In the summer of 1761, a 7-year-old African girl arrived in Boston Harbor aboard the Phillis, a ship owned by a wealthy slave trader. Although the little girl had a name, it had been destroyed in the Middle Passage, and the Wheatley family who eventually enslaved her called her by the name of the ship from which she emerged, naked except for a piece of carpet wrapped around her. Phillis Wheatley’s small size and likely traumas — she had spent months alongside dozens of fellow Africans below the ship’s deck as it sailed across the Atlantic — were not a matter of concern for the white merchants and businessmen on King Street, where the Wheatleys lived.

Ever since John Winthrop recorded the arrival of Africans in Boston in 1638, the town had been an important site in the Atlantic slave trade and the various industries that supported it. If the sale of an African child was not unusual in Winthrop’s “city upon a hill,” nor was her Blackness. At more than 10 percent of Boston’s population, people of African descent, both enslaved and free, were common on the wharves and streets of the city. They were also a familiar presence in white residents’ homes. Susanna and John Wheatley had two grown children and had buried three others. At 53, Susanna wanted “a domestic” who would take care of her in her old age. Little Phillis was a bargain: Her young age and “frail” condition meant, as a Wheatley descendant later wrote, that the family “procured her for a trifle, as the Captain had fears of her drop[p]ing off his hands, without Emolument by death.”

It’s a testament to Black endurance and brilliance that the little girl called Phillis Wheatley became, within 12 years of her arrival in Boston, the most significant African American poet of the 18th century. Yet, as the historian David Waldstreicher shows in “The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley,” his thoroughly researched, beautifully rendered and cogently argued biography, Wheatley is brilliant not merely because she survived and composed some of the most important works of trans-Atlantic literature. Rather, Waldstreicher insists, Wheatley was a supremely gifted neoclassical practitioner of language, an “organic intellectual of the enslaved.” “The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley” is at once historical biography at its best, literary analysis at its sharpest and a subversive indictment of current political discourse questioning the relevance of Black life in our country’s history.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Levering Lewis called biography “an art with few rules beyond the most basic ones embedded in the methodology of research.” Yet, he went on, there was one rule “that all who try their hand at it come to know: Until the protagonist reveals his or her character — his or her inner self — what the biographer produces is less a life than a report, an autopsy rather than the record of a séance.” Through his close readings of Wheatley’s poetry, Waldstreicher manages to both render a life and conduct a séance with an 18th-century Black woman whose thoughts and feelings are hard to discern. Unlike her contemporary the Mohegan preacher Samson Occom, Wheatley did not write an autobiographical sketch. And unlike her fellow trans-Atlantic African Olaudah Equiano, she did not detail her journey from slavery to freedom. Perhaps as a result, there is always more to learn about Wheatley — as evidenced most recently by the discovery of an early poem in a Quaker commonplace book at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

Wendy Roberts, a professor at the University of Albany, holding a magnifying glass over the text of a 1767 poem by Phillis Wheatley, which Roberts recently discovered in a Quaker commonplace book at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. 

Like the stories of many Black people of the 18th century, Wheatley’s has often been told by others, including descendants of those who held her in bondage. Margaretta Odell, Susanna Wheatley’s great-niece, included a short account of Phillis’s life in an 1834 reissue of her poems, while various prominent Boston merchants and ministers who met her attested to the authenticity of the verse by the African “genius.” Waldstreicher’s book is not the first to question the white gaze through which Wheatley is often discussed; Vincent Carretta’s “Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage” (2011), for instance, rightly took Odell to task for her unverifiable claims about Wheatley’s life after her emancipation. And the award-winning poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s “The Age of Phillis” (2020) adopted the scholar Saidiya Hartman’s concept of “critical fabulation” to capture Wheatley’s inner life beyond Odell’s racist assumptions. Yet Waldstreicher is the first to reconstruct the poet’s world by situating her work within the context of the Revolutionary era’s neoclassical discourse. His analysis re-establishes the woman Carretta calls the “founding mother of African American literature” as a sophisticated thinker who actively challenged the religious and political culture around her.

In “Mrs. Thacher’s Son,” one of her earliest surviving poems, Wheatley used the death of a local lawyer to seize on “death and deliverance as common themes that linked rich and poor, women as well as men, children and adults.” Written in 1765, “Mrs. Thacher’s Son” was the work of a preteen trafficking victim who had known English for just four years. But Waldstreicher cautions us against valorizing Wheatley’s talents merely because her existence is remarkable. Rather, he writes, by inserting herself “into the King Street neighborhood,” Wheatley engages with colonial New England culture even as she may be recalling women’s mourning rituals of her native West Africa. Although Wheatley doesn’t mention Africa, Waldstreicher tells us we cannot assume that she described the death customs of 18th-century British North America without reference to her past: “When Wheatley began to compose in the elegiac mode, she could be both assimilating to post-Puritan New England and bending what was available to fit what she knew. She could even be making kin.”

Waldstreicher’s major contribution as a scholar is to take seriously the alternate reality that enslaved people like Wheatley created outside the white gaze. His reassessment of “On Being Brought From Africa to America,” Wheatley’s most canonized and contested poem, is particularly astute. It begins: “’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,/Taught my benighted soul to understand/That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too:/Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.” Wheatley’s seemingly deferential posture to those who enslaved her was criticized by 20th-century Black critics, including Addison Gayle Jr., who wrote that Wheatley and most other Black writers of the pre-Harlem Renaissance era “negated or falsified their racial experience in an attempt to transform the pragmatics of their everyday lives into abstract formulas and theorems.” Gayle approvingly quoted Richard Wright, who said that Wheatley writes “as a Negro reacting, not as a Negro.”

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Waldstreicher asks us to appreciate the sarcasm in Wheatley’s lines. He suggests that she was well acquainted with a trans-Atlantic Methodism that deemed an “abominable hypocrisy” the widely accepted notion of the slave trade as a path for Africans to salvation. In her poem, Wheatley doesn’t reinforce the notion of African inferiority; she challenges it. This is apparent in the final two couplets: “Some view our sable race with scornful eye,/‘Their colour is a diabolic die.’/Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,/May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.” These couplets, Waldstreicher argues, are “the real point, set up by the first four lines that seem to bathe enslavement in evangelical glory, something white folks might want to believe.”

In portraying Wheatley as an often subversive artist who understands and talks back to the racial assumptions of her time, Waldstreicher refuses to take the white Wheatleys at their word. They insisted that Phillis’s genius was an exception that proved the rule of African inferiority. When Susanna Wheatley sent another African “servant” to fetch Phillis from a visit to a white neighbor, she was appalled to see the Black man return to the Wheatley home with Phillis sitting next to him in the chaise. The notion that “my Phillis,” as Susanna exclaimed, would associate with a Black person whom the Wheatleys considered a proper servant annoyed her more than the prospect of Phillis sitting apart from the white people she was sent to entertain. In “The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley,” the poet emerges not as the object of white benevolence or a parrot of neoclassical verse, but as an actor in her own career and eventual emancipation.

This stance prepares us for the most revelatory assertions of Waldstreicher’s narrative: that Wheatley helped facilitate the trip to London in 1773 that led to her freedom, and that her post-slavery life was not as tragic as previous scholars have assumed. Waldstreicher admits that the Wheatleys were skilled publicists who submitted Phillis’s poetry for publication in Boston and London, but, he insists, it was her words that brought her the fame necessary to gain her freedom.

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The cover of Wheatley’s elegy on the death of George Whitefield, composed in 1770 to commemorate the popular English evangelist, who often preached in Boston.

To buttress his case, he undertakes a deep analysis of two poems: “To the Right Hon. William Earl of Dartmouth, His Majesty’s Secretary of State for North America &.c. &.c. &.c” and “Ode to Neptune. On Mrs. W——’s Voyage to England,” both composed in the fall of 1772, the year before her London trip. The Dartmouth poem heralded the earl’s recent appointment as the king’s secretary of state for the Southern Department, which included the American colonies. Lord Dartmouth was thought to be sympathetic to Granville Sharp, an antislavery activist who had assisted James Somerset, an enslaved African, in winning his freedom earlier that year, in a famous legal case in England. The Wheatleys had heard the news of Dartmouth’s appointment when, in October, a London merchant named Thomas Wooldridge, who sought to ingratiate himself with Dartmouth, visited their home and demanded that Phillis compose a poem in the earl’s honor.

Wooldridge assumed that claims about the African poet’s abilities were exaggerated. Less thorough historians have taken at face value the story that Wooldridge subsequently told: that Phillis composed the Dartmouth poem on the spot, that he was so impressed he relayed it to Dartmouth himself. But Waldstreicher introduces a new possibility: that Wheatley orchestrated her meeting with Wooldridge through Wooldridge’s wife, Susannah Kelly Wooldridge, a connection Waldstreicher establishes through his brilliant dissection of Wheatley’s “Ode to Neptune” — a poem dated the same day as the Dartmouth poem.

Through meticulous close reading, Waldstreicher argues that Wheatley likely knew Mrs. Wooldridge (indeed, that “Ode to Neptune” was “about, and for,” her); that she also knew of Mr. Wooldridge’s aspiring relationship with Dartmouth; and that both poems were an attempt to win the attention of English reformers recently galvanized by the Somerset case. Wheatley, Waldstreicher notes, had already sent a letter with another poem to Selina Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon and a Methodist philanthropist in England. Toward the end of 1772, after her encounter with Wooldridge, Wheatley sent a manuscript of her collected poems to England, and Hastings, impressed, agreed to promote the book once it was published. Here, Waldstreicher is at his analytical best, seamlessly comparing Wheatley’s verse with the historical record in order to show that she understood the emancipatory potential of her craft.

We do not know precisely when or why Wheatley was freed in 1773. But it is likely that the publication in London of her “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral” that September — following her own trip to England and introduction to prominent citizens there, including Lord Dartmouth and friends of Selina Hastings — gave her a powerful tool with which to negotiate her emancipation. In England, the Wheatleys’ notoriety as enslavers of an African genius could easily have turned to public outrage, given the poet’s popularity among reformers on both sides of the Atlantic. Back in Boston in the fall of 1773, Phillis Wheatley wrote to an acquaintance, “Since my return to America, my Master has at the desire of my friends in England given me my Freedom.” Waldstreicher concludes that the appearance of her book, facilitated by her canny use of the relationships she had forged with white women in Boston, allowed her to insist on this outcome. And while her life afterward was challenging — she endured the Revolutionary War; marriage to a formerly enslaved man who faced frequent financial setbacks; and the deaths of two of her children — it was hardly “utterly desolate,” as Odell claimed. Wheatley continued to write and publish poetry until shortly before her death, in 1784.

“The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley” arrives at a time when Black studies, and African American history more generally, are denigrated as either the recent invention of an allegedly “woke” mob, or the unserious or irrelevant pontifications of diversity instructors intent on white humiliation. By taking Wheatley seriously as a writer and thinker, Waldstreicher challenges this narrative. More than 150 years before the Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen marveled “at this curious thing:/To make a poet black, and bid him sing!,” Phillis Wheatley shaped 18th-century trans-Atlantic literature as much as she was shaped by it, confounding generations of skeptics, including slaveholders like Thomas Jefferson, who famously dismissed her work as “below the dignity of criticism.”

Kerri Greenidge, the Mellon associate professor in race, colonialism and diaspora at Tufts University, is the author, most recently, of “The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family.”

A version of this article appears in print on April 2, 2023, Page 14 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Poetic Justice.