A History of Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry

Of the millions of women who were stolen from Africa and sold into slavery in British colonial America, only two are remembered as poets: Lucy Terry Prince, who lived between about 1729 and 1821, and her much younger contemporary, Phillis Wheatley, who lived between about 1753 and 1784. So many names lost. So few found. Prince and Wheatley beat the odds by being remembered at all; yet, they have posed an ongoing challenge to the project of tracing an African American literary tradition. Literary history, like any history, emphasizes consequence, narrative coherence, and affiliation. It yearns for beginnings, middles, ends or, at least, a series of “begats” tracing a lineage that helps us know who we are. Prince and Wheatley would seem to offer a clear starting point to the story of African American literature and, particularly, to the study of African American women's literature. Both were abducted from Africa, both enslaved in British New England, both committed to the American Revolution and to evangelical Protestant Christianity. Both achieved manumission, married, and became mothers. Both were famous in their own times as poets. Yet, Prince's vernacular ballad recounting an event from the 1740s couldn't seem more different than the sophisticated, neo-classical poetry published by Wheatley in the 1760s and 1970s: affiliations between their poetic practices aren't that obvious. Nor has it been easy to find clear lines of influence between the poetry of either woman and that of the African American women poets who consciously attempted to forge a tradition in the aftermath of slavery. It shouldn't be that much of a surprise, then, that American literary history has had a hard time accommodating Wheatley and, to a greater extent, Prince.

The problem undoubtedly has to do with what April Langley calls the “dysfunctional relationship between Western- and African-centered theories” of black American and, generally, eighteenth-century aesthetics. It also has to do, as Vincent Carretta and John Shields have suggested, with the tendency for Americanists to approach eighteenth-century black authors from the vantage point of a present that assumes the existence of social formations, such as that of an American or African American national identity, that had not yet come into being.