The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley

October 1, 2022

In Slavery's Constitution, Waldstreicher, Distinguished Professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Center, unpeeled the U.S. Constitution to reveal enslavement at its heart. Here he unpeels the life and work of seminal Black American poet Phillis Wheatley, revealing how her writing prompted argument and counterargument about race, subjugation, and British rule and what it ultimately meant for the institution of enslavement during a fight for independence.

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2023
A biography of the Phillis Wheatley focused on her poetry and the politics of Revolutionary-era America. Waldstreicher, a history professor and author of Slavery's Constitution and Runaway America, documents Wheatley's arrival in Boston on the slave ship Phillis, her purchase by Susanna Wheatley in 1761, her storied writing career, and her life after emancipation. The author's primary focus, however, is Wheatley's work, about which he offers many intriguing insights. This book, he writes, is "a joint exercise in history and literary criticism." Waldstreicher argues that Wheatley gave "subversive and productive meanings" to her classical and neoclassical-inspired poetry, becoming both a "political actor and an artist of quality and note" in the 18th-century world she inhabited, a world marked by the "abominable hypocrisy" of American slave owners who likened their oppression by Britain to slavery. For those familiar only with Wheatley's often anthologized "On Being Brought From Africa to America," the breadth and depth of her poetry will be a revelation, as will her correspondence with Samson Occom and George Washington; her intimate, lifelong friendship with Obour Tanner, an enslaved woman in Newport, Rhode Island; and the details of Wheatley's trip with her enslaver's son to London, where she stayed for six weeks in 1763. The attention that Waldstreicher pays to the complexity of Wheatley's identities as an African, a woman, and an enslaved person (among other identities) in his close readings of her poetry is sometimes missing from his discussion of her life. Questions like how much control Wheatley had over her own literary productions and their circulation while she was enslaved remain largely unasked. Given his focus on the political contexts and meanings of Wheatley's work, Waldstreicher leaves room for future biographers to further examine Wheatley's life as she became the "most famous African in North America and Europe during the era of the American Revolution." Wheatley's poetry comes into sharper focus, but Wheatley herself remains elusive.

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Starred review from January 9, 2023
Waldstreicher (Slavery’s Constitution), a history professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center, delivers a magisterial biography of 18th-century poet Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784). Tracing Wheatley’s trajectory from a promising student to a national celebrity, he explores her development as an artist and focuses on how Wheatley crafted “subversive” meanings and considered “piety, politics, and race” in her work. He begins in 1761 with Wheatley’s arrival by slave ship in Boston, where as a young girl she was enslaved by the Wheatley family until they granted her freedom in 1773, shortly after the publication of her first poetry collection. Waldstreicher excels at teasing out the subtle political messages within Wheatley’s poetry, contending, for instance, that “On Being Brought from Africa to America” satirizes the racism critics accuse it of perpetuating. The author candidly addresses gaps in the historical record, such as when he constructs a plausible account of the under-documented last six years of Wheatley’s life, when her marriage to a domineering grocer took her out of the limelight. The historical scholarship dazzles and the incisive analysis of Wheatley’s poetry suggests she had a more “liberatory political agenda” than she’s often credited for. The result is an indispensable take on an essential early American poet.

Starred review from February 1, 2023
Stolen from her African family as a girl; forced onto the slave ship Phillis, and purchased in 1761 by the Wheatley family in Boston, prodigy-poet Phillis Wheatley launched a complexly creative and courageous life of strategic dissent that has never before been so fully illuminated. Nor has Wheatley's poetry been fully appreciated for its nuanced response to the epic moral and political battles of her revolutionary time. Historian Waldstreicher zestfully establishes an intricately detailed context for his in-depth analysis of Wheatley's experiences and writings, from her relationship with the family who supported her literary ambitions and controlled her life to her interactions with the most powerful figures in America and England and triumphant London visit upon publication of her first book. Waldstreicher's use of "odyssey" reflects both Wheatley's journey and fluency in Homer and other poets from Horace to Milton and Pope. Waldstreicher's fresh readings of her poems and letters explore her literary adeptness, political savvy, cutting irony, and antislavery arguments. He traces the delicate balancing act Wheatley elegantly performed as an enslaved person (until her 1773 emancipation) and public figure whose poems served as sophisticated, lyric op-eds on the toxic hypocrisy of the colonists' enslaving Africans while demanding freedom from British tyranny. With extensive notes and appendices, Waldstreicher's engrossing restorative biography makes one hope for a Hamilton-style celebration of Wheatley's profound quest.

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