A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats: Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects (1773): Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, Phillis Wheatley

Abstract:Phillis Wheatley's 1773 collection, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, is surely a book that matters. It matters as the first book published by an American slave of African origin; it matters as an emblem of the complex political, moral, and philosophical debates at hand in the American colonies on the eve of revolution; it matters as an aesthetic achievement; and it matters, perhaps most of all, as evidence of the persistence of antiblack racism and the discourse of white supremacy that have indelibly impacted the reception of this book from its eighteenth-century release to the present day.