The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley by David Waldstreicher

The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journey Through American Slavery and Independence
By David Waldstreicher
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2023

Phillis Wheatley, the young Boston slave who achieved fame in 1773 for her book Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, hasn’t lacked for biographies in the 239 years since she died at age 31 in 1784, and it’s no wonder: her story – brought to the colonies as a child, bought by the Wheatley family in Boston and taught to read and write, brought to London in 1773 by her master’s son, emancipated there and also published to widespread acclaim, and married to a grocer named John Peters for the odd obscurity of her final decade – is not only fascinating but obviously emblematic, woven through with many of the evils, contradictions, and promise of the Revolutionary era. 

Historian David Waldstreicher’s new book, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journey Through American Slavery and Independence, stands out from its predecessors in two main ways: it’s quite possibly the longest book ever devoted to Wheatley’s short life, and it’s the most intelligently searching of the woman and especially her works. He convincingly attributes several anonymous poems to Wheatley, and he’s uniformly excellent at discussing everything she wrote. “Once she is given her due as a politically aware person, and poetry is understood as a performance of possibilities rather than as solely an expression of feelings, it becomes easier to understand why her boldness, including this early, initial seizure of an opportunity to suggest the wrongs of slavery, is built upon stories of nations and pursued through analogies to parents and children,” Waldstreicher writes with his pleasing long-windedness about Wheatley’s poem “America,” for instance. “It isn’t that she was insensitive to the harsh realities of racial slavery. It’s that she saw the magnitude of the task at hand, on both the political and the personal levels, and the need to proceed carefully – even more carefully than the colonial point men like Benjamin Franklin who also spun the relationship of slavery and liberty for far-flung audiences.”

The thrilling dramatic climax of Wheatley’s story – the transformation of her life during her time in London in 1773-74 – is handled with terrific energy and detail by Waldstreicher. Wheatley arrived there as a slave and left a free woman and a famous one, and it forms the highlight of this long and intensely readable book. “People had intervened on her behalf. She had encouragement and prospects. Sold as a genius, given as gifts the classic books that for her constituted stock-in-trade, she could no longer remain enslaved property herself,” Waldstreicher writes. “Now she held a copyright, a property. That changed something, if not everything.” 

The extent of Waldstreicher’s research is evident in the book’s close-typed 150 pages of endnotes notes. “Many of the materials I’ve used to reconstruct Wheatley’s life and art were not available at all,” he writes, “not easily accessed, or not considered relevant by earlier scholars and readers.” (Readers will have to take his word for it, since the book inexcusably includes no bibliography). And more vital even than all this research is the insight of the biographer; it makes this big book impressively interesting and moving. 

Phillis Wheatley’s personal odyssey, Waldstreicher writes, “makes her intimately knowable, yet still mysterious.” This book dispels as much of the mystery as any is ever likely to do and makes this enigmatic founding American literary figure as knowable as the biographer’s art can manage.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.