New Scholarship on the Life of Phillis Wheatley and Her Poetry (3.7.23)

This book review appeared in today's New York Times. I think we are witnessing a renaissance in Phillis Wheatley's poetry, including this biography by David Waldstreicher, a 2011 biography by Vincent Carretta, The Age of Phillis, by Honorée Fanone Jeffers and published in 2020, plus this essay linking Fanone Jeffers' work to a concept called "critical fabulation."  Not to forget the critical essay and close analysis of her poem, "To S.M., a Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works," in Edward Hirsch's new book, The Heart of American Poetry. *

Which is all to say, it's past time that those of us who were introduced to Phillis Wheatley's poems ("On Being Brought from Africa to America") in our sophomore American Lit survey courses (Norton, vol. 1) as somebody to pass over on our way from Anne Bradstreet to Ralph Waldo Emerson to get reading and (re)assessing. 

* Accorded a place of high estimation: the second of 40 poets/songwriters presented in the book whom Hirsch considers formative in the history of American poetry.