[These books offer two approaches to the life and work of
Wheatley, who is a cornerstone figure of the U.S. and African American
literary traditions.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

POETRY, BIOGRAPHY, AND THE UNKNOWABLE  
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Hollis Robbins
July 30, 2023
Los Angeles Review of Books
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_ These books offer two approaches to the life and work of Wheatley,
who is a cornerstone figure of the U.S. and African American literary
traditions. _

,

 

The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys Through American
Slavery and Independence
David Waldstreicher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 9781429969451

Phillis Wheatley Peters: Biography of a Genius in Bondage
Vincent Carretta
University of Georgia Press, 2nd edition
ISBN-13: ?978-0820363325

TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY years after the publication of _Poems on Various
Subjects, Religious and Moral_, there is no easy way to know—or to
feel that you know—its author, Phillis Wheatley. She was a young
African woman, perhaps 19 years old, who had arrived in Boston a dozen
years before her book’s release, kidnapped, bedraggled, on a ship
from the coast of Africa. She never spoke or wrote about the
experience. Knowing any poet is a challenge, even confessional poets,
who, like all poets, lie all the time. Wheatley, who sailed to London
in 1773 to publish the first volume of poems in English by a Black
author, was still enslaved to the Boston family she would return home
to and be emancipated by. She was not a confessional poet, though her
most notorious poem, “On Being Brought from Africa to America”
(1773), is still being litigated as one.

I have two treatments of Wheatley’s life in front of me: Vincent
Carretta’s _Phillis Wheatley Peters_: _Biography of a Genius in
Bondage_, a revised and updated edition of a 2011 volume that was the
first full-length biography of Wheatley, and David Waldstreicher’s
_The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys Through American
Slavery and Independence_, which draws on Carretta’s earlier book to
paint a new and accessible picture of the young woman poet. Both
Carretta’s and Waldstreicher’s volumes arrive by intention on the
250th anniversary of Wheatley’s still extraordinary poetic
accomplishment.

Getting to know Wheatley via Carretta means being immersed in the
material facts of life of one portion of the globe between the years
1750 and 1800: colonial America, the slave trade, shipping lanes and
trade between Europe and the colonies, merchant and church life in
Boston, what books were available, who read what, and what political
revolutions were brewing. Carretta, on whose truly exhaustive research
over the past several decades all Wheatley scholars have depended,
brings the reader to Wheatley, to Wheatley’s era, describing in
meticulous detail what material and spiritual life most likely was for
her, what she read, whom she knew, why she may have chosen this church
over that, what doctrinal differences divided Methodists from
Congregationalists.

Getting to know Wheatley via Waldstreicher is far easier—his book
brings Wheatley to the present and to present-day readers, presuming
that she would think and speak as we think and speak. His book has
already been a big hit. He offers a Phillis Wheatley ready for her
TikTok close-up. “[B]iography and history demand that we ask what
she felt and experienced,” he argues, offering the reader a
compelling and “relatable” Wheatley. If you don’t know anything
about Wheatley and aren’t interested in 18th-century minutiae,
Waldstreicher is not a bad place to start.

If I had written this review a year ago, before ChatGPT, the stakes
would have been far lower in reviewing and comparing these two
treatments of Wheatley, exemplars of two theories of biography:
bringing either the reader to the subject or the subject to the
reader. I would have stated simply that Carretta’s volume, a
revision of his already magisterial 2011 biography updated to include
a decade’s worth of startling new details (including Cornelia
Dayton’s discoveries involving Wheatley’s marriage to a litigious
tradesman, John Peters, requiring an updated book title to reflect
Phillis Wheatley Peters’s preferred name in the final years of her
life), delivers the far richer understanding of the poet, a young
woman of her time, not ours. As a scholar and a dean invested in the
value of careful archival research and scrupulous historical accuracy,
I prefer Carretta’s approach, particularly as every claim of every
sentence carries relevant facts weighed in making conclusions.

Consider, for example, this treatment of Wheatley’s baptism:

She was baptized “18 August 1771 (At old South) Phillis servt of Mr
Wheatly.” As was customary in records of slaves, Phillis had no
surname. She had probably not been baptized earlier because
Congregationalists were commonly baptized at the age of eighteen, the
age her enslavers may have assumed she reached in the summer of 1771.
Rev. Samuel Cooper (1725–83), minister of the Brattle Street Church,
baptized Phillis at Old South because Old South had not yet called
Rev. John Bacon (1738–1820) and Rev. John Hunt (1744–75) to serve
as its joint pastors. Being baptized at Old South, rather than at New
South, the Wheatley family church, may have been one of Phillis
Wheatley’s earliest acts of independence, though she was still
enslaved. Old South no doubt appealed to Phillis because it accepted
the Half-Way Covenant, which permitted the baptism of children whose
parents were not full members of the church. Old South probably also
appealed to Phillis Wheatley because during the 1760s it was the
Congregationalist church in Boston most sympathetic to [George]
Whitefield’s Methodist mission.

At this point in his biography, Carretta has already provided detailed
background on “Old Light” and “New Light” Congregationalists
as well as Anglican and Calvinist Methodists, the career of Jonathan
Edwards, the Great Awakening, and Whitefield’s influence on New
England culture and Wheatley’s religious and writing community. If
doctrinal differences were important to Wheatley, they should be
explained to the reader.

Compare Waldstreicher’s version of events:

The septuagenarian [Rev. Joseph] Sewall didn’t meet his maker until
1769, but he’d been quite ill in 1765. Known as an effective pastor
who stressed family piety, at some point Sewall picked up the nickname
“the weeping prophet.” Wheatley would have seen Sewall carried in
a chair up to his pulpit, still holding forth in Old South after more
than fifty years. While Sewall was clearly well-liked by the Wheatley
family, John and Susanna were members of New South Church rather than
the nearer Old South. Phillis would choose differently, joining the
Old South Church formally at the usual age of eighteen, in 1771, after
a two-year delay in the settlement of a replacement for Sewall had
occurred. She would ratify that choice when she was baptized by the
Reverend Samuel Cooper—a grandson of Samuel and nephew of Joseph
Sewall—at Brattle Street Church, where he had been pastor since
1744. To praise Boston’s leading preachers but to make her own
choices among them pushed the claims that a female slave could make on
membership in the covenanted community.

Waldstreicher’s version offers no argument at all for Phillis’s
choice of a different church than the Wheatley family. There are
details offered, yes, but they seem whimsical and vague. Why “at
some point” had Sewall picked up a nickname and why did this matter
to Wheatley? We never learn.

By contrast, while certainly not _fun_, the painstaking research
Carretta provides is crucial for understanding such details as
Wheatley’s relationship with the people around her, including her
neighbors and her longtime correspondent Obour Tanner; the place of
Evangelical Methodism in the American colonies at the time; and the
role of individuals like Countess Huntingdon, to whom _Poems on
Various Subjects_ is dedicated. When, nearly 70 pages in, Carretta’s
readers finally get to Wheatley’s first published poem, “On
Messrs. Hussey and Coffin” (1767), about a schooner laden with whale
oil that survived the most terrible gale in memory, sufficient details
about the key players (Nathaniel Coffin was an Anglican Boston
merchant and an enslaver of a young girl named Sappho while Hussey was
one of several sons of a prominent and prosperous Nantucket Quaker
merchant and owner of whaling vessels) have been offered to support
Carretta’s claim that “Phillis was already commenting on
transatlantic economic and political subjects by the time she was
about fifteen years old.” As the opening lines show, Wheatley’s
poetic voice is bold and questioning:

 

Did Fear and Danger so perplex your Mind, As made you fearful of the
Whistling Wind? Was it not Boreas knit his angry Brow Against you? or
did Consideration bow? To lend you Aid, did not his Winds combine? To
stop your passage with a churlish Line, Did haughty Eolus with
Contempt look down With Aspect windy, and a study’d Frown? Regard
them not;—the Great Supreme, the Wise, Intends for something hidden
from our Eyes.

The path to this poem has been long, but we understand the import of
the poet’s boldness and questioning, exhibited, for example, in her
choice of church.

Waldstreicher opens his book with this very poem, to begin his
argument that Wheatley’s poetic expressions must be a matter of what
she personally experienced and felt. Since Wheatley was brought to
America on a slave ship on a rough and dangerous journey, she must
have felt a personal connection to the story of a rough and dangerous
sea journey:

It isn’t hard to imagine why the survivor of a slave ship could
identify with another terrifying voyage, with voyagers who wondered
whether the punishing winds were themselves alive (“Was it not
Boreas knit his angry Brow / Against you?”) and whether the stormy
emotions of gods would doom or deliver, save or destroy. But enslaved
girls were not encouraged to speak of those voyages.

First of all, the entire historical record in fact demonstrates that
young Phillis _was_ encouraged by the Wheatley family to speak as well
as to read and write. “The Wheatleys gave Phillis access to a
dictionary and a place to write, and allowed her to mix socially with
their politically, religiously, and socially prominent guests,”
Carretta tells us.

Second, while it is not at all wrong to wonder whether the trauma of
the poet’s Middle Passage sparked her drive to write so forcefully
and so well, it is a question, not a certainty. Today, in 2023, making
a connection between a traumatic experience and a work of art is so
habitual that it’s nearly impossible to see that not all art works
like this, and no poet or critic would assume such a connection in the
18th century. But Waldstreicher’s readers don’t really have a
choice to agree or not with his conjectures and conclusions that “On
Messrs. Hussey and Coffin” was more about Wheatley than about Hussey
and Coffin. Waldstreicher does not mention that Coffin was an enslaver
in talking about the poem. An endnote disputes Carretta’s claim,
saying that “there were many Coffins and Husseys” in the area. But
shouldn’t readers be told it is a possibility?

For Waldstreicher, bringing Wheatley to the present, to the modern
reader, often paradoxically means talking about her poems in ways that
would have been strange to Wheatley herself. As he describes, “She
returns to the trope of threatening deities: another wind god, Aeolus,
was angry, haughty, frowning. She backs off: she depersonalizes, in a
classical idiom that to modern readers has seemed so off-putting, so
scholastic, so _white_.” Waldstreicher seems to be suggesting that
Wheatley is responding to being triggered by using unfamiliar
“white” classical allusions to distance herself from her trauma.
This makes no sense, of course: Wheatley knew her Greek mythology
well. And here is a missed opportunity in Waldstreicher’s approach:
in attempting to bring Wheatley and her work to the present-day reader
probably unfamiliar with Greek myth, he does not explain that Aeolus
and Boreas are wind gods with unequal power relations and the latter
also a kidnapper of Athenian princesses, but rather dismisses the
topic altogether to make the simpler claim that the African-born
Wheatley is “storm-tossed,” like many classical victims and
heroes. Wheatley’s poem is much richer than Waldstreicher seems to
think it is.

Carretta’s treatment of the question of the poet’s first, terrible
voyage is fact-based, even in its hypotheticals and speculations:

Phillis Wheatley does not mention her own Middle Passage in any of her
known writings. Perhaps her experience was understandably so traumatic
that she was never able or willing to reimagine it. Nearly one out of
four of her fellow enslaved Africans died aboard the _Phillis _on
their way to Boston in 1761. She was clearly lucky to have survived.
The sight of so much death around her may help to account for her
subsequent attention to death in so many of her earliest poems. From
contemporaneous accounts of the Middle Passage by and about other
enslaved Africans we can be quite sure that as a prepubescent girl she
was allowed to roam the vessel much more freely than older enslaved
Africans, who might pose a physical threat to the crew.

Again, had I written this review a year ago, I also would have stated
that Carretta’s book is the more important volume, considered as a
work of academic research and evidence-based argument.
Waldstreicher’s portrait of Phillis Wheatley owes a debt to Carretta
as well as to other key Wheatley scholars, including Henry Louis Gates
Jr., Joanna Brooks, and Cornelia Dayton, whose names appear in
footnotes but not in the body of Waldstreicher’s text. Yet I also
would have grudgingly admitted that Waldstreicher’s book was of
tremendous importance in welcoming new readers to Wheatley’s poetry
and Wheatley’s story. As much as I may have personal resistance to a
“relatable” Phillis Wheatley, why not celebrate if her story
elicits new public interest? Waldstreicher’s Wheatley is emotionally
compelling: always in control, poised to resist and dissent, fully
aware of systems of oppression and her place within these systems.

But we have entered the AI era, with new and ongoing discussions of
how artificial intelligence will affect all of us who write, who sift
evidence, who weigh facts and assess the motivation of historical and
literary figures, who can hold in our minds simultaneously multiple
perspectives on and versions of events, comfortable with ambiguity and
being certain only about the fact that we will never truly know what
happened long ago and how to interpret historical material. I am
concerned that Waldstreicher’s repurposing of other scholars’
facts to craft a new and perhaps too convincing psychological profile
of Phillis Wheatley, as modern as she is familiar, seems a frightening
forerunner of what ChatGPT and other AI platforms will soon deliver.

We have seen what ChatGPT can do: write a birthday poem in the manner
of Emily Dickinson, write a rap for Napoleon lamenting Waterloo, write
a play about the Iroquois hunting dinosaurs on the moon. Everything is
everywhere all at once in the AI era. Chatbots hallucinate, making up
facts and legal cases and works of scholarship that don’t exist.
When I ask GPT-4 “what might modern readers assume Phillis Wheatley
was thinking when she wrote ‘On Messrs. Huffey and Coffin’ in
1767,” it answers thus:

As an AI, I can’t ascertain what today’s readers might believe
about Phillis Wheatley’s thoughts, as they will have different
interpretations based on their own perspectives and understanding of
her work and life. However, I can suggest that modern readers may
consider several aspects when interpreting Wheatley’s early poem.

 

* LIFE AND DEATH: The poem is about two men who narrowly escape death
at sea. Considering Wheatley was enslaved and transported across the
Atlantic as a child, an experience known as the Middle Passage which
often resulted in high mortality rates, she may have had a personal
understanding of the dangers of sea travel. Modern readers might
surmise that she was contemplating the fine line between life and
death in these verses.
* RHETORIC AND PERSUASION: This poem, like many of Wheatley’s
others, makes use of religious imagery and themes. Readers today might
think she was using this familiar language to appeal to her mostly
white, Christian audience, asserting her intelligence and capability
in a society that often denied the humanity of enslaved people.
* SELF-EXPRESSION: Wheatley was among the first African-American
poets, and her writing was a profound act of self-expression in a
society that often suppressed the voices of people like her. Today’s
readers might imagine she was thinking about her own experiences,
emotions, and ideas as she penned her first poem, using the act of
writing as a means of asserting her identity and individuality.
* EMOTIONAL RESONANCE: Wheatley might have been thinking about the
emotional impact of her words. Her poem speaks to a human
experience—the fear and relief associated with a narrow escape from
death—that transcends her particular place and time. Readers today
might appreciate how Wheatley used her poetry to evoke shared feelings
and experiences, helping to bridge the gap between her own lived
reality and that of her readers.

 

Again, these are all speculations based on a reading of the text and
an understanding of Wheatley’s life and historical context. The
beauty of poetry lies in its openness to multiple interpretations and
the individual connections readers can make with the text.

GPT-4 is very good at the kind of interpretation that makes readers
feel certain they understand the poem. When you push a little harder
and ask GPT-4 how might an 18th-century reader and 21st century reader
differ in their reading of Wheatley’s poem “On Messrs. Hussey and
Coffin,” including their understanding references to actual people
and allusions to Aeolus and Boreas, you still get a kind of certainty:

Sure, let’s focus on the poem “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin” and
consider the specific elements you mentioned.

* UNDERSTANDING OF ACTUAL PEOPLE: “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin”
was written about two men who survived a brush with death at sea. A
contemporary reader in the 18th century may have been more aware of
the actual incident or people involved, especially if they were part
of Wheatley’s immediate Bostonian society. On the other hand, a
21st-century reader would not have this personal context unless they
undertook specific historical research.
* ALLUSIONS TO AEOLUS AND BOREAS: Aeolus is a figure from Greek
mythology who was known as the keeper of the winds, while Boreas was
the god of the North Wind. An educated 18th-century reader, familiar
with Greek mythology due to the period’s classical education, would
immediately understand these allusions. They might see them as an
indication of Wheatley’s impressive learnedness. A 21st-century
reader, however, might not immediately recognize these allusions
unless they are familiar with Greek mythology. When they do understand
these references, they might focus on how Wheatley was leveraging the
cultural capital of the Classics, part of the dominant (white, elite)
culture, to express her own experiences and perspectives.
* OVERALL INTERPRETATION: An 18th-century reader, living in a
society that practiced slavery, might have been astonished at the
intellectual capabilities of an enslaved African woman. They might
have seen the poem as evidence of the “benevolence” of
Wheatley’s enslavers in providing her with an education. A
21st-century reader, conversely, might focus on the power dynamics in
the poem. They might interpret Wheatley’s skilled use of classical
allusions and poetic form as a critique or subversion of the power
structures that kept her enslaved. They might also consider the poem
in the context of Wheatley’s life, as well as the broader African
American literary tradition.

 

Thus, the perspectives of the 18th- and 21st-century readers can
differ greatly due to their different historical, cultural, and social
contexts.

They surely do.

Two hundred and fifty years after the publication of _Poems on Various
Subjects, Religious and Moral_, there is no easy way to know—or to
feel that you know—its author, Phillis Wheatley, a young African
woman, perhaps 19 years old, who had arrived a dozen years earlier in
Boston, homeless, bedraggled, enslaved, on a slave ship from the coast
of Africa, and framed the experience in a way we’re still fighting
about.

 

’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 die.”
Remember, _Christians_, _Negros_, black as _Cain_, May be refin’d,
and join th’ angelic train.

Is this poem what it says it is? GPT-4 tells us:

The poem is about her journey from Africa to America and her
acceptance of Christianity, interpreting her enslavement and transport
to America as an act of divine mercy because it introduced her to
Christianity. This is a complex perspective that reflects the
difficult circumstances of her life.

Or is it?

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_Hollis Robbins is dean of humanities at the University of Utah. Her
most recent book is _Forms of Contention: Influence and the African
American Sonnet Tradition_ (2020). _
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* 18th Century U.S. History
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* Poetry
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* African American literature
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* American literature
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