Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral

About

Phillis Wheatley's 1773 collection was the first book of poetry published by an African American and the second by an American woman — composed by an enslaved woman who had taught herself to read and write and mastered the neoclassical verse forms of Pope and Young. The poems are simultaneously a demonstration of Black intellectual capacity (in a society that denied it), a record of personal piety, and — in poems like 'On Being Brought from Africa to America' — a subtle negotiation with the paradox of her position. Wheatley was manumitted the year her book was published.