Phillis Wheatley Peters and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

“This is the difficult miracle of Black poetry in America: that we persist, published or not, and loved or unloved: we persist” (June Jordan, “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America: Something like a Sonnet for Phillis Wheatley,” 1986).

Phillis Wheatley Peters (ca.1753-1784) is recognized as the first African descended person and only the third woman to publish a book of poetry in British North America. She was born around 1753 near present-day Ghana and was kidnapped and enslaved around 1761. Her enslavers, the Wheatley family, renamed her “Phillis” after Phillis, the slave ship that transported her from Africa. Young Phillis was a savant: a voracious reader who began publishing poetry in newspapers by the age of fourteen. Recent scholarship suggests that she was also a driving force behind the publication of Poems on Various Subjects, published in London with the support of Selima Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon. The poems, written largely in the neo-classical style, cover a range of topics, from the death of prominent figures like George Whitefield, to philosophies of mind and imagination, to biblical narratives and Greek myths. Several poems address political figures and carry antislavery sentiments. Poems gained immediate attention as a demonstration of Black literary excellence. This visibility pushed Thomas Jefferson and others to intensify white supremacist arguments in defense of their claims that Africans were inherently inferior to Europeans. Wheatley Peters continued writing and publishing after the Wheatleys emancipated her in 1773 but could not secure funding for a second collection. She married John Peters, a free Black man, in 1778. The two had three children, all of whom preceded her in death.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911) was among the most prolific and versatile writers of the nineteenth century. She was born free in Baltimore, MD, and raised by her uncle, William Watkins, Sr., who ran the Academy for Negro Youth. Her first poetry collection, Forest Leaves, appeared around 1846. In addition to four novels (three serialized in newspapers) and approximately a dozen poetry collections, Harper published poems, essays, short fiction, letters, and speeches across a wide array of periodicals. During Reconstruction, Harper toured Southern states lecturing on civil rights, the role of Black women, and education. In later years, she helped found the American Woman Suffrage Association and the National Association of Colored Women, and she was one of the few women to be recognized and to speak at multiple colored conventions. Harper excelled at the ballad, using the ostensibly simple form to develop complex characterizations and to voice early Black feminist ideas. Harper often used her writing as a teaching tool, whether focused on the evils of enslavement, the harmful effects of alcoholism, or the importance of Black women’s political power.

Phillis Wheatley Peters. Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. London: Printed for A. Bell, Bookseller, 1773.

Phillis Wheatley Peters. Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. London: Printed for A. Bell, bookseller, Aldgate; and sold by Messrs. Cox and Berry, King-street, Boston, 1773.

William G. Allen. Wheatley, Banneker, and Horton. Boston: Daniel Lag, Jr., 1849.

Frances E. W. Harper. Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects. Boston: J. B. Yerrington and Son, 1854.

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