A Black Tory Abolitionist in Early America: Phillis Wheatley’s Republican Poetics

Abstract

ABSTRACT The first African-American to publish a book, Phillis Wheatley has long been disparaged, by eighteenth-century slave owners and twentieth-century leftists alike, as ‘a third rate imitation of Alexander Pope’. No one, however, seems to have taken very seriously what the obvious presence of Pope in Wheatley’s poetry might mean, and this is the question the following article explores. Pope belonged to a conservative neo-classical cultural movement that was united by its opposition to the capitalist modernity emerging in early eighteenth-century England, and Wheatley draws from and in the process boldly reinvents the aesthetics and thought of this movement in order both to reiterate its republican values and to illuminate their abolitionist and indeed socialist potential.