late eighteenth century, before the Romantic Movement arose, and her use of poetic form is just what one would expect from an Augustan poet at this time. Wheatley writes in smooth rhyming couplets, generally in iambic pentameter. She does not use free-standing verse forms such as the sonnet, and her poems vary in length but not in style. Her writings clearly show the influence of her reading. A child prodigy, Wheatley learned to read Latin and Greek by the age of twelve, and her poems are full of classical allusions. As models, however, she chose earlier Augustan poets in English, particularly Alexander Pope.

As an example of some of these features, take one of Wheatley's most famous short poems:

'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there's a God, that 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 dye."
Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,
May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.

The lines here are perfectly regular. Elizabethan and Jacobean poets who use iambic pentameter tend to vary the meter somewhat, but Augustan writers like Wheatley favor a perfectly smooth flow of iambics.

Although this poem is only eight lines long, the diction is epic, with lofty language and an elaborate, formal structure. There are several strong caesuras in lines three, seven, and eight and a rhetorical tone to the whole poem. Wheatley also uses a biblical allusion to the brand or mark of Cain, which some Christians equated with black skin, to reinforce her point.