I have known about Phillis Wheatley for a very long time, but there is always more to learn, even about a person or a subject. When I watched Stamped From The Beginning, I learned that people were so astounded that a black woman (really more of a child) could produce such luminous work that she was essentially put on trial to convince people that it was her own work. She also was put on the spot often in less formal situations--she was asked to produce poetry about a subject or a person in the moment. Just astoundingly weird.
Going back to the beginning: Phillis Wheatley was a young Boston slave who achieved fame in 1773 for her book Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. She was widely known in her own time, and she hasn’t lacked for biographies in the 239 years since she died at age 31 in 1784, and it’s no wonder: her story – brought to the colonies as a child, bought by the Wheatley family in Boston and taught to read and write, brought to London in 1773 by her master’s son, emancipated there and also published to widespread acclaim, and married to a grocer named John Peters for the odd obscurity of her final decade – is not only fascinating but obviously emblematic, woven through with many of the evils, contradictions, and promise of the Revolutionary era.
This version works through her story, and one interesting tidbit that came out is that Benjamin Franklin was a big fan, but Thomas Jefferson not so much. Jefferson is less and less attractive the more we know about him, and this is yet another chink in his armor because it was not that he didn't like poetry but rather that he undervalued her.
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