Poetry is a way of making art with language.

POET HIGHLIGHT: 

Phyllis Wheatley

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Phillis Wheatley was the first African American to write a book. Her book of poetry was published in 1773.

Phillis Wheatley was born in West Africa. Her date of birth and her African name are not known. She was captured when she was about 8 years old and was taken to the Americas to be sold into slavery. A ship took her to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1761. A couple named John and Susanna Wheatley bought her. They gave her their own last name.

Wheatley quickly learned to speak, read, and write English. In 1767 a newspaper published one of her poems. Three years later Wheatley wrote another poem to honor a clergyman named George Whitefield. The poem was published throughout the North American colonies and in England. Wheatley became famous.

By 1773 Wheatley had written enough poems to fill a book. Susanna Wheatley helped Phillis to publish the book in England. The book was called Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Wheatley traveled to England in 1773. The English welcomed her as a famous author, though she was still enslaved. Wheatley gained her freedom when she returned from England.

Some of Wheatley’s poems could not be published in England because they supported American independence. Her most famous patriotic poem is To His Excellency, General Washington.

Wheatley wrote most of her poems in the style of poetry called, heroic coupling:

Heroic couplet, a couplet of rhyming iambic pentameters often forming a distinct rhetorical as well as metrical unit. The origin of the form in English poetry is unknown, but Geoffrey Chaucer in the 14th century was the first to make extensive use of it. The heroic couplet became the principal metre used in drama about the mid-17th century, and the form was perfected by John Dryden and Alexander Pope in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.