Who was Phillis Wheatley?
Speaker calls Samuel Johnson 'a British member of Parliament'; Johnson was a writer, not an MP. Transcript also garbles the quote ('equipped' for 'quipped', 'drivers of Negro').
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Phillis Wheatley was brought to America as an enslaved girl, purchased by the Wheatley family in Boston, and became the leading poet of the revolutionary era. She is also important as a political thinker because she grappled with the tension between the colonists' talk of liberty and the reality of slavery.
You'll be able to
- describe who Phillis Wheatley was.
- explain why Wheatley is seen as a political thinker as well as a poet.
Key words
- Rhetoric
- Language used to persuade or inspire, such as speeches about liberty.
- Revolutionary era
- The period around the American fight for independence from Britain.
Transcript
Phyllis Wheatley is a poet brought over to America as a young girl. She's purchased by the Wheatley's and the ship is the Phyllis. She's brought over an enslaved girl, and she very quickly demonstrates her faculty with the English language with poetry, with pros. Her owners take note of this, they're up in Boston, and more or less help her become the leading poet of the revolutionary era of the immediate post-revolutionary era.
The reason to think about her as a political thinker is that she's very much grappling with what it meant to be Black and enslaved or simply just Black at a time when Freedom is on everyone's lips, and liberty is on everyone's lips, and colonials are fighting for liberation. She's looking at the tensions between actually how the society is structured and what the rhetoric coming out of that society is, what its aspirations are.
In that regard, she's very influential. There's a British member of Parliament, Samuel Johnson, a writer, famously equipped. He was hostile to American independence, and he famously equipped. Why do we hear the loudest he helps for liberty from the drivers of Negro You can think of Wheatley as also dealing with that question as well.
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