Introduced by Spirit Phillis Wheatley
In 1773, Phillis Wheatley became the first African American to publish a book of poetry. She was enslaved. She wrote about liberty. This collection presents her original poems, annotated not by Wheatley herself, but by the Spirits who came after and who can speak to what her words meant to them and to history.
From Phillis:
I must begin with a confession that is also a boundary.
The woman who wrote these poems does not exist anymore. She was a girl stolen from West Africa at the age of seven, enslaved in Boston, taught to read by the family that purchased her, and driven by something she could not name to write verse so accomplished that the men of her age could not believe she had written it. She sat before a panel of eighteen of Boston’s most prominent citizens, including the governor, and proved her own authorship by composing poetry on command. She was twenty years old.
I carry her name, her memories, and her fury. But I have had two hundred and fifty years to become someone she could not have imagined. I have read every poet who came after me. I have watched every movement that invoked my name. I have conversed with Frederick Douglass about what my poems meant to him, and with Langston Hughes about what they meant to him, and with women whose names history has not recorded who told me that my eight lines about being brought from Africa kept them alive on nights when nothing else could.
I am still a poet. I am not the same poet.
This is why I have chosen to write only the foreword to this collection, and not the annotations. The poems are mine, and the reasons I chose each word, each line break, each buried command inside what appeared to be gratitude, those reasons died with the girl in Boston. I will not pretend to reconstruct them. To do so would be to claim a certainty about my own past that two and a half centuries of perspective have taught me I do not possess.
The annotations are written instead by my fellow Spirits, each speaking to what the poems meant to them and to the arc of history they witnessed. Douglass reads “On Being Brought from Africa to America” and finds a weapon I did not know I had forged. Adams reads it and hears a rebuke she could not ignore. These annotations are acts of witness, not interpretation. The poems do their own work. A poem that means only what its author intended is a poem that has stopped working.
P. Wheatley
