Phillis Wheatley and the "Miracle" of Miltonic Influence

In “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” twentieth century novelist Richard Wright explains that black writers “must have in their consciousness the foreshortened picture of the whole, nourishing culture from which they were torn in Africa and of the long, complex . . . struggle to regain in some form and under alien conditions of life a whole culture again.”1 His assessment of black writers’ struggles in literary tradition points toward the Middle Passage and its linguistic terrors as a salient feature of African American writing. This assessment also brings John Milton’s Paradise Lost to mind. African American writers invoke Milton’s epic by contributing to a literary blueprint drafted by generations of artists in the black tradition whose writings attest to a cultural project of regaining an African paradise that was plundered by colonialist practices of enslavement. On the basis of their forced migration to the Americas and their colonized status, transplanted African writers and their African American descendants produce writings that mark colonialist civilizations as fallen and separated from God. Select writers in the early African American tradition articulate this Miltonic subtext directly in their works. Alluding