Literary Legacies of Phillis Wheatley Peters
In the arts, Wheatley Peters’s legacies have been both transnational and multi-genre. In September 1774, just a year after her return to the North American colonies from England, one British writer published a lyric in London’s Sentimental Magazine under the title “Wrote after reading some Poems composed by Phillis Wheatley, an African Girl.” Through Wheatley, April C. E. Langley argues, readers may still achieve at least an indirect link to a Black aesthetic grounded in African cultural practices.
Black women have often led the way in saluting and extending Phillis Wheatley Peters' literary legacies. Mary Church Terrell wrote and directed a pageant in 1933, with one goal being to expand the cultural work of events being organized to commemorate George Washington. In Terrell’s play, the first president became a secondary figure in a script foregrounding Wheatley.
In 1973, Margaret Walker—herself, like Wheatley both poet and a Black thought leader—organized a celebratory event to honor PWP’s artistic contributions in the 200th anniversary year of the Poems’ publication. In 2023, another anniversary year, the Margaret Walker Center mounted an even more ambitious Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival recalling the first.
In the past decade, a burst of creative writing has emerged to reaffirm Phillis Wheatley Peters' artistic relevance. From plays composed by Ade Solanke and Paul Oakley Stovall (with Marilyn Campbell-Lowe) to books of poetry by drea brown, Alison Clarke, and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Wheatley Peters lives on.
A flowering of children’s and YA literature linked to Wheatley Peters is continuing to demonstrate her ongoing impact on creative legacies also linked to educational goals.
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“20 Black women poets to honor Phillis Wheatley” The New York Times 2 November 1973, p. 54.
Isani, Mukhtar Ali. “A Contemporaneous British Poem on Phillis Wheatley.” Black American Literature Forum vol. 24, no. 3, 1990, pp. 565-66.
Langley, April C. E. The Black Aesthetic Unbound: Theorizing the Dilemma of Eighteenth-Century African American Literature. Ohio State University Press, 2008.
