Phillis Wheatley Research Paper

The Life of the Slave Writer

How does one individual mold a voice for the entire black nation within the written word? Phillis Wheatley is born in 1753 as an African American. Due to being black she has been born into an cruel life with no merit and no liberty. As a result of this, she experienced many endeavors in her childhood life that many children could not envision, and she wanted to create an alteration in the history of the blacks. Phillis Wheatley was one of the greatest and most inspiring poets of the seventeenth century.

Phillis Wheatley’s poems were written during the colonial era, where there is slavery and unequal rights. There may not have been many wars neer Phillis, but there were many wars during her time that impaired her

Some of her poems included her beliefs on Christianity, slavery and the struggle for independence, elegies, praises to people in government or power, or important events in history, she wanted to write about all that she could but biased it towards God and black rights. Susannah would have her friends come and listen to Wheatley's poems because she would write so well and people enjoyed listening to her. Her poems assisted people to realize that blacks were no different than whites that they could do just as good of things as anyone and this is what Phillis wanted to show. On October 8, 1772 she published her first book of poetry which was widely discussed in Europe and America and from this she got many criticisms and many praises. She asked Nathaniel Wheatley,one of John and Susannah's children, to oversee the publication. She was then emancipated after publishing her book, and she continued to be the same person she was. After becoming free she went on to publish another book titled Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. She continued writing after these successes because she felt her gole had not been reached world

For this reason, she was then called before a group of Bostonians to prove that she wrote the poems. One of the things about Boston is that the population was around 15,520 people and 1,000 were black and of that black population only 18 were free, this caused Wheatley even more realization on how many people struggled with the same thing she was fighting for. She met with Thomas Hutchinson, Reverend Mather Byles, Andrew Oliver, Joseph Green, Reverend Samuel Cooper, James Bowdoin, and Reverend Samuel Mather. She also received correspondence from John Paul Jones, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and John Hancock. While she was in Boston there was much questioning on whether blacks were real people, but Wheatley and many other people disagreed on this. Wheatley defended herself and eventually proved them wrong because skin tone does not show a person place in