After , however, the documentary record on the poet goes largely silent. In the wake of the Revolutionary War, the colonies sank into a severe depression, and efforts by commercial creditors to collect prewar debts led to a wave of business failures. John Peters was prosecuted for debt, and Carretta suggests that the couple fled Boston.
Her second book of poems was never published. Though Phillis left a rich paper trail of poems and letters, she never recorded her own account of her life, and, in her writings, which brim with her spiritual and political ideas, biographical details are sparse. In fact, public records show that he stayed in Boston—and, after digging himself out of debt, he may even have been the same John Peters in Suffolk County who ran for senator in Maybe Odell had misrepresented their relationship.
Who was Margaretta Matilda Odell, and why did she publish a memoir in ? Or was she seeking some social or economic benefit for herself? And in a twist, another version of the memoir appeared in , this one by a named author, B. Thatcher, a white man, was a member of the American Colonization Society, a group that opposed slavery but advocated, as a remedy, the return of Black people to Africa.
Was Odell also a member? There are no clear answers. In one sense, then, her book is an act of purification. I told Peters that we would print them, at a certain price to be agreed upon if sufficient subscribers appeared and [after? Jeffers began to wonder what their relationship was really like. No account that she had read considered the most obvious reason for their marriage—that Phillis had not been desperate or tricked by Peters but in love with him.
Why the screaming of the grown shelf mates a woman or two giving birth Newborns kept by sailors or capriciously tossed to sharks Why the banquet of placenta left for rats. In a fictional first draft of her letter to George Washington, Phillis gives vent to her exasperation with flattering white egos:. May 8, What did Phillis Wheatley believe in? Susannah Wheatley believed that all human beings, including African slaves, could learn if given the chance.
She believed that all people, of any skin color, should love and respect each other. She treated Phillis more as a daughter than as a slave. What was Phillis Wheatley's genre? Writing in heroic couplets, many of her poems consist of elegies while others stress the theme of Christian salvation.
Only the second African-American to get their book published, Phillis Wheatley's work marks the beginning of the genre of African-American literature. How old was Phillis Wheatley when she published her first book? Phillis Wheatley was only seven or eight years old when she was captured and taken from her home in West Africa.
During which of these literary periods did Phillis Wheatley publish a book of poems? Was Phillis Wheatley an abolitionist?
Male abolitionists, such as Cugoano and Equiano, were not the only black people in Britain to publish books. In the USA she became well known as a poet and she visited England in Does Walmart have rubber gloves? What are the names of Santa's 12 reindeers? Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral , was published in London in late , just as Phillis traveled back to Boston to tend to a gravely ill Susanna.
Even with her literary popularity at its all-time high, the years after the trip to London were difficult for Phillis. Most of the Wheatley family died during , and Phillis was unable to secure funding for another publication or sell her writing.
There were glimmers of happiness; she married a free black man, John Peters, in It is believed that none of their children survived infancy. The couple struggled with extreme poverty, and in Peters was placed in jail because of debt. Phillis continued to write—on subjects varying from biblical themes to the horrors of slavery—but was not able to support herself with these writings.
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