Phillis Wheatley's Miltonic Poetics

P. Loscocco

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137474773
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137470058
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Phillis Wheatley, the African-born slave poet, is considered by many to be a pioneer of Anglo-American poetics. This study argues how in her 1773 POEMS, Wheatley uses John Milton's poetry to develop an idealistic vision of an emerging Anglo-American republic comprised of Britons, Africans, Native Americans, and women.

1

Conspiracy Theory: “Britannia’s Distant Shore”

Abstract: Chapter 1 addresses a multidisciplinary resistance to reading Wheatley and Milton together. Sifting through literary histories of Milton in early America and postcolonial studies of Wheatley in the context of transatlantic culture and African American literature, it discovers a deep-seated unease about bringing British (and especially Miltonic) literary tradition to bear on early American studies in general and African American or transatlantic cultural studies in particular. In response, the Chapter brings together a mix of revisionist history, protofeminism, early African American studies, intertextuality, pre-nineteenth-century cultural history, and Milton studies in order to lay a working foundation for understanding the epochal nature of Wheatley’s poetic achievement in Revolution-era Anglo-America.

Keywords: African American literature; American literature; American Revolution; American studies; Anglo-America; early women writers; eighteenth-century cultural studies; English literature; intertextuality; John Milton; liberty; literary history; Milton studies; Phillis Wheatley; postcolonialism; slavery; transatlantic studies

Loscocco, Paula. Phillis Wheatley’s Miltonic Poetics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137470058.0006.

Miltonic Wheatley

Phillis Wheatley’s Miltonic Poetics brings together several topics from scholarly disciplines not usually joined in single conversation: Phillis Wheatley as a poet in Revolution-era Boston; John Milton as a poet and polemicist during the English civil wars 130 years earlier; the inaugural miscellany as a potent genre in the hands of a poet searching rhetorical tradition for ways to position her new song in relation to contemporary culture; British influence in early American letters in general and the notion of what Leonard Tennenhouse calls the diasporic American reclamation of idealized English culture in particular (8); African and Native American and women’s voices as components of early American culture and English-language literature; and the larger world of the eighteenth-century Anglo-Atlantic.

Bringing these disparate issues and perspectives to bear on Phillis Wheatley’s 1773 POEMS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL, this study argues for the African-born slave poet Wheatley as a major writer who uses Milton’s poetry to develop what she calls a “sov’reign . . . verse” ultimately answerable to her vision of an English-speaking American republic comprised of Britons, Africans, and Native Americans, including women (18:18). This study argues for the Miltonic Wheatley as the founding mother of emergent Anglo-American culture, broadly defined. More specifically, it shows that Wheatley enters into wide-ranging dialogue with Milton’s works, particularly the early Poems of Mr. John Milton, Both English and Latin, in order to carry the English poet’s achievement forward to the American revolutionary moment in two dramatic—and distinctly Miltonic—ways. First, though she adopts a Christian poetical voice remarkable for its towering spiritual, civil, and moral authority, that voice proves unable to articulate fully or respond adequately to the multiplying traumas—of sin and conscience, loss and grief, tyranny and slavery—underlying her and her compatriots’ religious, personal, and civil experience. Then, in an extended sequence of poetical experiments designed to discover and showcase the freedom, power, and variety of inspired human song, she offers her readers a startlingly effective poetics, at once consolatory and visionary, that she uses to redeem and remedy her Anglo-American community’s disabling traumas and to enable that community—if it will—to join her in constructing a story of national (re)formation.

A key claim of Phillis Wheatley’s Miltonic Poetics is that Wheatley understands and advertises her POEMS as a miscellany in the tradition of Milton’s first poetical book, and that this literary kinship profoundly shapes her volume’s structure, poetic groupings, and verses. In recent years, there have been important studies devoted to individual Wheatley poems and to her career as a whole.¹ But this study begins and ends with the 1773 POEMS, arguing that Wheatley uses Milton in her first and only printed volume to dramatize the powerful and liberatory nature of a poetics uniquely suited to respond to the challenges and opportunities of Anglo-America’s historical authority, present traumas, and civil potential.

Understanding Wheatley’s POEMS as a self-contained whole with a single metapoetic narrative makes it possible to do what no other study to date has done, which is to identify the five major poetic groupings that structure her volume. POEMS opens with a set of verses, starting with “On VIRTUE,” that ring with Christian, African, and American ministerial authority, though this authority is radically destabilized by family elegies whose burden of loss, grief, and failed consolation closes this first section. In a second group of poems anchored by the scriptural verses, “GOLIATH of GATH. 1 Sam. Chap. xvii” and “Isaiah lxiii.1–8,” the speaker lays aside both her ministerial authority and the traumatic challenges to that authority, and instead explores a poetics of the imaginative and fanciful sublime in which the several virtues and mental powers of incarnated divinity inspire free, powerful, and various song, not only in tribute to God, but for the benefit of Wheatley’s educated and evangelical transatlantic community. Wheatley brings this poetics to bear on the traumas of historical and geographical experience in her third group of poems, beginning with the powerful invocation of the twin traumas of tyranny and slavery in “To the Right Honourable WILLIAM, Earl of DARTMOUTH,” and continuing with the trail of broken hearts and scattered songs in the ocean poems and family elegies that follow.² Though the shock of contact between her visionary poetics and the traumas of experience keeps the poet from doing more than bear witness in this central set of poems, she achieves a remarkably powerful integration of poetry and experience in her fourth set, where the breakthrough ode “An HYMN to HUMANITY” inspires Wheatley to a series of major poetical responses to the pain and sorrow of transatlantic trauma and loss. Her consolatory work done, she ends POEMS by pointing readers toward the rising possibility of “Britannia,” an ideal vision of an inspired Anglo-America that she and her African, Native, and British American peers might imagine into being (Wheatley 63:25). She leaves Boston in 1773 to embrace this ideal nation in “A Farewel to AMERICA,” though she returns with a cautionary version of the same in her postscript verse, “Ocean.”

Scholars have missed the episodic structure of the 1773 POEMS mainly because perceiving the volume’s poetic groupings, as well as its larger metapoetic narrative, depends on recognizing how deeply Wheatley grounds her poetic vision in Milton’s work. His poetry, not least the shorter poems overlooked by readers combing American literature for echoes of Paradise Lost, serves as the deep grammar of Wheatley’s poetics, and its presence makes itself felt throughout the 1773 POEMS. Milton’s “Lycidas,” which uses death at sea as a vehicle to explore the nature of poetic response to the experience of personal, poetic, and political crisis, is particularly important. The monode grounds Wheatley’s struggle to develop a poetics adequate to the challenges that emerge early in her volume by providing a potent model of a writer using others’ voices to fuel consolatory experiments that repeatedly fail until they finally succeed. Later, at mid-volume, “Lycidas”’ status as a sustained and anguished meditation over a “wat’ry bier” underlies the poet’s depiction of transatlantic trauma, elegy, and maritime fantasy (Milton 100:12). Other Miltonic poems powerfully support the metapoetic narrative of Wheatley’s volume. Allusions to A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle occur early on, amplifying the poet’s claims to Christian poetic authority. Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained, along with “Il Penseroso” and a host of other Miltonic texts, not least Paradise Lost, have an important role in Wheatley’s articulation of a sublime poetics of imagination and fancy. Finally, the major verses from “An HYMN to HUMANITY” to “A Farewel to AMERICA” are in continual conversation not only with the paired poems “An Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” and “The Passion,” but with a number of verses from Milton’s Poemata, the Latin half of Milton’s Poems, particularly “Epitaphium Damonis.”³

There is a larger parallel between Wheatley and Milton, however, suggesting that Wheatley may have understood herself as a kind of American Milton. In her intertextual study of the 1645 Poems, in which she situates Milton’s inaugural volume in contemporary reworkings of classical tradition, Stella Revard argues that “Epitaphium Damonis,” the 1639 elegy that closes Milton’s miscellany with a pledge to produce a future English Protestant epic, serves two purposes. It completes the breakthrough to poetic maturity that begins with the mid-volume “Lycidas” of 1637, and it does so across the divide of Milton’s 1638–9 trip to the cultural capitals of Italy and his return to an England poised for civil war and republican triumph.⁴ “‘Epitaphium Damonis’ is both a recapitulation . . . and a valediction to [Latin] pastoral,” Revard notes, “as Milton revolves, but in a different way from ‘Lycidas,’ on the poet’s place in society, and turns away from eclogue to epic, as a medium for poetic expression” (226). In “Epitaphium Damonis,” she adds, he makes an important nationalist turn from classical to English language and tradition: “Milton announces his heroic theme at the same time he renounces Latin pastoral . . . [being] now determined to sing an English epic for an English audience” (229).

Revard’s claims for Milton’s 1645 miscellany have provocative implications for Wheatley’s 1773 POEMS, which the poet traveled to London to publish and which (almost) closes with a shipboard paean to the English sources of her American poetics. To the extent that a demonstrably Miltonic Wheatley assembles an inaugural volume that uses her culture’s understanding of literary tradition to dramatize the nature, sources, and potential of a powerful new poetic voice, even as she brings that voice to bear on the meanings for self and country of a round trip to an idealized cultural homeland, Wheatley is a poet of liberation at a time of national revolution in more specifically Miltonic ways than scholars have yet realized.⁵

The issue of Wheatley’s likely access to Milton’s works has similarly provocative implications, as it too raises the likelihood that Wheatley understood herself to stand in relation to the emerging Anglo-American nation in 1773 as Milton did to the nascent English republic in 1645. Though Wheatley engages in steady conversation with Milton’s miscellany throughout the POEMS, the actual point of contact is not between her volume and Milton’s 1645 POEMS, which Milton re-issued in 1673 with additions and which Jacob Tonson re-published in 1695 in altered sequence (Masson 28). Rather, it is between Wheatley’s 1773 POEMS and Milton’s Poems as the latter volume appeared (largely returned to its 1673 order) in Thomas Newton’s 1752 edition of PARADISE REGAIN’D. A POEM IN FOUR BOOKS. To which is added SAMSON AGONISTES: AND POEMS upon SEVERAL OCCASIONS. David Masson notes that Newton’s “remained the standard library edition till the close of the century” (34) and that it was published in various formats under two separate titles—as a one- or two-volume PARADISE REGAIN’D &c (for subscribers of Newton’s 1749 Paradise Lost) and as the third and final volume of THE POETICAL WORKS OF JOHN MILTON (the first two volumes in 1749 and a third in 1752).⁶ Several Boston libraries held copies of Milton’s works, and Wheatley clearly had access to several of these.⁷ But readers need only look to the minister Mather Byles to find the volume that mattered most to Wheatley in 1773. In the catalogue of Byles’ library, compiled by his son after his death, Item 635 is “Milton’s Paradise Regained &c.” (Byles Jr 18).

Wheatley scholar John Shields insists on the primacy of the Byles-Wheatley relationship. It is “probable” that Wheatley “received instruction in Latin and in poetics from Mather Byles, a nephew of Cotton Mather, a congregational minister, and a graduate of Harvard College.” And “as Byles lived across the street from the Wheatleys and had been a prolific poet and champion of poets in his younger days, it is plausible that Byles took an interest in helping to shape Wheatley’s budding talent.” Finally, it “is certain that Wheatley constructed her 1773 Poems . . . after the example of Byles’ 1744 Poems on Several Occasions” (2008 82).

Shields is a founding figure in Wheatley studies, along with Wheatley editor and biographer Vincent Carretta, but his claims for Byles’ cultivation of Wheatley’s talent are only partly persuasive. Yes, Wheatley lived near Byles and likely had access to both his library and his Poems.⁸ But Byles’ library held the specific edition of Milton’s POEMS (in the PARADISE REGAIN’D &c volume) that this study shows to have been pivotal to Wheatley’s poetical vision—dramatically more pivotal than Byles’ minor miscellany could possibly have been to a poet of Wheatley’s epochal brilliance and vision. Indeed, where Shields sees Wheatley drawing on a sometimes Miltonic Byles, as he does in his comparison of Byles’ “Written in Milton’s Paradise Lost” and Wheatley’s “To Maecenas” (2008 177), this study sees Wheatley pointing through Byles to Milton himself, with an ensuing conversation between major revolutionary poets that rivets readers’ attention.⁹ In his Poems, as Revard amply demonstrates, Milton draws on his culture’s understanding of classical tradition to speak as a writer of personal, political, and spiritual liberation at a key moment in English religious and political history. In her Poems, as this study makes clear, Wheatley invokes her culture’s understanding of English and especially Miltonic tradition to speak freely as a Christian, African, and American poet alerting America to its civil and spiritual ideals on the eve of republican revolution.

A Wheatley-Milton dialogue is all the more likely given what Marcus Walsh identifies as Milton’s position at the center of “the nascent English literary canon”: for “many eighteenth-century readers and some editors,” culminating in Newton, “Paradise Lost bore the scriptural warranty of truth, and might even be used as an exposition of, even an equivalent for, Holy Scripture” (53–6). A major consequence of such equivalency, Walsh notes, was the application of scriptural exegesis to Milton’s poetical texts, fully realized in Newton’s variorum edition, which provides paraphrase, identifies allusions, cites parallel texts, refers to previous exegesis, and provides contextual annotation (94–110). Extending Walsh’s argument to include PARADISE REGAIN’D &c, and stipulating at present Wheatley’s familiarity with eighteenth-century Miltonic traditions (including but not limited to Byles), Phillis Wheatley’s Miltonic Poetics argues not only for Wheatley’s sense of direct contact with Milton, but also for the depth and breadth of intertextual methodology and tradition that such contact made available.

In making its case, however, this study confronts the extraordinary critical paradox that the Miltonic Wheatley as African mother ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Prologue: the humble Afric muses seat
• 1  Conspiracy Theory: Britannias distant shore
• 2  Authority and Challenge: Where shall a sovreign remedy be found?
• 3  Wheatleys Fanciful Sublime: What songs should rise!
• Epilogue
• References
• Index