1 Overview
I suppose the main reason for including some selections from Phyllis Wheatley is to note that this is the poetry Jefferson describes as “beneath the dignity of criticism” in Query XIV in the Notes on Virginia.
Is it excellent? I don’t know. Formal poetry of this sort isn’t my cup of tea. Here’s another excerpt from a poem by Phyllis Wheatley:
Now shall the adventurous muse attempt a theme
More new, more noble, and more flush of fame
Than all that went before——
Now through the veil of ancient days renew
The period famed when first Columbus touched
These shores so long unknown——through various toils,
Famine, and death, the hero forced his way,
Through oceans pregnant with perpetual storms,
And climates hostile to adventurous man.
Now, if your response to this is to say, like Jefferson, “There you have it; more bad poetry,” let me confess: I lied to you; those lines aren’t from Wheatley. That up there is the beginning of “On the Rising Glory of America,” by Phillip Freneau, the great “Poet of the American Revolution” himself; arguably the most prominent (white) American poet of the early nineteenth century. Perhaps now you have a different view of those lines, and you think they are better than these lines from Phyllis Wheatley, the enslaved woman:
Will will fulfil the treasure of thy love,
Ay, fill it full with wills, and my will one.
In things of great receipt with ease we prove
Among a number one is reckon’d none.
More terribly poetry! But I have to confess, I have lied to you again. That quatrain is not by Wheatley. It is by no less than William Shakespeare his very self. If you found your view about those two poems changing before and after thinking they were by Wheatley, it may be worth thinking about why.
Perhaps Wheatley isn’t your cup of tea either (but then what poetry is?). Whatever your particular views on poetry, if you spend a few minutes with Wheatley and compare her poems to, I don’t know, all poetry, I think you will find it would be a reach to say Wheatley’s poetry is “beneath the dignity of criticism.”
Wheatley was born in West Africa and sold into slavery. She wrote “To the University of CAMBRIDGE, in NEW-ENGLAND,” included here, on p. 11 when she was 14. What were you doing when you were 14? When I was 14, I was sneaking into strangers’ pools in the middle of the night. Wheatley was reading Greek and Latin and writing neoclassical poetry by the age of 12, a mere four years after arriving in the colonies—and not for an education but as a slave.
Wheatley became evidence against the Jeffersonian idea that Africans lacked aesthetic ability. In addition to her benefactors in the colonies, Voltaire for example referred to her poetry for that reason.
“On Virtue” (p. 11) and “On Imagination” (pp. 36–37) are about as good as this subgenre of poetry gets. But the imprecision of judging these works as good or not speaks generally to the imprecision of aesthetic judgment in general, and perhaps also to how pernicious aesthetic judgment is as a tool for measuring human excellence and accomplishment. Is Wheatley any good? What about Homer or Shakespeare? Here are, totally at random, lines from Homer:
Meanwhile Neptune had kept no blind look-out, and came up to them in the semblance of an old man. He took Agamemnon’s right hand in his own and said, “Son of Atreus, I take it Achilles is glad now that he sees the Achaeans routed and slain, for he is utterly without remorse—may he come to a bad end and heaven confound him. As for yourself, the blessed gods are not yet so bitterly angry with you but that the princes and counsellors of the Trojans shall again raise the dust upon the plain, and you shall see them flying from the ships and tents towards their city.”
And from Shakespeare:
At least the whisper goes so: our last king,
Whose image even but now appeared to us,
Was, as you know, by Fortinbras of Norway,
Thereto pricked on by a most emulate pride,
Dared to the combat; in which our valiant Hamlet
(For so this side of our known world esteemed him)
Did slay this Fortinbras, who by a sealed compact,
Well ratified by law and heraldry,
Did forfeit, with his life, all ⟨those⟩ his lands
Which he stood seized of, to the conqueror.
Are you having a different response to these excerpts than you do to Wheatley? Do these feel less “beneath the dignity of criticism”? Are you detecting a significant “racial” difference?
If your answers are no to all that, the inference shouldn’t be, I don’t think, so much that the quality of art is ‘subjective’ or open to interpretation any way you like. It should instead be hesitation to go along with someone like Jefferson, claiming as he does that ‘whites’ are definitively superior in the arts to others. Suppose—which would be different from saying we can simply arbitrarily attach any meaning and value to art we like—there is no objective measure for determining the relative value of Phyllis Wheatley to, say, Philip Freneau or Lemuel Haynes, both American poets of her time. Haynes by the way wrote a wonderful poem, “The Battle of Lexington,” that I think is gorgeous. Here’s the final badass quatrain, describing dead revolutionaries:
This Motto may adorn their Tombs,
(Let tyrants come and view)
“We rather seek these silent Rooms
Than live as Slaves to You”
(Haynes was half-African or half-African-American. Uh oh! Will Jefferson let this be good poetry or no?) Suppose, in any event, there is no objective measure for determining the relative value of Wheatley to Freneau or Haynes (or of Haynes’ African-descendant half to Haynes’ European-descendant half). Why—not how; we know how; arbitrarily—why does Jefferson need to exclude Wheatley from the corpus of works of art worthy of criticism? What is the value and importance of taste to someone like Jefferson?
In a letter to Samson Occom, Wheatley by the way brings out what seems to most of us, I imagine, the fairly blatant contradiction between Jefferson’s elevating, in writing, of natural rights for all humans and his lowering, in action, of African descendants to the condition of slavery. See p. 153 for Wheatley’s description of “the strange Absurdity of their Conduct whose Words and Actions are so diametrically opposite.” She wrote that letter when she was 21. She died ten years later, broke.