17 pages • 34 minutes read
America
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Background
Historical Context: Poetry and the American Revolution
“America” is a war poem written in and to a nation edging toward an armed conflict—in this case, one that would feature the American colonists and their French allies against the British. Since the Founding Fathers wished to unite the colonies as a republic, the revolution became a touchstone for a generation of poets who saw in the revolution a manifestation of freedom, equality, and Enlightenment values.
However, many of the poems most associated with the American Revolution itself—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride,” for instance, or Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Concord Hymn”—would not be composed until more than a half-century after the British surrender at Yorktown. Such poems became a reflection of America’s own search for a national identity and its desire for a common culture. Most of the poetry actually written during the conflict reflects that revolution’s aspirational spirit. The most noted poet of the American Revolution was Philip Freneau (1752-1832), a journalist who represented the American Revolution as a manifestation of the will of Americans eager for political freedom and committed to creating a new kind of empire from the wilderness of the unexplored continent. His poetry was fiery, inspirational, and idealistic.
That idealistic voice of the American Revolution can be compared to Wheatley’s. As an enslaved person, Wheatley’s numerous poems dedicated to her ruminations on the American Revolution embraced the ideal of the new America as a bastion of liberty, but they inevitably interrogated that premise from the position of someone devoid of legal rights. Her poetry, although always laudatory about the courage and heroic idealism of the American experiment, was more pragmatic, more realistic than Freneau’s. Her Revolutionary War poetry chided the colonists quietly, often ironically, to apply their same lofty principles of freedom to those they enslaved.
Literary Context: Wheatley and Neo-Classicism
No poet in the mid-18th century, British or American, wrote without following the templates of the Neo-Classical giants. Thus Wheatley’s poetry—with its complex prosody, its lofty and erudite diction, and its allusive references to the myths of Antiquity—is conventional for her era. Despite being technically an American living in Boston, Wheatley drew on the poetic templates of the Neo-Classical poets in England whose works were popular and acclaimed. She became familiar with the works of John Dryden, John Milton, and Alexander Pope, as well as a host of Greek and Roman poets, most notably Ovid and Cicero. Wheatley displayed a confident command of how poetry should sound, how it should scan, and how it should look to conform to the conventions of the day.
However, as an enslaved person, Wheatley attracted both acclaim and skepticism for her work. It was initially difficult for her to find a publisher for her debut collection, and even after its release there were some who either derided her verse or expressed disbelief that an enslaved person could write poetry at all. She became something of a celebrity for a time, but she then struggled again to publish a second collection and sunk into poverty. In the decades after her death, her poetry continued to divide opinion: Some abolitionists would find an argument against slavery in her clear display of talent, while later Black scholars criticized what they regarded as Wheatley’s apparent acquiescence to her enslaved status. It was only more recently that scholars have re-evaluated their assessments of her life and work, uncovering more clues regarding her critical stance towards slavery. In this, Wheatley’s literary context reaches back to British Neo-Classical templates, but it anticipates more than a century later the assertion of pride and dignity that became the roots of the artistic renaissance among Black writers, painters, musicians, and visual artists.
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By Phillis Wheatley
