Phillis Wheatley: Difference between revisions
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==Quotes about Wheatley==
*"No more snickering," [[Alice Walker]] counseled, at "the stiff, struggling, ambivalent lines," of the first published African-American poet, Phillis Wheatley. This kidnapped and enslaved Black woman wrote in the only materials available to her, in the only language in which she could write, and in the only cadence she knew as song. Of Wheatley, Walker also wrote: "It is not so much what she sang, as that she kept alive... the notion of song."
**[[Bettina Aptheker]] ''Tapestries of Life: Women's Work, Women's Consciousness, and the Meaning of Daily Experience'' (1989)
*A great deal of this new freedom rests upon the type of education which the Negro woman will receive. Early emancipation did not concern itself with giving advantages to Negro girls. The domestic realm was her field and no one sought to remove her. Even here, she was not given special training for her tasks. Only those with extraordinary talents were able to break the shackles of bondage. [[Phillis Wheatley|Phyllis Wheatley]] is to be remembered as an outstanding example of this ability — for through her talents one was able to free herself from house hold cares that devolved upon Negro women and make a contribution in literary art which is never to be forgotten. The years still re-echo her words. “Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain/May be refined, and join the Angelic train”
**[[Mary McLeod Bethune]], [https://speakingwhilefemale.co/education-bethune/ speech] (1920)
*At the library I would go the shelves alphabetically. I was drawn to anyone with a female name, with a Latino or Spanish name. There were very, very few. But as a teenager I discovered African American poetry. Gwendolyn Brooks was the first. Then [[Phillis Wheatley]]. I really identified with this slave woman writing poetry to assert and affirm her humanity. Suddenly my eyes were open to history. There was a whole explosion of African-American women poets-[[Audre Lorde]], [[Nikki Giovanni]], [[June Jordan]]. I have a poem in my head that's going to take me years to write down. Its working title is "On Thanking Black Muses." I owe them, because poetry really changed my life, saved it.
**[[Lorna Dee Cervantes]] Interview in ''Fooling with Words: A Celebration of Poets and Their Craft'' by [[Bill Moyers]] (1999)
* Here among the rarities of early Negro Americana was...Phyllis Wheatley's Mss. poem of 1767 addressed to the students of Harvard, her spirited encomiums upon George Washington and the Revolutionary Cause...Such things and many others are more than mere items of curiosity: they educate any receptive mind.
** [[Arturo Alfonso Schomburg]], "The Negro Digs Up His Past" (1925)
*When I read Jefferson's disparagement of [[Phillis Wheatley|Wheatley]], it felt like he had been disparaging the entire lineage of Black poets who would follow her, myself included, and I saw a man who had not had a clear understanding of what love is. When [[Robert Hayden]] gave us the ballads to remember how captured Africans survived the Middle Passage and arrived on these shores, it was an act of love. When [[Gwendolyn Brooks]] wrote about the children on the South Side of Chicago playing with one another in neighborhoods left neglected by the city, it was an act of love. When [[Audre Lorde]] fractured this language and then built us a new one, giving us a fresh way to make sense of who we are in the world, it was an act of love. When [[Sonia Sanchez]] makes lightning of her tongue, moving from Southern colloquialisms to stanzas shaped by Swahili, traversing an ocean in one breath, it is an act of love. Jefferson's conceptions of love seem to have been so distorted by his own prejudices that he was unable to recognize the endless examples of love that pervaded plantations across the country: mothers who huddled over their children and took the lash so their little ones wouldn't have to; surrogate mothers, fathers, and grandparents who took in children and raised them as their own when their biological parents were disappeared in the middle of the night; the people who loved and married and committed to one another despite the omnipresent threat that they might be separated at any moment. What is love if not this?
**[[Clint Smith (writer)]], ''How the Word is Passed'' (2021)
* Mrs. Phillis: Your favour of the 26th of October did not reach my hands 'till the middle of December. Time enough, you will say, to have given an answer ere this. Granted. But a variety of important occurrences, continually interposing to distract the mind and withdraw the attention, I hope will apologize for the delay, and plead my excuse for the seeming, but not real neglect. I thank you most sincerely for your polite notice of me in the elegant lines you inclosed; and, however undeserving I may be of such encomium and panegyric, the style and manner exhibit a striking proof of your poetical talents; in honor of which, and as a tribute justly due to you, I would have published the poem had I not been apprehensive that, while I only meant to give the world this new instance of your genius, I might have incurred the imputation of vanity. This, and nothing else, determined me not to give it place in the public prints. If you should ever come to Cambridge, or near headquarters. I shall be happy to see a person so favored by the muses, and to whom Nature has been so liberal and beneficent in her dispensations. I am, with great Respect, etc.
**[[George Washington]], [http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/mgw:@field(DOCID+@lit(gw040306))#N0393-312 letter to Phillis Wheatley] (2 February 1776)
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[[Category:1753 births]]
[[Category:1784 deaths]]
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