Classicism, literary authority, and Black artistic community in Phillis Wheatley Peters’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral

Abstract

When Phillis Wheatley Peters’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was published in 1773, the collection’s paratextual apparatus—the attestation signed by prominent Bostonians, the copy of John Wheatley’s letter, and the publicity materials promoting the collection’s release—worked in concert to contain Wheatley Peters’s achievement, by framing it as singular and anomalous. This article argues that three late-addition poems, ‘To Maecenas’, ‘Niobe in Distress’, and ‘To S.M.’, can be read as Wheatley Peters’s cumulative poetic response to this framing, and that classicism provides the terrain on which she contests its terms. In ‘To Maecenas’, she scripts the collection’s ideal reader, and claims Terence as her predecessor, disrupting the classical tradition’s presumed whiteness. In ‘Niobe in Distress’, Wheatley Peters synthesizes classical literature and contemporary visual art in an ekphrastic reworking of an episode of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, thereby asserting her interpretive authority across aesthetic traditions. In ‘To S.M.’, she redirects the authority she has established across the sequence towards the recognition and celebration of another enslaved Black artist. In these poems, Wheatley Peters thus refutes her collection’s paratextual framing of her authorship as anomalous by constructing lines of relation—with readers, predecessors, and contemporaries.