Phillis Wheatley's Use of Classicism

Abstract

1ERHAPs because Phillis Wheatley was not only the first Black American to publish a volume of poems, but also the second American woman to do so, critics too exclusively use her example for the premise of socioanthropological argument. Rarely have they noted the esthetic merit of the young slave girl's writing, still less frequently her classical learning. Flourishing just before the American Revolution, Wheatley wrote poetry filled with classical allusions, including her own variations upon the theme of Niobe. George and Evert Duyckinck remarked in their popular Cyclopaedia of American Literature (i866) that the interpolation of a line at one point in her rendering of Ovid would do honor to any pen. Indeed it does; Wheatley's line intensifies the wrath of Apollo, preparing to avenge an insult to his mother Latona by slaughtering all fourteen of Niobe's children: