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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral," Phillis Wheatley, the first published African American poet, intricately weaves her experiences and reflections within a neoclassical framework. Her lyrical style, characterized by its eloquence and graceful meter, explores themes such as religion, morality, and the human experience. Contextually, Wheatley's work emerged during the 18th century, a time fraught with racial tension and the complexities of slavery, which she navigates with a poignant and profound voice, ultimately challenging dominant narratives through her articulate verses. Phillis Wheatley was born in West Africa and was brought to America as an enslaved child. Her extraordinary aptitude for language and poetry was nurtured by her owners, the Wheatley family, who educated her and recognized her talents. Wheatley's writings not only reflect her personal struggles and triumphs but also serve as a testament to her resilience and intellect in an era when such voices were often silenced. Her position as both a poet and a Black woman in a predominantly white society adds depth to her work and underscores her significant role in American literary history. This collection is highly recommended for readers interested in the intersections of race, gender, and literature, as Wheatley's poems challenge preconceived notions about the capabilities of enslaved individuals. "Poems on Various Subjects" is not only a foundational text in African American literature but also an essential read for those seeking to engage with a narrative that merges beauty, spirituality, and social commentary. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Poems on various subjects, religious and moral
Table of Contents
Introduction
This volume, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, presents the single book of poems Phillis Wheatley published in her lifetime, first appearing in 1773. As a unified collection, it gathers her moral, devotional, occasional, and classical pieces into a carefully ordered demonstration of learning, piety, and poetic craft. Its overarching purpose is both literary and social: to show mastery of the prevailing poetic forms of the eighteenth century while offering meditations designed to edify and instruct. The result is neither a miscellany nor a complete works, but a deliberately framed set of poems addressing public events, private losses, and enduring religious concerns.
The collection’s architecture is signaled by its paratexts—Preface, the letter by John Wheatley, and To the Public—which introduce the author and attest to the authenticity of her work. These materials do not merely preface poems; they establish the volume’s public character and the conditions of its reception. In an era attentive to reputation and authority, such framing documents invite readers to consider the poems as the achievement of a learned mind formed within the moral and religious culture the volume advances. Together, they orient the reader to the volume’s aims and to the social world in which it circulated.
The poems themselves encompass a broad range of eighteenth-century genres. Readers encounter hymns and devotional verses, elegies and consolation pieces, odes, scriptural paraphrase, occasional addresses, and epistles to individuals. The book includes narrative and heroic treatments such as Goliath of Gath, classical engagement in Niobe in Distress, and reflective pieces like On Imagination and On Recollection. Scriptural engagement appears in Isaiah lxiii. 1–8, while maritime and natural themes surface in Ode to Neptune and Thoughts on the Works of Providence. The volume also includes a rebus and its answer, showing Wheatley’s ease with playful forms alongside solemn subjects.
Public address is a pronounced feature. Poems are written to figures of authority and influence—to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty (1768), to the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth, and to colonial officials—revealing a poet at home in the transatlantic sphere of patronage and print. Such poems move within the idiom of loyal praise and moral counsel, balancing deference with a pointed ethical imagination. They mark the collection as a work of its historical moment, engaging civic life and power while maintaining a devotional center, and illustrating how verse could contribute to public discourse without forsaking spiritual and moral ends.
Equally prominent are elegies and poems of condolence, commemorating clergy, public figures, and children. Pieces such as those on the deaths of the Rev. Dr. Sewell (1769), the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield (1770), and numerous family members and acquaintances perform the period’s consolatory work. These poems weave reflections on mortality, the hope of salvation, and the duties of the living into formal tributes fitting for domestic circulation and public remembrance. Through measured praise and doctrinal assurance, they bind private grief to communal belief, exemplifying how occasional verse mediated loss and affirmed the providential order that structures the collection’s moral outlook.
Religious devotion anchors the book. Hymns to morning and evening, meditations on providence, and scriptural paraphrase make clear the theological core of Wheatley’s art. The poem to the University of Cambridge, in New-England addresses students with moral exhortation, joining learning to piety. Across the collection, providence governs human fate; virtue is urged as a reasonable service; and prayer shapes the moral life. These are not sermons in meter but poetic engagements with doctrine, designed to move the affections and instruct the mind. The consistent alignment of poetic form and religious content gives the book its unmistakable unity of purpose.
Classical learning supplies a second axis of coherence. To Maecenas situates the poet within an Augustan lineage, while Niobe in Distress adapts Ovidian narrative to moral interpretation. The heroic strain of Goliath of Gath draws biblical material into epic register, illustrating neoclassical taste applied to sacred story. Such poems demonstrate facility with allusion, exemplum, and decorum, establishing Wheatley’s command of the period’s literary idiom. The steady use of heroic couplets, balanced syntax, and personification reflects the discipline of an education in the classics, and shows how ancient models and Christian ends could coexist in the architecture of eighteenth-century verse.
The collection also registers the author’s position within the Atlantic world of African-descended letters. On Being Brought from Africa to America and To S. M. a Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works address origins and artistic kinship within a Christian moral frame. Without abandoning the idioms of civility and piety, these poems open a space for acknowledging an African past and celebrating talent against the constraints of the day. Their compact arguments and poised address exemplify Wheatley’s capacity to speak into a divided public, advancing a universal moral claim while marking the presence of Black intellectual and artistic achievement.
Poems on imagination, recollection, and nature extend the book’s range beyond tribute and exhortation. On Imagination and On Recollection explore faculties of mind as sources of delight and moral insight, while Thoughts on the Works of Providence contemplates the harmony of creation. Ode to Neptune merges maritime power with figurative play, signaling the poet’s delight in personification and allegory. These pieces bring together the sensibility prized in the period with the devotional framework that grounds the collection, allowing readers to experience aesthetic pleasure as a path to gratitude and reverence. The result is a carefully balanced union of fancy and faith.
Many pieces are occasional in the fullest sense, responding to voyages, storms, illness, and recoveries. Poems to captains, clergy, patrons, and friends trace the social networks through which the book moved. To a Lady on her remarkable preservation in an hurricane in North-Carolina, To a Gentleman on his voyage to Great-Britain for the recovery of his health, and A Farewel to America. To Mrs. S. W. exemplify how verse could mark thresholds and passages. These poems operate as public gestures and private tokens, offering counsel, comfort, and celebration. Collectively, they portray a community knit by correspondence, ceremony, and shared moral language.
Stylistically, the collection displays a disciplined eloquence: heroic couplets with emphatic closures, antithesis and parallelism, apostrophe to abstract virtues and divine attributes, and a diction suited to religious and civic themes. The hallmarks are clarity, balance, and control, yet within these constraints Wheatley achieves moments of striking compression and address. Unifying themes include providence, mortality, virtue, and the uses of learning, all articulated through forms that were the lingua franca of her age. The book remains significant for its literary achievement within those forms and for its place in early American and African American letters as a landmark of authorship.
As a whole, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral invites readers to encounter an eighteenth-century poetic voice that is at once public and intimate, classical and scriptural, occasional and enduring. Its scope encompasses a representative array of the period’s genres; its purpose is moral, devotional, and civic; its achievement lies in the coherence of tone and design across varied subjects. Approached in sequence, the paratexts and poems model how a poet entered the republic of letters and spoke to her moment. Approached thematically, they reveal a sustained meditation on faith and virtue that continues to instruct and reward.
Author Biography
Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753–1784) was a pioneering poet of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, the first African American to publish a book of poetry and among the earliest published women poets in what became the United States. Enslaved as a child and brought to Boston, she achieved literary prominence through polished neoclassical verse that engaged religion, history, and politics. Her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) circulated in Britain and North America, prompting debates about authorship, race, and intellectual capacity. Wheatley’s work remains central to studies of early American literature, Black Atlantic writing, and the complex intersections of enslavement, faith, and Enlightenment ideals.
Born in West Africa and transported on a slave ship to Boston in the early 1760s, Wheatley entered a household that encouraged her education. She learned to read English rapidly and studied the Bible, geography, and classical literature, with exposure to Latin. Boston’s vibrant print culture and networks of ministers, merchants, and intellectuals brought her poetry to public attention. As a teenager she composed occasional verses and elegies for newspapers and broadsides, displaying poise in iambic pentameter and an ear for the heroic couplet. Early recognition established her as a prodigy, even as racial prejudice shaped how audiences evaluated her achievement.
Unable to secure a publisher locally, Wheatley traveled to London in the early 1770s, where her first book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, appeared. The volume included a prefatory statement by prominent Bostonians attesting that she had written the poems, a document that reflects the skepticism faced by an enslaved African woman writer. Patronage, notably from evangelical circles, facilitated publication. The collection’s range—elegies, biblical paraphrases, hymns, and tributes—showcased mastery of neoclassical conventions. Its success made Wheatley a transatlantic figure and helped catalyze conversations about slavery, religion, and education in the colonies and Britain.
Wheatley’s influences included Alexander Pope and John Milton, as well as classical authors encountered through translations and schooling. She favored the heroic couplet and drew on myth, scriptural typology, and the rhetoric of virtue to structure moral reflection. At the same time, she crafted pointed meditations on bondage and liberty. Poems such as On Being Brought from Africa to America, An Hymn to the Evening, and To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth intertwine piety with political resonance, often compressing critique into the decorum of eighteenth-century verse. Her art balances praise and admonition, foregrounding spiritual equality within a hierarchical society.
During the Revolutionary era, Wheatley wrote To His Excellency, George Washington, praising the struggle for American independence in elevated, classical imagery. She sent the poem to Washington, who replied respectfully, signaling the regard some leaders held for her talent. Reception was mixed: admirers cited her as proof of African intellectual capacity, while detractors questioned originality or authorship. Her published letter to the Mohegan minister Samson Occom linked Christian principles to a universal love of freedom, articulating an antislavery argument that echoed through abolitionist networks. Across poems and correspondence, she navigated the constraints of patronage while edging public discourse toward liberty.
Wheatley gained legal freedom in the early 1770s, around the time her book appeared, and continued writing through the disruptions of war and economic instability. She sought support to issue a second volume, circulating proposals and assembling manuscripts, but the project did not reach print. Individual poems and tributes continued to appear in periodicals, and her themes increasingly joined classical poise to forthright appeals for moral reform. Despite public fame, precarious finances limited her opportunities. The contrast between her celebrated authorship and the material realities of postcolonial life underscores the fragile circumstances in which early Black writers labored.
Wheatley died in Boston in the mid-1780s, leaving a slender yet formative body of work that has resonated across centuries. Nineteenth-century abolitionists and educators cited her as emblematic of Black intellect, while twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars have reappraised her irony, classical strategies, and political nuance. Today, her poems appear regularly in academic syllabi and anthologies, studied for their craft and as documents of the revolutionary Atlantic. Her achievement opened paths for African American letters and reshaped expectations of who could speak in the public sphere, ensuring her place as a foundational voice in American and African diasporic poetry.
