For Phillis Wheatley writing in 1773, as for Ottobah Cugoano writing in 1787, “it was already too late.” Those are the words that Stephen Best and Saidiya Hartman use to describe the impossibility of repair in the context of Cugoano’s abolitionist Thoughts and Sentiments: “It was not too late,” they write, “to imagine an end to slavery, but it was too late to imagine a repair of its injury” (1); for Wheatley, who published her foundational Poems on Various Subjects in 1773, the vast and incalculable harms of slavery were certainly beyond repair. Against a calcifying system of racialized harm, a turn to repair would only serve to produce what Hartman describes elsewhere as the contradictory position of the reparations movement: promising reform, but unable to right “the systemic ongoing production of racial inequality, in material or any other terms” (198). Within Wheatley’s and Cugoano’s earlier calls for abolition lies an understanding that there is no “making right a wrong, restoring what has been destroyed, or giving back what has been taken” (Best and Hartman 3).
I would like to suggest that Wheatley’s poetics engages early structures of political economy to meditate on the limits and possibilities of repair. To do this, I look to a perhaps surprising place: Wheatley’s neoclassicism, specifically her use of theodicy and georgic. Closely linked in their literary histories, both georgic and theodicy engage poetic form as a model for the world and the cosmos in the long eighteenth century. Wheatley’s neoclassical heroic couplet poetry, I argue, takes up those forms to actively reimagine them. As J. Paul Hunter has established, the effect of heroic couplets, here those of Alexander Pope, may be understood as “a demonstration in how to read as an exercise in how to think” (“Formalism” 119). A careful reader of Pope, Wheatley renovates the couplet as a mode of thinking that seeks to move beyond reformist understandings of repair. Looking to the neoclassical forms of georgic and theodicy, she heightens established poetic structures of inequality to make a case for reimagining the world. Writing at a moment when it was far too late for repair, Wheatley foregrounds a poetics of racial capitalism through neoclassical form and ultimately seeks to transform the entire structure—to build something new.Footnote 1
In turning to the seemingly outmoded form and genre of neoclassicism and georgic, Wheatley inaugurates a Black Atlantic poetics that abstains from innovative models while remaining committed to social change. I take up the concept of repair, a term that sometimes holds connotations of innovation or improvement but also has its own recursive temporality, to consider the relevance of Wheatley’s neoclassical aesthetics to what Anna Tsing has called the “arts of living on a damaged planet.”Footnote 2 In many ways, this is a georgic sensibility. As David Fairer has argued in his work on “eco-georgic,” this key poetic mode of the eighteenth century holds an unrelenting “practicality”—a “recognition of issues like excess, waste, process” and a sense that “things that might easily be drained away can be recycled” (212). Wheatley’s neoclassical style embraces such georgic engagement as a mode of salvage that demands social and political justice.
In Wheatley’s poetry, one finds two seemingly disparate but surprisingly interrelated notions of repair: on the one hand, the call for reparations and, on the other, what Eve Sedgwick defines as reparative practice. Reparative reading—often understood as a pleasurable or nourishing alternative to hermeneutic methods that seek to acknowledge and expose structural oppression, pain, and injury—would seem an unlikely practice to consider alongside ongoing debates about reparations for slavery. But the terms of Sedgwick’s discussion are not in fact dissimilar to those that must remain central to any theorization of slavery and repair. “In a world full of loss, pain, and oppression,” Sedgwick writes, “both epistemologies”—that is, the paranoid and the reparative—“are likely to be based on deep pessimism: the reparative motive of seeking pleasure, after all, arrives, by Klein’s account, only with the achievement of a depressive position” (138). Sedgwick describes the reparative process as a gathering of fragments: “it is possible in turn to use one’s own resources to assemble or ‘repair’ the murderous part-objects into something like a whole—though, I would emphasize, not necessarily like any preexisting whole” (128).Footnote 3 Wheatley’s neoclassical poetry, I argue, assembles “something like a whole,” looking backward, through the mode of neoclassical georgic, to imagine future possibility and social change. She invokes the odd temporality of repair, caught between recursiveness and possibility—or faint glimmers of progress—to make a case for abolition and world-building rather than reforming the world as it is.
By revising their conventional relationship to labor, Wheatley’s georgics offer an early poetic statement against what Ellen Meiksins Wood has described as the old models of capitalist development: “a paradoxical blend of transhistorical determinism and ‘free’ market voluntarism, in which the capitalist market was both an immutable natural law and the perfection of human choice and freedom.” For Wood, the antithesis of such a model would fully acknowledge the “imperatives and compulsions” of the capitalist market, “while recognizing that these imperatives are rooted not in some transhistorical natural law but in historically specific social relations, constituted by human agency and subject to change” (34). I suggest that Wheatley’s neoclassical georgics offer an early version of such a model, both registering the compulsions of the market and insisting on the possibility of structural change. Writing in a context in which inevitability gets used to sanction rather than to deplore the irreparability of harm, Wheatley unravels providential form to make a case for social transformation. She revises the formal logic of theodicy to provide a voice for a version of abolitionism that “derived strength from its association with the critique of the operation of pure market forces” (Blackburn 440). Working explicitly within the neoclassical mode, Wheatley offers an abolitionist poetics that is inherently and structurally anticapitalist. She locates responsibility and agency not in enforced labor or cultivation but in larger social and economic structures. In this way, her georgics quietly oppose the inevitability of both capitalism and slavery.
Theodicy and Repair
Neoclassical form and theodicy share a close poetic history. Vindicating the ways of god to man by “equat[ing] art and divine providence” within the “orthodoxy of aesthetics” (Paulson, Beautiful xi), theodicy finds formal articulation through a neoclassical poetics that serves as an analogue for the ideal craftwork of cosmic design. As Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz puts it in his Theodicy, which describes god as a “great craftsman,” “God is all order; he always keeps truth of proportions, he makes universal harmony; all beauty is an effusion of his rays” (159, 51).
Leibniz’s optimism had a profound effect on the poetics of Pope, whose version of theodicy is predicated on a somewhat paradoxical empiricism that gains confidence from a lack of knowledge (see Sitter, “Theodicy” 93–94; Danielson 27–28). In this view, one derives conclusions from what one sees or senses while also trusting that divine craftsmanship is beyond the scope of human comprehension. For Leibniz, this principle is best illustrated by a comparison of the universe to a large but intricate painting:
Look at a very beautiful picture, and cover it up except for some small part. What will it look like but some confused combination of colors, without delight, without art; indeed the more closely we examine it the more it will look that way. But as soon as the covering is removed, and you see the whole surface from an appropriate place, you will understand that what looked like accidental splotches on the canvas were made with consummate skill by the creator of the work.(“On the Ultimate Origination” 153)
Here, close examination leads inevitably to more confusion. Only in that impossible synoptic view can one see the “consummate skill by the creator of the work.” As Pope himself puts it in An Essay on Man, “All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee; / All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see” (epistle 1, lines 289–90).Footnote 4 In moving from a “confused combination of colors” to the highest order of divine workmanship or art, Leibniz’s theodicy anticipates Pope’s poetics of concordia discors, in which order spontaneously rises from disorder. This shift in perspective, from the seeming chaos of a part to what Pope describes as an “amazing Whole” (epistle 1, line 248), resonates with his ideal of poetic workmanship, in which heroic couplets build on each other to create an intricate and perfectly crafted poem. In the world of Pope’s poetics, his own (painstaking but seemingly careless) literary labor is analogous to the work of a larger cosmic design.
As has been amply demonstrated in the last four decades of Pope scholarship, such poetic forms and philosophies have often served as an alibi for harm. Pope’s Windsor Forest most famously takes concordia discors as the central form for locodescription as well as a figure for global capitalism. An example of what critics have sometimes referred to as Pope’s “economic theodicy,” which depicts the world as a “gigantic self-regulating market” (Barrell and Guest 121), this picture slides easily into the logic of empire and slavery.Footnote 5 The climactic moment of harmony in Windsor Forest—Queen Anne’s divine fiat, “Let Discord cease!” (327)—celebrates the Treaty of Utrecht, which also granted the Asiento contract, entitling the British South Sea Company to trade 4,800 enslaved Africans annually for thirty years. Here, in what might be understood as theodicy’s art of not knowing, one finds the logic behind what Immanuel Kant describes as “the failure of all attempted philosophical theodicies”: in place of an omniscient view, art allows one “to find the appropriate means for the ends that one likes” (284n1). In this way, notions of craft, or “art,” as universal harmony play a central role in articulations of theodicy—the use of enslaved labor being one prevalent example of such “appropriate means.”
Writing sixty years after the publication of Windsor Forest, Wheatley participates in and contributes to an important shift in the relation between poetry and theodicy. As Earl Wasserman argues in his study of ontological poetics in the period, “‘Serious’ poetry has always been an effort to call into valid being a particular ordering of reality” (10).Footnote 6 But whereas the eighteenth century offered “sufficient intellectual homogeneity for men to share certain assumptions, or universal principles” (10), the nineteenth century demanded a new mode in which “the modern poem must both formulate its own cosmic syntax and shape the autonomous poetic reality that the cosmic syntax permits” (11). Within this turn, Wasserman explains, “‘Nature,’” which had once been “prior to the poem and available for imitation, now shares with the poem a common origin in the poet’s creativity” (11). A careful reader of neoclassical theodicy and a poet who, as John Shields and others have argued, anticipates Romantic poetics, Wheatley should be understood as a key figure in the shifting terms of that “particular ordering of reality,” in which “a poem is an organic unity and therefore a kind of cosmos of its own making” (Wasserman 4). Her work—positioned between an older poetics of things as they are and an emergent desire for something more—seeks to develop a new cosmic syntax.
Wheatley holds an especially complicated place in this history. As Simon Gikandi suggests, Wheatley has long been known for her “more eschatological view of enslavement,” which exemplifies the “providential design of the slave narrative” (86).Footnote 7 Yet at the same time, one hears in her letters an ongoing concern with the logics of theodicy and slavery. In a letter to John Thornton, for instance, she refers to god as craftsman, “the great Maker of all” (Collected Works 173–74), and writes, “O that I could meditate continually on this work of wonder in Deity itself…. Nor will this desire to look into the deep things of God, cease, in the Breasts of glorified saints & Angels” (173). In a defiant update of Leibniz, Wheatley acknowledges the limited empiricism of theodicy while also expressing her desire to look deeper, perhaps to find a cause. She continues to be skeptical of craft and design. Speaking of “bereaving Providence” in a letter about her former enslaver Susanna Wheatley’s death, she describes her “laboring under a languishing illness for many months past” (180, 178), and she later writes to Obour Tanner, “I hope ever to follow your good advices and be resigned to the afflicting hand of a seemingly frowning Providence” (181). While Wheatley may express such a “hope” for resignation, her poetry and correspondence return instead to images of affliction and disorder. Continuing to resist notions of providential form, she goes on in the letter to write of her desire to “praise our great benefactor, for the innumerable benefits continually pour’d upon me, that while he strikes one comfort dead he raises up another” (181). Written in the context of not knowing, Wheatley’s letters dwell in the appearance of chaos, the “pouring,” “strik[ing] dead,” and “raising up” of a “seemingly frowning Providence.”
These letters are reflections on providential harmony, but they are also reflections on harm—on the uneven force of a “bereaving Providence,” whose “afflicting hand…strikes” certain people’s “comfort dead.” By highlighting the very injury that neoclassical theodicies so often seek to hide, Wheatley insists in her letters on acknowledging and defining injury through an unlikely set of terms. She thus participates in a history that includes both Belinda Sutton’s 1782 “Petition,” which makes a case for reparations by documenting the “agony, which many of her country’s children have felt, but which none have ever described” (142), and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s more recent call for reparative justice, which underscores the Supreme Court’s unactionable definition of “social discrimination” as “an amorphous concept of injury that may be ageless in its reach into the past” (Regents of the University of California v. Bakke qtd. in Coates; see also Franke; Araujo; Martin and Yaquinto; Finkenbine). In describing that which political theodicy leaves obscure, Wheatley brings out the uneven distribution that inheres in seemingly neutral accounts of providence. The “innumerable benefits” and “striking one comfort dead” while “raising up another” suggest something closer to economic theodicy than to divine providence.
Freedom and Providence
Wheatley’s “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” perhaps most directly reenvisions formal optimism to place pressure on Pope’s continued assurances in Essay on Man that “Whatever is, is right” (epistle 1, line 294). The poem at first appears to accept the terms of neoclassical theodicy by offering a synoptic glance at the cosmos:
Ador’d for ever be the God unseen,
Which round the sun revolves this vast machine,
Though to his eye its mass a point appears:
Ador’d the God that whirls surrounding spheres. (11–14)Footnote 8
The rhyme between “unseen” and “machine” in this moment establishes the terms of Leibnizian theodicy, in which cosmic order exists beyond the reach of the human eye. But as the poem proceeds, it begins to register a skepticism of such a grand design:
Creation smiles in various beauty gay,
While day to night, and night succeeds to day:
That Wisdom, which attends Jehovah’s ways,
Shines most conspicuous in the solar rays:
Without them, destitute of heat and light,
This world would be the reign of endless night:
In their excess how would our race complain,
Abhorring life! how hate its length’ned chain!
From air adust what num’rous ills would rise?
What dire contagion taint the burning skies?
What pestilential vapours, fraught with death,
Would rise, and overspread the lands beneath? (29–40)
The stanza seems at first to offer a case study in heroic couplet balance: the chiasmus that shifts from day to night and then from night to day mimics the formal balance of the universe, which a few lines later Wheatley says “appears harmonious, fair, and good” (60). But the lines that follow elide any such appearances and linger instead over a world in chaos. Indeed, the sheer number of lines that follow threatens to exceed the apparent balance of the initial couplet as disaster rather than order rises repeatedly across the poem. For a reflection on providence, the stanza dwells somewhat incongruously on discord. A neat inversion of Pope’s iconic depiction of concordia discors in Windsor Forest—“Not Chaos-like together crush’d and bruis’d, / But as the World, harmoniously confus’d” (13–14)—the passage begins with harmony and ends with chaos: “Ills,” “contagion,” and “pestilential vapours” overwhelm an initially harmonious world.
In its extended depiction of discordant harm, the passage recalls Samuel Johnson’s definition of discordia concors, in which “the most heterogenous ideas are yoked by violence together” (16). But the violence of Wheatley’s poem is introduced more specifically with an “excess” of “solar rays.” In a formulation that sounds close to the logic of the Plantationocene, Wheatley’s lines begin to map ecological ruin onto racial injustice.Footnote 9 As Katy Chiles argues, in these lines “slavery diseases the land”: “the poem questions three times what the disease might be, but the answer of slavery itself remains unspoken” (58). While the repeated “would” appears to mark the latter parts of her stanza as an exercise in imagination or “roving Fancy,” the figure of life’s “length’ned chain”—set alongside the ambiguous but suggestive end-rhyme of “our race complain”—pulls the poem back toward the brutal realities of the slave trade. Recalling the description of “the iron chain” that will no longer “enslave the land” in Wheatley’s ironic celebration of America’s escape from political slavery in “To Dartmouth” (17, 19), life’s “lengthen’d chain” alludes to the harm of subjugated labor.Footnote 10 A few lines down, the speaker describes the “tasks diurnal” that “tire the human frame” (49). Not simply a counterfactual, Wheatley’s excess of solar rays evokes the very present reality of an economic structure that relies on the endless labor of the enslaved.
In these figures of extended daylight, which tie “tasks diurnal” to an “excess of solar rays,” Wheatley links ecological catastrophe and forced labor. She develops, in other words, what Katherine Clay Bassard describes as her “continued, if implicit, critique of the slave trade and its founding ideologies about climate and environment, which attempted to map race and subjectivity onto geographical space” (48). As Bassard puts it, in a reading of “To Cambridge” that also resonates across the Collected Works, “the ‘sin’ is slavery, conceived of by Wheatley (because she probably experienced it as such) as a global system of captivity and forced labor” (42). In “Thoughts on the Works of Providence,” that system of endless “tasks diurnal” becomes inextricable from an extended list of “ills” and “pestilential vapours” that “overspread the lands beneath.” Christina Sharpe, engaging Hartman’s work on the “precarities of the afterlives of slavery,” points to the harmful and ongoing effects of narratives that seek to place catastrophe firmly in the past: “Transatlantic slavery was and is the disaster.” Sharpe writes, “The disaster of Black subjection was and is planned; terror is disaster and ‘terror has a history’ and it is deeply atemporal” (5).Footnote 11 Writing in the midst of that history of terror, Wheatley brings together the language of catastrophe and theodicy to show slavery as planned disaster. Her couplets resist the inevitabilization of slavery and racial capitalism, inviting her readers to consider racial injustice alongside environmental degradation.
In the moments when Wheatley does turn toward something like cosmic design to imagine a synoptic view, she carefully separates out the logic of subjugated labor from theodicy. What she offers then is an unwavering picture of freedom: the cosmos is described earlier in “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” as “unbounded space” (22), and “To Dartmouth” takes up the structure of concordia discors, or “order from disorder sprung” (Milton, bk. 3, line 713), to make claims for the unfinished project of abolition: “Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song, / Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung” (20–21).Footnote 12 Here Wheatley participates in the abolitionist tradition of Prince Hall, who uses the language of craft to advocate for freedom rather than trust in established representations of providence; he maintains in his sermon to the African Lodge of Freemasons in Boston, “[T]he most excellent accomplished piece of the visible creation, Man…is the most remarkable workmanship of God” (Hall and Marrant 108). For Hall, the implications of such workmanship for slavery are unambiguous: “what nation or people dare, without highly displeasing and provoking that God to pour down his judgments upon them.—I say dare to despise or tyrannize over their lives or liberties, or incroach on their lands, or to inslave their bodies? God hath and ever will visit such a nation or people as this” (109). Here abolition is explicitly unreconcilable with the logic of economic theodicy.
One hears this sharp distinction between theodicy and an economics of subjugation when Wheatley returns to the language of form to call for racial justice in a letter to Samson Occom. She writes, “[T]he Chaos which has reigned so long, is converting into beautiful Order, and reveals more and more clearly, the glorious Dispensation of civil and religious Liberty, which are so inseparably united, that there is little or no Enjoyment of one without the other” (Collected Works 176). Here “beautiful Order” offers hope for civil progress rather than a picture of the world as it already is. Instead of claiming a confidence in what she cannot know, Wheatley famously ends the letter by using language reminiscent of theodicy to decry the contradiction between a discourse of political liberty and the reality of slavery in the colonies:
God grant Deliverance in his own way and Time, and get him honor upon all those whose Avarice impels them to countenance and help forward the Calamities of their Fellow Creatures. This I desire not for their Hurt, but to convince them of the strange Absurdity of their Conduct whose Words and Actions are so diametrically opposite. How well the Cry for Liberty, and the reverse Disposition for the Exercise of oppressive Power over others agree,—I humbly think it does not require the Penetration of a Philosopher to determine.(177)
Wheatley invokes “Hurt” not as a wish to harm her enslavers in equal measure but rather with the hope of stopping them from “help[ing] forward” further harm. The figure of diametrical opposition, furthermore, invokes the structure of heroic-couplet balance and antithesis in reference not to naturally opposing forces but to a careful grafting of racial capitalism onto theodicy. Here concordia discors is less a sign of god’s plan than an attempt to formalize and calcify uneven distribution—to impose life’s “length’ned chain,” the reign of endless day, on the enslaved. Wheatley’s abolitionist poetics suggests that freedom is a logical repair of the deliberate harms of slavery. The hortatory utterances that begin the passage—“God grant Deliverance…and get him honor”—signal a desire for transformative reordering. Shifting toward that new cosmic syntax, a theodicy and poetics of creative possibility, Wheatley calls for a world in which “the Cry for Liberty” and “Exercise of Oppressive Power” are not held in poetic tension but rather mutually exclusive.
In her recent Reckoning with Slavery, Jennifer Morgan has demonstrated that early modern Black women were not merely “enmeshed” in the affective and commercial relationships that determined their lives; they were themselves “economic thinker[s]…versed in political arithmetic, speculative thought, and social calculation.” In this crucial and compelling work, Morgan shows “what Africans and their descendants in the early modern Atlantic could and did know about the terms of their captivity” (3). In Wheatley’s insistent heightening of formal inequality, in her careful mapping of forced labor onto environmental space, I also hear a mode of economic thinking. An active response to the harms of theodicy, Wheatley’s writing engages forms of uneven economic distribution to call for something in the spirit of—and yet also well beyond—repair.
“The Products of Her Leisure Moments”
Wheatley’s poems are not known for their attention to the painful and exploitative labor that disrupts the logic of theodicy. Poems on Various Subjects draws a clear line between Wheatley’s poetry and her labor. The preface begins by assuring readers that “The following Poems were written originally for the Amusement of the Author, as they were the Products of her leisure Moments” (Preface 4). In a way such phrasing only serves to diminish Wheatley’s art: one anonymous review reproduces the preface’s language to describe “[t]he pieces, of which this little volume consists” as “the productions of her leisure moments” with a tone of condescension (qtd. in Isani 146). But a refusal to categorize her poetry as labor is in fact at the heart of Wheatley’s reparative poetics and of the broader literature of slavery, for which, Paul Gilroy writes, “work signifies only servitude, misery, and subordination.” Unlike the self-consciously laborious poetics of the neoclassical tradition, the literature of the Black Atlantic, Gilroy maintains, takes “artistic expression” as the “centre-piece of emancipatory hopes” (40). One begins to hear a faint echo of this turn from writing as labor to writing as leisure in a letter to Tanner in which Wheatley concludes, “Pray excuse my not writing to you so long before, for I have been so busy lately that I could not find leisure” (Collected Works 178). Speaking in the same letter of having “lately met with a great trial in the death of my mistress” (177), Wheatley frames her domestic responsibilities—here a mix of work and grief and care—in opposition to her writing.
“To Maecenas” opens Poems on Various Subjects by affirming this sense of writing as something to be actively sought after. Helping to capture the mood of precarity that hovers over her entire literary project, Wheatley’s speaker professes, “While blooming wreaths around thy temples spread / I’ll snatch a laurel from thine honour’d head, / While you indulgent smile upon the deed” (45–47). Critics have read this moment variously as a playful insertion of herself into a literary tradition that would be recalcitrant toward her or as an allusion to her own traumatic kidnapping at a young age; she writes in “To Dartmouth” of being “snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat” (25).Footnote 13 Somewhere in between the mischievous gesture of the first reading and the solemnity implicit in the second—which might well coexist in the line—I would add, is her refusal to regard her art as labor. By willfully “snatching” that laurel from Maecenas’s head, Wheatley starkly opposes her approach to that of someone like Jonathan Swift, whose speakers often describe the writing process as one in which, for example, when, “with more than usual Pain, / A thought came slowly from my Brain,” to which he adds: “It cost me lord knows how much time / To shape it into sense and rhyme” (7–10). “Smil[ing] upon the deed,” Wheatley resists even such playful definitions of poetry as lost or labor time and instead considers her art a brief moment of respite from more painful domestic concerns.Footnote 14
Wheatley’s refusal to treat poetry as labor might at first seem to be at odds with the work of feminist labor theory, which strives to make invisible labor visible (see Santamarina 10). As Paula Bennett has argued, Wheatley’s declaration that she will “snatch a laurel from thine honour’d head” contributes to the important work of “poetic self-redemption—that is, her legitimation of her right to practice her vocation” (66). But in that moment I also hear Mary Wollstonecraft’s description of the scant and “disorderly” education available to women (32). “Led by their dependent situation and domestic employments more into society” (32–33), Wollstonecraft writes, “what they learn is rather by snatches,” and they are denied the opportunity to “pursue any one branch with that persevering ardour necessary to give vigour to the faculties” (33). Learning similarly by “snatches,” Wheatley helps to demonstrate the “desultory kind” of knowledge that must be actively sought after by those who were even more forcefully excluded from the world of letters (Wollstonecraft 32). In this respect the final couplet of “To Maecenas”—“Then grant, Maecenas, thy paternal rays, / Hear me propitious, and defend my lays” (54–55)—might be read not just as a defense against the criticisms leveled at an enslaved poet but also as a wish to protect her own poetry from its casualization. Here art and labor must remain carefully differentiated. Wheatley’s domestic labor might then be taken as the work that it is, while the gentlemanly arts of many of her neoclassical predecessors might more properly be understood as a product of social privilege.
“To Maecenas” does the important work of tying together race, reception, and theodicy. Wheatley approaches theodicy not simply as a divine model of the cosmos but also as a system of thought that can be appropriated to perpetuate and protect racial capitalism as though it were natural. One might revisit her oft-cited complaint about the exceptional status of Terence with these concerns in mind:
The happier Terence all the choir inspir’d
His soul replenish’d, and his bosom fir’d;
But say, ye Muses, why this partial grace,
To one alone of Afric’s sable race. (37–40)
The lines at first appear to adopt a posture of humility toward a lofty aesthetic tradition. But by using neoclassical poetics to foreground the uneven distribution of the Muses’ “grace,” they also refuse to reenact the optimism of this mode. Frances Smith Foster argues that these lines should be understood as “part question and part challenge,” acknowledging the role of racism in the reception of her work (39). Wheatley’s rhyme of “grace” and “race” can be read as a comment on attempts to naturalize that racist reception as “grace.” Calling attention to formal inequality and “partial grace,” Wheatley anticipates Max Weber’s account of Calvinism’s “comforting assurance that the unequal distribution of this world’s goods was the special work of the providence of God, who by means of these distinctions, and his ‘particular’ grace, was working out his secret purposes, of which we know nothing” (119).
N. D. B. Connolly’s response to Coates, which calls for a more robust account of the necessary economic reorganization at stake, offers a helpful corollary to what I suggest Wheatley does with her poetic form. “Putting the ‘repair’ into reparations,” Connolly writes, “essentially means using constitutional amendments, political organizing, and the courts to restructure the very government that has enabled the wretched and enduring history that Ta-Nehisi Coates so vividly details.”Footnote 15 Against the political functions of theodicy, repair demands agency and responsibility at a higher scale; it requires moving away from formal harmony to highlight an ongoing history of pain, difficulty, and injustice and to redistribute that pain more equitably and responsibly. Taking up in both her letters and her poetry the balance and antithesis of heroic couplet architecture, Wheatley formalizes structural inequality to demand a complete reordering of reality.
In casting her writing as leisure or art rather than labor, Wheatley anticipates another facet of repair. One sees this most clearly in Tara Bynum’s reading of Wheatley in terms of pleasure and friendship, asking critics and scholars “to rethink what kinds of sociability are possible between black women in the revolutionary era” (“Phillis Wheatley” 43): “Tanner and Wheatley craft and speak…an erotic out of which each woman feels, loves, and remembers on her own terms” (47). As Bynum argues in another essay, Wheatley “crafts a way of being that makes possible the very notion of pleasure in the lives of eighteenth-century black women” (“Phillis Wheatley’s Pleasures”).Footnote 16 Bynum places Wheatley in a tradition of Black feminism that allows scholars to think reparation differently. Shauna Sweeney takes the example of Audre Lorde, who “foregrounded the somatic, sensual experiences of women—what she called the ‘erotic’—as key to black reparation. Here, pleasure en route to revolution became a negation of capitalism” (65). In a similar vein, Afua Cooper seeks to avoid reproducing the structure of racial capitalism by arguing that “knowledge about Black people is a form of reparation” (Cooper et al. 155). Cooper’s framing of knowledge as repair provides a lens for reading Wheatley’s poems, where knowledge is to be defended for its own sake rather than understood as more work—or as a debt to be repaid.
By thinking pleasure, knowledge, and leisure together as forms of repair, I might seem to read Wheatley through the lens of what Patricia Stuelke has identified as a late-twentieth-century strain of reparative thinking that casts “feeling and care as ends in themselves and limit[s] points of possible action” (9). In this framework, which centers therapeutic modes of individual repair, the reparative appears to offer “relief from the burden of histories that hurt” while “seem[ing] to stave off the difficult work of imagining possible worlds that break definitively with this one” (13, 17). A turn to leisure may well risk falling into that trap of repair. But part of what is most remarkable about Wheatley’s poetic invocations are the ways in which they actively resist the therapeutic register of writing. When Wheatley asks, “But say, ye Muses, why this partial grace, / To one alone of Afric’s sable race?” her call for poetry and leisure is framed in terms of a larger collective. In what Virginia Jackson has identified as her “metalyrical creation of a poetics of personal abstraction” (60), Wheatley resists any move toward individual repair. On the contrary, as Jackson suggests in a reading of “On Recollection,” Wheatley “beats—couplet by couplet, iambic foot by iambic foot—the representation of individual subjectivity into thin air” (119). That “poetics of uncertain personhood” (124)—the insistently recessive “I” of her poetic voice—often allows Wheatley to shift her writing toward a wider scale. Wheatley’s call to separate art from labor, in other words, is not simply an attempt to find more “leisure Moments” for herself but rather part of a consistent poetic demand for structural change.
“How happy that man who is prepar’d for that night wherein no man can work!” writes Wheatley in another letter to Tanner (Collected Works 168). These lines offer an allusion to the millennial imagery of John 9.4: “I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work.” Characteristically eliding the “I” from the King James Version, Wheatley registers her own desires, here in a personal letter to a friend, as a generalized call for liberation. Here, too, an image of beautiful order and liberty is tied to darkness and a world without work—an example of the way in which Wheatley’s poetics repeatedly dismantle, as Sondra O’Neale has said, the “antagonistic black and white color imagery to symbolize societal assumptions about race and election” (147). Poetry holds a special place in this image. As June Jordan puts it, Wheatley was made to read poetry that “was written, all of it, by white men taking their pleasure, their walks, their pipes, their pens and their paper, rather seriously, while somebody else cleaned the house, washed the clothes, cooked the food, watched the children.” In the tradition of “this white man’s literature of England,” written “while somebody else did the other things that have to be done” (177), poetry might well be understood as the vehicle for such a world without work.
Art without Labor
If Wheatley’s poetics of repair requires a strict separation between her art and her labor, then georgic, a mode that places labor—idealized and at times redemptive—at its center, would seem to have no place in her art. One of the most prevalent modes of poetry in English in the eighteenth century, georgic is often understood to celebrate farm labor and husbandry as a means of nation building in the aftermath of civil war. Yet as many critics have argued, georgic tends to pastoralize or elide the backbreaking labor that is its substance. L. P. Wilkinson has noted that the tradition of obscuring enslaved and laboring bodies goes back at least as far as Virgil’s Georgics, which omitted the enslaved workers on which Roman farms relied—a “vagueness” that, Wilkinson maintains, “contributed greatly to the poem’s vitality in the long run” (55).Footnote 17 This work of euphemism would gain traction in the eighteenth century, when, as Beth Fowkes Tobin argues, “[t]he competition between intellectual and physical labor for moral value is the central problematic of georgic” (52). In a recurring sleight of hand, British poets replaced the manual labor celebrated by The Georgics with leisure activities such as reading or hunting.Footnote 18 Similarly, Cristobal Silva argues that James Grainger’s georgic The Sugar-Cane omits “representations of slave labor” in order to “carv[e] out a space for the imaginative or poetic labor of writing—the labor of representation” (138). The key rhetorical move of British georgic, it has seemed, is the displacement of the actual labor of farmworkers or the enslaved by the intellectual labor of the poet.Footnote 19
By referring to her writing as “leisure,” and by evacuating her poetic works of labor, Wheatley demonstrates little patience for such analogies. She neither elides nor celebrates the labor so often thought central to the mode but rather divorces her own art from a category that was used to marginalize her works.Footnote 20 Wheatley’s verse takes issue with what had been the moral center of Virgil’s middle term, the divine sanction of painful and relentless toil. As Virgil proclaims in his Jupiter theodicy, here translated by John Dryden,
The Sire of Gods and Men, with hard Decrees,
Forbids our Plenty to be bought with Ease:
And wills that Mortal Men, inur’d to toil,
Shou’d exercise, with pains, the grudging Soil.
(Dryden, bk. 1, lines 183–86)
The logic of georgic theodicy gets echoed in the Black Atlantic context by Jupiter Hammon, who cites Isaiah in “An Evening’s Improvement”: “Here we see that we ought to pray, that God may hasten the time when the people shall beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into pruning-hooks, and nations shall learn war no more” (48). Virgil likewise celebrates the providential origin of “Handy-Crafts and Arts” (Dryden, bk. 1, line 189) and looks forward to a time when “crooked Scythes” are no longer “streightened into Swords” (684), when
The lab’ring Swains,
Who turn the Turfs of those unhappy Plains,
Shall rusty Piles from the plough’d Furrows take,
And over empty Helmets pass the Rake.(662–65)
It is precisely this connection between peacetime—or harmonious order—and labor that Wheatley’s work strives to undo.Footnote 21 Her poetry imagines a version of georgic—signaled as early as “To Maecenas,” which alludes to Virgil’s dedication of The Georgics—that displaces labor from its position as ethical center of gravity.
Part of a public exchange in verse in The Royal American Magazine, “To a Gentleman of the Navy” turns away from the moral focus on landed labor toward what one might call the oceanic possibilities of georgic. As Neal Wood and others have demonstrated, landed economies were losing ground during Wheatley’s time, becoming more about capital investment and profit than “subsistence and self-sufficiency” (9). Wheatley unites ploughing and seafaring in an intricate metaphor that brings recent economic shifts from land to capital to bear on colonial exploitation:Footnote 22
Far in the space where ancient Albion keeps
Amidst the roarings of the sacred deeps,
Where willing forests leave their native plain,
Descend, and instant, plough the wat’ry main.
Strange to relate! with canvas wings they speed
To distant worlds; of distant worlds the dread. (19–24)
Part of a series of poems that Honorée Fanonne Jeffers argues “illustrate an embrace of her Africanness” (175), “To a Gentleman of the Navy” also introduces the persistent figure of the sea, which recurs throughout Wheatley’s work. The extended metaphor itself feels almost liquid. The “willing forests” are initially cast as frontiersmen, choosing to “leave their native plain” only to become both settlers and seafarers when they “descend, and instant, plough the wat’ry main.” But no sooner do they land than those same “willing forests” get transformed again into slave ships on the Middle Passage “with canvas wings” speeding out toward “distant worlds.”Footnote 23 Here the georgics of the sea sit and shift uncomfortably alongside Wheatley’s quiet georgics of slavery.
In a self-conscious lament at the beginning of the poem, Wheatley returns to her complaint about “partial grace”: “Calliope, half gracious to my prayer, / Grants but the half and scatters half in air” (17–18). Unlike the chiastic balance meant to formalize theodicy, the three “half”s belie the emergence of anything like a providential whole. Written into the only couplet of the poem to be set apart as a two-line stanza, moreover, those “half”s stand out as a reminder of structural inequality within the couplet’s four-part organization.Footnote 24 The caesura in the first line and the grammar of the second split each of the lines into a division of two followed by three feet. As if in preparation for the image of slave ships that follows, the couplet models an organized structure of uneven distribution and harm. As with her earlier “why such partial grace”—a complaint about a literary culture that measures art as an index of one’s humanity—here Wheatley pushes against the interlocking forms of racial slavery and providential design. In her “half-scattered prayer” and in her description of “waves on waves devolving without end,” in her poem “Ocean” (26), Wheatley insists on dismantling the shared neoclassical projects of georgic and theodicy.
In this way, Wheatley’s use of the heroic couplet represents the structures of racial capitalism and economic theodicy while also suggesting the possibility of rearranging those structures, tearing them down to build something new. Her approach might act as something like a prehistory of what Sonya Posmentier describes as a lyric ecology of the provision grounds, those plots of land that enslaved laborers were given to grow crops for their own sustenance and which were often used “in ways that transgressed the very economy they were supposed to serve”: an ecology that entails, in Posmentier’s words, the “yoking together” of an “apparently ‘rooted’ local landscape of the plot and the transnational literary routes of the modern sonnet” (45).Footnote 25 Wheatley’s bringing the more traditionally “rooted” heroic couplet out onto the sea where “waves on waves devolv[e] without end” might be similarly understood in terms of such a lyric ecology.Footnote 26 But what strikes me most about this formulation—here in a discussion of Claude McKay’s sonnets—is how it evokes the form of the heroic couplet itself: “yoking together” recalls the neoclassical zeugmas that yoke seemingly incompatible objects or concepts in tension, and Posmentier’s description of the modern sonnet as a “dialectic between freedom and constraint” applies equally to the increasingly complex balance and antithesis that structures the heroic couplet poem. In Wheatley’s case in particular, the phrase resonates with the “dialectic of freedom and slavery” that characterizes both the form and content of her verse (J. Shields, Phillis Wheatley’s Poetics 17)—an effect that Jeffers movingly demonstrates in her poem “Fracture,” which introduces the trauma of enslavement with a sharp caesura that runs down the page: “The men arrive. Slave ships are anchored. / The men arrive. The traders gather …” (13). Here one sees clearly how neoclassical form comes to signify brutal constraint and irreparable harm. Wheatley’s heroic couplet poems reject the link between labor and providence that was supposed to hold georgic poems together. In moving georgic out onto the sea, Wheatley imagines alternatives to providential design and implicitly refuses to “cultivate” in both cultural and agricultural senses of the word.
Transformative Repair
What, then, does georgic look like without the labor that was supposed to define it? I would like to conclude by looking to Wheatley’s “On Imagination,” which begins by invoking (and destroying) the language of slavery to describe the creative capacities of the artist, for one possible answer:
Now here, now there, the roving Fancy flies,
Till some lov’d object strikes her wand’ring eyes,
Whose silken fetters all the senses bind,
And soft captivity involves the mind.(9–12)
The oxymoronic constructions of “silken fetters” and “soft captivity” invoke the same sort of tension between freedom and constraint expressed by her heroic couplet poems. As with her description of life’s “length’ned chain” in “Thoughts on the Works of Providence,” here the imagination is soon forcefully constrained. Wheatley goes on to map this description of the “force” of imagination onto a georgic meditation on the seasons:
Though Winter frowns to Fancy’s raptur’d eyes
The fields may flourish, and gay scenes arise;
The frozen deeps may break their iron bands,
And bid their waters murmur o’er the sands. (23–26)
The lines echo the earlier neoclassical tradition of Virgil’s Georgics; Dryden’s translation, for instance, instructs his reader to begin to labor “While yet the Spring is young, while Earth unbinds / Her frozen Bosom to the Western Winds” (Dryden, bk. 1, lines 64–65). Here Wheatley adapts to her dialectic of freedom and constraint the georgic theme of the force of the seasons that exceeds any individual control: “But e’re we stir the yet unbroken Ground,” Dryden’s speaker warns, “The various Course of Seasons must be found; / The Weather, and the setting of the Winds” (75–77).Footnote 27 In Wheatley’s hands, this contingency gets mapped onto the condition of slavery, the “unbroken ground” becoming instead the “iron bands” of winter. The uncontrollable force of the seasons in this moment is tied to the constraint of her condition as slave. In stark contrast to Virgil’s Jupiter theodicy, Wheatley highlights oppression and exploitation without a hint of labor or productivity.
At first, these lines might appear to place Wheatley at the beginning of a tradition that Margaret Ronda has described in relation to Paul Dunbar’s georgics, written over a century later, in which labor is “hostage to larger forces that threaten to undermine its progress.” Wheatley’s poem would in this respect seem to anticipate the “racial inflection” of Dunbar’s work, in which “labor as suffering without redemption remains the lot of a burdened few” (864). But in deliberately bracketing off representations of labor, Wheatley reverses the relationship of contingency and work that was so crucial to eighteenth-century versions of the georgic mode. Wheatley’s refusal to take georgic as a celebration or violent suppression of labor in effect flips the mood and structure of georgic poetry, making the unpredictability of the seasons less an obstacle to productivity than a glimmer of possible social change. “The frozen deeps may break their iron bands”; spring may come, along with social progress, even if it remains out of one’s hands. Wheatley translates georgic anxiety into a half-hopeful formulation.
Wheatley does not in fact leave matters solely up to the inevitable and unpredictable turn of the seasons, however. The next stanza of “On Imagination” undoes that half-hopeful resignation by recasting the previous one as subject to the force of the imagination:
Such is thy [Imagination’s] pow’r, nor are thine orders vain,
O thou the leader of the mental train:
In full perfection all thy works are wrought,
And thine the sceptre o’er the realms of thought. (33–36)
What seemed like a qualified optimism of a mapping of social progress onto the turn of the seasons here gives way to a more direct assertion of poetry’s ability to effect political change. The repeated “may” of the earlier stanza moves from depleted agency to possibility: thanks to the power of the imagination, fields “may flourish,” frozen deeps “may break their iron bands,” show’rs “may descend.” The uncertain “may” becomes possibilistic. “[T]hy works are wrought,” moreover, recalls the language of theodicy, now linked to the power of the imagination. The word wrought, a past participle of work, and its rhyme-word, thought, evoke the possibility of making—by imagining—something else. Wheatley’s own heroic-couplet thinking, rather than a fetter or limitation, is central to this turn toward possibility. Though the poet who would later describe the “ploughing of the sea” might be read as highlighting the limitations of our actions and the powerful forces that shipwreck political change, Wheatley renovates the georgic mode early on to suggest precisely the opposite. She offers a crucial alternative to the poetics of ineffectuality that critics have located in the georgics of someone like Grainger, who, as Silva argues, uses “the conventions of georgic poetry to justify slavery only to then lament poetry’s inability to end the very practice that The Sugar-Cane is ideologically committed to reproducing” (150). Wheatley, by contrast, invokes and alters georgic convention to posit responsibility where it would most appear to be out of one’s hands.
For Wheatley, poetry offers a moment of respite from everyday concerns, and “On Imagination” demonstrates just how brief such moments can be. She ends the poem with the following lines:
But I reluctant leave the pleasing views,
Which Fancy dresses to delight the Muse;
Winter austere forbids me to aspire,
And northern tempests damp the rising fire;
They chill the tides of Fancy’s flowing sea,
Cease then, my song, cease the unequal lay. (48–53)
That melancholy last line concludes a fleeting moment of poetry. The brief interruptions of meter—the repeatedly stressed “cease”—fall quietly back into the regular iambics of “the unequal lay” in a sonic reminder of the everyday rhythm of structural inequality. For Wheatley, the power of imagination is momentary and fleeting. I would add, so is the process of repair. Sedgwick notes that the “depressive position” that underlies the reparative practice of assembling “the murderous part-objects into something like a whole—though…not necessarily like any preexisting whole” is “an anxiety-mitigating achievement that the infant or adult only sometimes, and often only briefly, succeeds in inhabiting” (128). Wheatley’s approach to georgic, indeed, hovers between vibrant possibility and a keen awareness of its ephemerality. Sedgwick writes, “Hope, often fracturing, even a traumatic thing to experience, is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to organize the fragments and part-objects she encounters or creates” (146).
Less a coping mechanism than an urgent call for structural change, Wheatley’s attention to the part-objects of theodicy offers something closer to the “imaginative intensity” that John Sitter finds in midcentury responses to Pope’s Essay on Man. Sitter writes of the turn at midcentury, “Man does not approach God primarily through a deductive understanding of created order but through his own capacity for creative ordering, his ability to appreciate, as God does, the sublimity of nature” (“Theodicy” 96). Wheatley’s theodicy shifts the focus away not just from labor itself but also from the natural laws tied to god’s workmanship and design by attributing this power to imagination—“all thy works are wrought.” Her description earlier in the poem of imagination’s “beauteous order” helps to signal her recovery of neoclassical theodicy for her abolitionist project (3). Wheatley recuperates georgic from the neoclassical aesthetics of resignation by replacing unredemptive labor with artistic expression. Having repeatedly demonstrated the ways in which neoclassical form supports economic structures of racial exploitation, she looks to art for her own “creative ordering,” which demands redistribution and transformation.
Fred Moten begins his discussion of Harold Mendez’s art by asking, “What if we could detach repair not only from restoration but also from the very idea of the original—not so that repair comes first but that it comes before. Then, making and repair are inseparable, devoted to one another, suspended between and beside themselves. Harold Mendez makes changes, out of nothing; flesh, out of absence” (168). I have suggested that Wheatley’s heroic couplet thought brings together making and repair in this way. I have also suggested that Wheatley’s approach to abolition and repair demands careful attention to the distinction between transformative and restorative justice that Mariame Kaba and others have demonstrated. One may well recall Wheatley’s letter to Tanner in relation to this history: “How happy that man who is prepar’d for that night wherein no man can work!” Itself also an echo of the oft-cited passage from Virgil’s Georgics—“Happy the Man, who, studying Nature’s Laws, / Thro’ known Effects can trace the secret Cause” (Dryden, bk. 2, lines 698–99)—Wheatley’s letter places pressure on Virgil’s depiction of the good life that remains subject to natural law. She looks to georgic to imagine a world without work, which would also be a world without painful and subjugated labor. In this brief moment of leisure and friendship—and in those brief moments of poetic imagination—Wheatley picks up the fragments of such possibility.
