The Trials of Phillis Wheatley by Henry Louis Gates Read Free Book Online Page B

Delany’s The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered (1852) were fulsome in their praise of Wheatley and her poetry. We can trace the anti-Wheatley tendency
at least to 1887, when Edward Wilmot Blyden, one of the fathers of black nationalism, wrote about her contemptuously, and the tone was set for the century to come. James Weldon Johnson, writing in 1922, complained that “one looks in vain for some outburst or even complaint against the bondage of her people, for some agonizing cry about her native land,” finding instead a “smug contentment at her escape therefrom.”
    But what really laid her low was ultimately a cultural critique of her work—less what she said than the way she said it.
    Wallace Thurman, writing in 1928, calls her “a third-rate imitation” of Alexander Pope: “Phillis in her day was a museum figure who would have caused more of a sensation if some contemporary Barnum had exploited her.”
    Vernon Loggins, in his masterful history of Negro literature, published in 1930, echoes Jefferson when he says that Wheatley’s poetry reflects “her instinct for hearing the music of words” rather than understanding their
meaning, “an instinct,” he concludes, “which is racial.” She lacks the capacity to reflect, to think. For Loggins, as E. Lynn Matson puts it, Wheatley is “a clever imitator, nothing more.”
    By the mid-sixties, criticism of Wheatley rose to a high pitch of disdain. Amiri Baraka, a founder of the Black Arts Movement, wrote in 1962 that Wheatley’s “pleasant imitations of eighteenth-century English poetry are far and, finally, ludicrous departures from the huge black voices that splintered southern nights with their hollers , chants , arwhoolies , and ballits .” For him, of course, these chants represent the authentic spirit of black creativity. Seymour Gross, writing in 1966 in “Images of the Negro in American Literature,” argued that “this Negro poetess so well fits the Uncle Tom syndrome. . . . She is pious, grateful, retiring, and civil.” As William Robinson reports, other critics called Wheatley “an early Boston Aunt Jemima,” “a colonial handkerchief head,” and “utterly irrelevant to the identification and liberation of the black man.” She
was finally, “oblivious to the lot of her fellow blacks.”
    Stephen Henderson, writing in The Militant Black Writer , (1969), argues that “it is no wonder that many black people have rejected Phillis Wheatley,” because her work reflects “the old self-hatred that one hears in the Dozens and in the blues. It is, frankly,” he concludes, “the nigger component of the Black Experience.” Dudley Randall wrote in that same year that “whatever references she made to her African heritage were derogatory, reflecting her status as a favored house slave and a curiosity.” In 1971 Nathan Higgins wrote that Wheatley’s voice was that of “a feeble Alexander Pope rather than that of an African prince.”
    Addison Gayle, Jr., a major black aesthetic critic, wrote in The Way of the World (1975) that Wheatley was the first black writer “to accept the images and symbols of degradation passed down from the South’s most intellectual lights and the first to speak
from a sensibility finely tuned by close approximation to [her] oppressors.” Wheatley, in sum, “had surrendered the right to self-definition to others.”
    And the assaults continued, the critical arrows arriving in waves. This once most-revered figure in black letters would, in the sixties, become the most reviled figure. Angelene Jamison argued in 1974 that Wheatley and her poetry were “too white,” a sentiment that Ezekiel Mphalele echoed two years later when he indicted her for having “a white mind,” and