Even with her literary popularity at its all-time high, the years after the trip to London were difficult for Phillis. Most of the Wheatley family died during , and Phillis was unable to secure funding for another publication or sell her writing. There were glimmers of happiness; she married a free black man, John Peters, in It is believed that none of their children survived infancy.
The couple struggled with extreme poverty, and in Peters was placed in jail because of debt. Your being appointed by the Grand Continental Congress to be Generalissimo of the armies of North America, together with the fame of your virtues, excite sensations not easy to suppress. Your generosity, therefore, I presume, will pardon the attempt. Wishing your Excellency all possible success in the great cause you are so generously engaged in. Anon Britannia droops the pensive head, While round increase the rising hills of dead.
Freedom comes. View Site Map. Donations to the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, Inc. The tax identification number is Haitian Creole. Chinese Simplified. She also studied astronomy and geography. At age fourteen, Wheatley began to write poetry, publishing her first poem in In , with financial support from the English Countess of Huntingdon, Wheatley traveled to London with the Wheatley's son to publish her first collection of poems, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral —the first book written by a black woman in America.
It included a forward, signed by John Hancock and other Boston notables—as well as a portrait of Wheatley—all designed to prove that the work was indeed written by a black woman.
She was emancipated her shortly thereafter. Pride in her African heritage was also evident. Her writing style embraced the elegy, likely from her African roots, where it was the role of girls to sing and perform funeral dirges. Religion was also a key influence, and it led Protestants in America and England to enjoy her work. Enslavers and abolitionists both read her work; the former to convince the enslaved population to convert, the latter as proof of the intellectual abilities of people of color.
She wrote several letters to ministers and others on liberty and freedom. During the peak of her writing career, she wrote a well-received poem praising the appointment of George Washington as the commander of the Continental Army.
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Chinua Achebe was a Nigerian novelist and author of 'Things Fall Apart,' a work that in part led to his being called the 'patriarch of the African novel. After being kidnapped from West Africa and enslaved in Boston, Phillis Wheatley became the first African American and one of the first women to publish a book of poetry in the colonies in Olivia Rodrigo —.
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