Review: The Short Life of a Formerly Enslaved Poet

Brought from Africa at age 7, Phillis Wheatley demanded and received emancipation shortly after the publication of her first book of poems in 1773. “In every human Breast,” she wrote in a letter at the time, “God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom.”

In The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence, historian David Waldstreicher paints a portrait of a woman bursting with agency—a very different character than the naive genius discovered and elevated by her patrons (and enslavers) whom I learned about in school.

“I humbly think it does not require the Penetration of a Philosopher,” Wheatley wryly noted, to see hypocrisy in the slave-holding Founders. In her short, colorful life, she offered her blessing to George Washington, was rudely dismissed by Thomas Jefferson, and generally held her own as the new nation’s “African poetess” and public intellectual.