Meet Phillis Wheatley: The Poet They Put on Trial

Proof demanded

Around 1772, a teenage girl stood before some of the most powerful men in Massachusetts — the governor among them — assembled for an examination with no precedent: to certify whether she could have written her own poetry. Phillis Wheatley had been kidnapped from West Africa as a child and enslaved in Boston. That she had mastered English, Latin, and the classical canon within a few years was, to her examiners, harder to believe than that she had lied.

The book that crossed an ocean

No American publisher would print her. London would. Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral appeared in 1773 with the men’s attestation bound into the front — a book that had to carry its own proof of authorship. She was about twenty, and the first African American to publish a book of poetry.

Verse as argument

She wrote in the era’s most respectable forms — elegies, odes, couplets — and slid the argument inside the elegance: that the love of freedom is planted in every breast, hers included. George Washington received her poem and invited her to visit. The work did what assertion alone could not: it made her capability undeniable.

Why they belong at your table

Seat her when you are being underestimated and the burden of proof has been unfairly placed on you. She will tell you how excellence itself becomes the argument.