Early American Literature

In Phillis Wheatley’s Poetics of Liberation: Backgrounds and Contexts, John C. Shields sets out to correct numerous errors of perception and scholarship that have misrepresented the writings of Phillis Wheatley for decades, if not longer. It is an unfortunate fact that innumerable scholars and critics (beginning with Thomas Jefferson, no less) have portrayed Phillis Wheatley’s works as unremarkable in composition, derivative of the poetry of Alexander Pope, or, even more remarkably, as reflecting no social consciousness or concern with the plight of African slaves. In fact, Shields is even able to cite the renowned historian John Hope Franklin who asserted that Wheatley “was not concerned with the problems of Negroes or the country” (26). Even though Phillis Wheatley is one of the most anthologized of American poets, one who actually does write directly about the issue of slavery as well as other social and political problems of the country, these claims have plagued her and her works. It leaves one wondering how such patently wrong claims about her work have continued to circulate as received fact.

It is high time that a significant, book-length study of Wheatley appear for scholars and students interested in a careful, well-documented analysis of Wheatley as one of the most important writers of the Revolution [End Page 724] ary period, one who is also arguably one of the pioneers of the American romantic movement. Indeed, Shields does an excellent job of debunking the myths and misrepresentations of Wheatley’s works, but, most important, he does so by carefully analyzing the actual poetry and letters as aesthetic objects that are a part of the cultural, spiritual, and intellectual milieu of the period. As a result, Shields arrives at the conclusion that what Phillis Wheatley’s poetics ultimately represent is a poetics of liberation that at times reveal that “she is decidedly romantic” (20).

The first chapter of Shields’s book outlines his theory of Wheatley’s poetics of liberation, situating her themes and poetic expressions within her contemporary context of intellectual, Revolutionary discourse. In this way, Shields reveals to the reader the various ways Phillis Wheatley expressly addressed political matters and engaged in a discourse concerning human rights alongside a variety of other English and British American thinkers, including Revolutionaries, who were trying to work to define the social and political implications of “liberty,” and for whom such ideas applied. So, as Shields points out, when Wheatley “speaks for liberty” in a number of poems, including “America,” “On the Death of Mr. Snider Murder’d by Richardson,” “To The King’s Most Excellent Majesty,” “To the Rt. Hon. Earl of Dartmouth,” and “To His Excellency General Washington,” among many other poems, “she is not addressing some remote, even vacuous and unrealizable probability; she is, according to the female intelligentsia of the time, describing a thoroughly plausible . . . probability, the dignity of political liberty for all human beings” (33). Shields contends that her calling as a poet was to explicitly expound on the theme of liberty in all its manifestations, both political and intellectual, and that the oeuvre of her writings, in addition to winning Wheatley her own physical freedom, was probably a means of survival as well (41).

One of the elements of Shields’s study that stands apart from much previous Wheatley scholarship is his emphasis on examining the actual works. He treats Wheatley’s poetry as worthy of careful literary analysis, both as individual works and as a corpus. He avoids the all-too-common claim of many previous critics that what makes Wheatley’s work so important is simply that she was a slave who wrote. In fact, Shields establishes that scholars should not only examine her various poems and letters but also consider the various stages of her writing career. John Shields is the first scholar to approach her work in this regard, arguing that “in the case of [End Page 725] her male counterparts, the poet . . . undergoes an early development whose products are called juvenilia...