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    A Study Guide for Phillis Wheatley's "On Being Brought from Africa to America"
    A Study Guide for Phillis Wheatley's "On Being Brought from Africa to America"
    A Study Guide for Phillis Wheatley's "On Being Brought from Africa to America"
    Ebook37 pages57 minutes

    A Study Guide for Phillis Wheatley's "On Being Brought from Africa to America"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Phillis Wheatley's "On Being Brought from Africa to America," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 2, 2016
    ISBN9781535830003
    A Study Guide for Phillis Wheatley's "On Being Brought from Africa to America"

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      A Study Guide for Phillis Wheatley's "On Being Brought from Africa to America" - Gale

      08

      On Being Brought from Africa to America

      Phillis Wheatley

      1773

      Introduction

      Phillis Wheatley's poem On Being Brought from Africa to America appeared in her 1773 volume Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, the first full-length published work by an African American author. In the poem, she gives thanks for having been brought to America, where she was raised to be a Christian. Wheatley was hailed as a genius, celebrated in Europe and America just as the American Revolution broke out in the colonies. Though a slave when the book was published in England, she was set free based on its success. She had been publishing poems and letters in American newspapers on both religious matters and current topics. She was thus part of the emerging dialogue of the new republic, and her poems to leading public figures in neoclassical couplets, the English version of the heroic meters of the ancient Greek poet Homer, were hailed as masterpieces. Some readers, looking for protests against slavery in her work, have been disenchanted upon instead finding poems like On Being Brought from Africa to America to reveal a meek acceptance of her slave fate.

      One critical problem has been an incomplete collection of Wheatley's work. In consideration of all her poems and letters, evidence is now available for her own antislavery views. Phillis Wheatley: Complete Writings (2001), which includes On Being Brought from Africa to America, finally gives readers a chance to form their own opinions, as they may consider this poem against the whole body of Wheatley's poems and letters. In context, it seems she felt that slavery was immoral and that God would deliver her race in time.

      Author Biography

      The African slave who would be named Phillis Wheatley and who would gain fame as a Boston poet during the American Revolution arrived in America on a slave ship on July 11, 1761. She was seven or eight years old, did not speak English, and was wrapped in a dirty carpet. She was bought by Susanna Wheatley, the wife of a Boston merchant, and given a name composed from the name of the slave ship, Phillis, and her master's last

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