Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Virginia Jackson on Phillis Wheatley ("To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth")
1.7k Plays1 year ago
Hard to think of a scholar who's had a more significant influence on poetry studies in the last two decades than Virginia Jackson, and so what a thrill it was for me to welcome her onto the podcast to discuss the legendary Phillis Wheatley and her poem "To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth."
Virginia Jackson is the UCI Endowed Chair in Rhetoric at University of California, Irvine. She is the author of two monographs, Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric (Princeton UP, 2023) and Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton UP, 2005), and the co-editor, with Yopie Prins, of The Lyric Theory Reader (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014). Her articles have appeared in such journals as Critical Inquiry, MLQ, New Literary History, Studies in Romanticism, and PMLA.
Remember to follow the podcast and to leave a rating and review if you like what you hear. Share this episode with a friend! And sign up for my Substack, where you'll receive a newsletter to go with each episode.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Kamran Javidizadeh and Virginia Jackson
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh, and I am so excited today to be talking to a scholar that I've admired for a long time now and who's been really important to my work. Our guest on this episode is Virginia Jackson. And Virginia Jackson, or Jenny, as she's known to friends, has chosen an amazing and fascinating poem for us to discuss today, a poem by Phyllis Wheatley called
00:00:32
Speaker
to the right honorable William Earl of Dartmouth, though I think that's a slightly shorter version of the title than its fullest version, which is something that Jenny will explain to us soon enough. But before we get to the poem, let me tell you a little bit more about our guest today.
Virginia Jackson's Contributions to Poetry Studies
00:00:50
Speaker
Virginia Jackson is the UCI Endowed Chair and Rhetoric at University of California, Irvine.
00:00:57
Speaker
and she's the author of two books. Her first monograph is called Dickinson's Misery, A Theory of Lyric Reading, and it was published by Princeton University Press in 2005. It's just a hugely important book for scholars of Dickinson, for readers of Dickinson more generally, for people interested in 19th century poetry,
00:01:25
Speaker
But really for poetry studies, as broadly conceived as you like, as partial testament to its importance, it was a book that won two prizes, the 2005 prize for a first book from the MLA and the 2006 Christian Gauss Award from Phi Beta Kappa Book Awards. I think I'll have more to say about Dickinson's misery in a moment.
00:01:53
Speaker
But Jenny, much more recently, in fact, just this year, just I think a month or so ago, published her second monograph, a book called Before Modernism, Inventing American Lyric, also published by Princeton, and as I say, this year in 2023.
00:02:11
Speaker
That book is already creating lots of buzz in the poetry studies world. It is sure to be an important one for lots of readers. And I think probably our topic today will invite lots of discussion about that book as
Impact of 'Dickinson's Misery' on Lyric Poetry
00:02:31
Speaker
well. And I hope, Jenny, you'll feel like you want to share with our listeners some of what you write about in that book.
00:02:38
Speaker
But I should also mention that Jenny is a co-editor of a third book, though it appeared between the first and the second that I've just named, a book called The Lyric Theory Reader, which is more than one thing, that book. It's an anthology of some of the most important essays in a field that we might call lyric theory or poetry studies.
00:03:10
Speaker
Essays mostly from the latter half of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st century, though not exclusively. When I say the book is more than one thing, it's not just an anthology. Jenny Jackson and her co-editor, Yopi Prins,
00:03:30
Speaker
have written really invaluable introductions to each section of that book, which I think taken together tell the story or tell one story of what lyric theory has been over the last century or so.
00:03:51
Speaker
That book was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2014. It's a book that I regularly assign to graduate seminars, undergraduate seminars in poetry, and it's an invaluable resource.
00:04:07
Speaker
So beyond those two monographs and that edited volume, Jenny has published articles in all of the places where a scholar of her significance would be expected to publish places like Critical Inquiry, MLQ, New Literary History, Studies in Romanticism, PMLA.
00:04:31
Speaker
But before we get going today and talk about Wheatley, I want to say a word about how I first became aware of Jenny's work and give you some impression of why it's been so important to me. Dickinson's Misery has one of the great openings of academic monographs that I know. It begins with the question
00:04:54
Speaker
I'm paraphrasing here. This isn't a direct quote. It begins by wondering what it was that Emily Dickinson left behind, sort of invites you as a reader to put yourself in the position of someone who opens a box that has her papers in it and then has to make sense of them. And then it thinks beautifully about
00:05:18
Speaker
why in some ways that's such a difficult question to answer and how one's own historical situatedness determines the kind of answer that one can give to that question. The book is, as I say, about Dickinson, but it's also about how the evolving reading practices and theoretical positions of the 20th century made Dickinson representative of something with an ancient name, but a new kind of meaning.
00:05:47
Speaker
and ever-evolving kind of meaning. That thing with the ancient name is lyric. And how the salience of that generic category, the increasing salience of that generic category in a process that Jenny calls lyricization foreshorten the way we read and the way we write poetry now.
00:06:17
Speaker
So what I love about this work is how it attends to the interrelation of theory and practice in poetry as they exist and evolve in history. So I work on primarily my scholarship on a different field. I'm mostly a 20th century and 21st century scholar, but I think in almost everything I've written since I've read
00:06:46
Speaker
Dickinson's Misery, I've been either citing it or thinking about it and responding to it in some way. And so I'm really excited that the new book is out and I'm so thrilled to have Virginia Jackson on the podcast today. Jenny, how are you doing?
00:07:05
Speaker
Thank you. Well, I'm doing really well after that introduction. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. I have also really benefited from your work. So the conversation is important to me. And we've been talking for a while, actually. So I think that it's helpful
00:07:33
Speaker
for me to hear you introduce me you know because I don't necessarily think of myself and the way that you describe and you know how it is when you've written a new book you don't know yet exactly what it is you've written and I can see its relation to what you described but the poem I want to talk about today
00:07:57
Speaker
shares a lot with the concerns of my previous work that is with what lyric theory is and isn't in various periods, what gets called lyric, what's not called lyric, and also with that sense of discovery. Yeah. Oh, good. Okay. Yes. And I do know, I mean, sometimes
00:08:18
Speaker
It's not as though I've been introduced all that many times in settings like these, but it's happened. One does always learn a little bit about what one has done on the basis of how other people describe it.
Historical Context of Phyllis Wheatley
00:08:36
Speaker
Well, I'm happy to provide that service to you, but now let me ask you to provide a service to our listeners, which is
00:08:42
Speaker
We're here today to talk about a poem written by Phyllis Wheatley, written in the 18th century. And I don't want to assume that our readers know really anything about who Wheatley was. I'm sure one could
00:09:00
Speaker
go on filling the hour and of course more with just talk about biography and literary history and that kind of thing. So I don't want for us to get stuck in that terrain, but I do think probably some context will be useful. So Jenny, what should people know about who Wheatley was not assuming they know anything coming into this conversation?
00:09:24
Speaker
Yeah, it's a really important question. As you say, Cameron, we could spend all day talking about it and probably should. In some ways, we know very little about the person who came to be known as Phyllis Wheatley.
00:09:39
Speaker
in the 18th century was, and in some ways we've learned a lot. Phyllis Wheatley was kidnapped from the western coast of Africa, probably the Cenagambian region in 1761. She arrived in Boston
00:10:03
Speaker
in 1761 when she was roughly seven years old. And we think she was roughly seven years old because she was described as shedding teeth. So however old you are, when you're losing teeth, she could have been six, she could have been seven, she could have been eight. She was a small child. The ship that brought her to the dock in Boston was called the Phyllis.
00:10:30
Speaker
And the people who thought they were purchasing her on that dock in 1761 were named Wheatley. So she became Phyllis Wheatley. She was named for the ship and she took the name as was conventional of her enslavers.
00:10:52
Speaker
Recently, Honore Jeffers, among others, have urged us to think of her as Phyllis Wheatley Peters because later in her life Phyllis Wheatley married a man named John Peters after her manumission. And so that's the last name of the black man she chose to marry rather than the name of her white enslavers.
00:11:16
Speaker
She became famous as Phyllis Wheatley and I'm interested in her as a literary historical subject. So I usually refer to her as Phyllis Wheatley with the admission of how obscene that name is. When talking about her biography, I think it makes sense to refer to her as Phyllis Wheatley Peters.
00:11:39
Speaker
Okay, so you, thanks, and that makes sense. And thank you for giving that additional context about her name. And I've also seen that Phyllis itself gets spelled differently sometimes, right, sometimes with a Y, sometimes with an I.
00:11:55
Speaker
Yeah, it's incorrect with a Y, but there were 19th century black reading clubs that started spelling it with a Y, so it's also historically, there's also an historical transmission related to the Phyllis Wheatley clubs, yeah. Maybe I could ask you just to say a few more words about what you referred to really briefly in passing as her fame. So this, can you say something about how that fame
00:12:23
Speaker
came to exist, and we're not.
Phyllis Wheatley's Fame and Legacy
00:12:27
Speaker
Are we, Jenny, talking about posthumous fame only here? No, not at all. In fact, her posthumous fame has wavered up and down, but her fame in her lifetime was tremendous. And so
00:12:42
Speaker
When she was a teenager, she began publishing poems first in local papers, but then in also British papers since, of course, Boston was a British colony. And by the time she published the poem that we're going to talk about today, the poem to Dartmouth,
00:13:02
Speaker
she was trans-Atlantic-ly famous. That is, she was a colonial subject in Boston who was trans-Atlantic-ly famous in the Anglosphere. And she was called the Sable Prodigy. Every poem she published in the papers was prefaced with a little biography about how she was the property of Mr. John Wheatley. And she was an extraordinary
00:13:29
Speaker
property, basically. The Wheatleys were proud of the value of this genius, and it's part of the creepy part about her fame. What a strange kind of pride. Right? Yeah. But also, she is clearly strategizing as a
00:13:50
Speaker
15, 16, 17-year-old, enslaved teenager, her publication and the way in which it's going to build on that fame. She writes an elegy for the charismatic
00:14:06
Speaker
uh minister uh evangelical preacher George Whitfield that really makes her transatlantic famous because Whitfield is the minister and ambassador of Selena Countess of Huntington who is an abolitionist patron and in fact she's the one who finally gets Wheatley's book published in London in 1773 so yeah she's famous in her lifetime and in fact
00:14:36
Speaker
She clearly wrote a second book of poems, but it's been lost because by that time she was freed and she was impoverished. And her manuscript was lost. And she kind of fell out of the conversation, obviously, by 1776. We know what happens in Boston.
00:14:56
Speaker
And so Wheatley wasn't so important until she's revived by abolitionist printing in the early 19th century. And then she circulates, but she comes back into academic circulation really with the Schomburg series
00:15:16
Speaker
that Henry Louis Gates publishes out of the Schomburg collection, yeah. Right. And it was not just her reputation that made it to England, but she herself is- Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes. On the occasion of the publication of her book, or in the preparation for the publication of her book, she in fact traveled to London
00:15:41
Speaker
And there's again ample I think evidence to suggest that she negotiated her manumission while in London because the Somerset case had just happened the year before in which Lord Mansfield of the King's Court had said that an enslaved person could not be returned to the colonies
00:16:03
Speaker
if that person made their way to London. So James Sumner said couldn't be returned, for example, to what was then known as the West Indies. And she could have stayed in London, but we think she probably negotiated to be manumitted as soon as she returned to Boston. And in fact, after the publication of her book, there was a huge public pressure to do so.
00:16:28
Speaker
right? And then maybe last thing before we turn to the poem, but that's all really fascinating context. And I do, I'm just endlessly curious about this biography, of course, is that
00:16:46
Speaker
most sort of notoriously, she comes up, doesn't she, in the writings of Thomas Jefferson, who has a very kind of dismissive thing to say about her? So it's interesting, actually, Cameron, and this we could talk about for a long time too. So in 1787, in Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson infamously says,
00:17:09
Speaker
Religion could, well, first he says, among blacks there is, you know, religion enough, but no poetry. Religion produced to Phyllis Wheatley, but it could not produce a poet. I've never seen a black do more than simply narrate.
00:17:27
Speaker
So it's an infamously racist proclamation, but what's often not discussed is that there was immediate response to Jefferson, and among others, Gilbert Imlay,
00:17:46
Speaker
responded and there was a kind of romantic circle response that is that he included recollection and an imagination that is Wheatley's poems and his response. And there's evidence that that response then got her work in front of the people who came to be called the British Romantics. So there's an argument to be made that she influenced British romanticism.
00:18:14
Speaker
Wow, okay. All right, yeah, so I said that was going to be my last question about biography. Now I want to ask other ones, but no, good. We should talk about the poem and I'm sure, well, because the poem
00:18:28
Speaker
in part, at least, has things to say in a way about her life. Maybe we'll have occasion to keep talking about her life. I think I flagged for listeners that the title I gave of the poem is perhaps not its full title. And so I wonder, Jenny,
00:18:49
Speaker
If I can ask you to read the poem out loud for us so that people have it fresh in mind, I should also say that I'll provide a link in the episode notes so that people can be looking at the text as they listen and as Jenny and I talk about the poem.
00:19:08
Speaker
But I wonder if I can ask you to tell us the full title of the poem and then I don't know if you want to wait till after you've done reading or if you want to foreground this in a way. Who is the Earl of Dartmouth? Why does the poem have this title? That kind of thing.
Reading and Analysis of Wheatley's Poem
00:19:25
Speaker
So I'm going to turn it over to you Jenny and ask for you to read for us.
00:19:30
Speaker
Okay, I'd be delighted to. I do want to tell listeners it's a longish poem. That's okay, we've had longer. Okay, cool. I also want to say that I'll say more about William Earl of Dartmouth after I read the poem, when we're talking about the occasion. Good.
00:19:54
Speaker
Phyllis Wheatley's poetry is occasional. Each poem has an occasion, and I think of each poem, in fact, as quite strategic. So there's a very specific occasion for this poem, but I'll talk about it after if that's okay. That's perfect.
00:20:11
Speaker
So the title, the full title, you gave most of the title, the full title is To the Right, Honorable William Earl of Dartmouth, His Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for North America, et cetera. And the date of the poem, the poem was written in 1772.
00:20:31
Speaker
It was published then, but also primarily in her book in 1773. So just before the revolution and all that? Just before. Her book is really, yeah, who knows what would have happened to her book? Because again, the revolution kind of eclipsed it a little bit for a while. Okay, this is the poem.
00:20:57
Speaker
Hail happy day when smiling like the morn fair freedom rose New England to adorn. The northern climb beneath her genial ray, Dartmouth, congratulates thy blissful sway. A late with hope her race no longer mourns. Each soul expands, each grateful bosom burns. While in thine hand with pleasure we behold, the silken rains and freedoms charms unfold.
00:21:24
Speaker
Long lost to realms beneath the northern skies, she shines supreme while hated faction dies. Soon as appeared the goddess long desired, sick at the view she languished and expired. Thus from the splinters of the morning light, the owl in sadness seeks the caves of night.
00:21:47
Speaker
No more America in mournful strain of wrongs and grievance unredressed complain. No longer shalt thou dread the iron chain which wanton tyranny with lawless hand had made and with it meant to enslave the land.
00:22:07
Speaker
Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song, wonder from whence my love of freedom sprung? Wents flow these wishes for the common good by feeling hearts alone best understood. I, young in life,
00:22:22
Speaker
by seeming cruel fate, was snatched from Africa's fancied, happy seat, which pangs excruciating must molest, what sorrows labor in my parents' breast, steeled was that soul, and by no misery moved, that from a father seized his babe beloved. Such, such my case. And can I then but pray, others may never feel tyrannic sway,
00:22:51
Speaker
For favors past, great sir, our thanks are due, And thee we ask thy favors to renew, Since in thy power, as in thy will before, To soothe the griefs which thou didst once deplore. May heavenly grace the sacred sanction give To all thy works, and thou forever live, Not only on the wings of fleeting fame, Though praise immortal crowns the patriot's name,
00:23:15
Speaker
but to conduct to heaven's rifulgent feign, may fiery coarsers sweep the ethereal plain and bear the upwards to that blessed abode, where like the prophet thou shalt find, thou thy God. Thanks very much. So that was Virginia Jackson reading Phyllis Wheatley's poem to the writer on our book, William Earl of Dartmouth. Thanks, Jenny. Maybe before we dive in to like
00:23:45
Speaker
to the beginning of the poem, we can say a word about its occasion. I like that you gave us that word as a place to begin. And then maybe also it would be useful just to think about the poem sort of formally for a minute before, you know, as a whole. I mean, it's in rhyming couplets, for instance, whereas why is Wheatley writing like that? You know, where's that coming from? But yeah, first maybe a word about the occasion. Who was the Earl of Dartmouth and why write a poem like this at all?
Political Context of Wheatley's Address to Dartmouth
00:24:13
Speaker
So William Legge, Earl of Dartmouth, was appointed in 1772, in September 1772, as, here's his full title, head of board of trade and secretary of state for the colonies in the Americas.
00:24:37
Speaker
And so this is 7072, right? And Cameron, as you said, so the buildup to the revolution, but it's obviously post-Stamp Act, right? And Boston is just boiling over. So Legge was, basically he's being appointed as the Secretary of State for the colonies, right? The British presiding figure for the colonies.
00:25:07
Speaker
And a lot of people have said, well, why is Wheatley writing to the colonial minister? Is she a monarchist? Is she pro-British? Is she against the revolution? Not only is she writing to him, but the tone, at least to a naive first reading, sounds like she's pleased with his appointment and it's on good terms.
00:25:32
Speaker
Absolutely. In fact, I think she is, as usual, mirroring a discourse that is very happy at first, that a lot of people are very happy that William Leggae Dartmouth has been appointed because Hillsborough was definitely a foe to the resistance in Boston and Leggae had voted for the repeal of the Stamp Act.
00:25:59
Speaker
Okay. So there was reason politically to believe that Legge was on their side. And so this is also obviously a gesture welcoming the new Secretary of State and saying, of course you're on her side, right? That is sort of performatively stating what they hope to be the case. So she's
00:26:25
Speaker
And what the hour refers to is in the hour side. That's the whole thing. So let me just say one more thing about the occasion of writing. So before Leggy shows up in Boston, he sent an ambassador, a guy named Woldridge,
00:26:46
Speaker
And Woolridge has made this very racist pronouncement about Wheatley, because she's famous by then. This is also important to know, right? She's already famous, especially in these circles and with the Countess of Huntington. And so Woolridge has said, she couldn't possibly have written the poems that we've read. This is some kind of, you know, and a lot of people are expressing this kind of skepticism. She can't write such fine English verse.
00:27:13
Speaker
And so Woolridge actually goes to the Wheatley's home, visits the Wheatley's while he's in Boston scouting out for for William Legate and and says, I want you to write a poem right now to prove that you can write this poetry. And she writes this. And he sends it. I see. So so there's an occasion within the occasion.
00:27:41
Speaker
Right. Right. And so it's as though, and I'm sure there's a broader context in which this is true as well, the fact that this woman has written these poems would be cited as evidence in
00:27:57
Speaker
abolitionist causes in discourse about slavery more generally, and okay. And so, you know, in a way, when I was asking what hour that pronoun might have meant to
00:28:15
Speaker
to Wheatley and what sort of, if this new minister was going to be sympathetic to the cause, what the cause in question was is that sort of more freedom for the colonists or is it a specifically sort of anti-slavery or it's staking out a position on abolition or on slavery?
00:28:41
Speaker
Well, this is part of the brilliance of the poem. So to take the occasion in which she's basically right by this racist being asked to prove that she could have written in order to address
00:28:56
Speaker
Dartmouth and saying and aligning herself with calling herself an American and an African at the same time. So aligning Africans and Americans at this moment and taking the discourse of tyranny that characterizes the resistance to British colonial rule and applying it to enslavement and crossing the axes of enslavement
00:29:23
Speaker
and colonization, that's what this poem is doing. It's astonishing really. So yes, we are Americans, right? But of course, she is an enslaved person who, in characterizing herself as American, is also claiming that her position is aligned with the position of colonized people who say they don't have freedom. And she says, well, you don't think you have freedom? Look at me.
00:29:52
Speaker
Right, right. So that's fascinating. And so now, I mean, I don't think this is...
00:30:04
Speaker
Well, I think these questions are related in a way. I'd said a minute ago, I was curious about how you might help us contextualize the poem's form.
Form and Innovation in Wheatley's Poetry
00:30:18
Speaker
Wheatley is writing in couplets, in heroic couplets, right? She's writing in couplets of iambic pentameter. How characteristic is that of her poetry more broadly?
00:30:30
Speaker
and of poetry being written in the colonies at around that time. I'm trying to place her, you know, of course, it's interesting, she's writing English poetry in two senses of the word, you know, right? She's writing in the English language, she's writing Anglophone poetry, but she's writing, technically speaking, I suppose, as an English subject, right? So talk to us about form in this poem.
00:30:58
Speaker
So not all of Wheatley's poems are in couplets, but a great majority are, and she is just
00:31:08
Speaker
her couplets are virtuosic in several senses. So you're quite right that she's writing in 18th century poetic form, right? She's writing in 18th century poetic genres, but she's been quite criticized by, especially the black arts movement, by using the master's tools not to dismantle the master's house, right? Like how could she be writing in popes, couplets?
00:31:34
Speaker
There seems to be something sort of conservative about that, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But what she does with couplet technology, and James Ford, who's writing a book called Black Swan, which promises to be amazing, is really great on this. And she's doubling down not only on couplet technology, but on neoclassicism more generally. So that she's, we don't know what her native language was, of course,
00:32:03
Speaker
She's from, various scholars have pointed out that she's from an Islamic, or she could have been from an Islamic region of Western Africa. She may have been literate in Arabic. She may not have been.
00:32:17
Speaker
But by the time, by a couple of years after she lands in Boston, she's speaking and writing in English, she read in Latin, she read some Greek and some Hebrew. She's a neoclassicist and also a classical scholar. Who's teaching her?
00:32:39
Speaker
So the twins in the Wheatley household realize how prodigious she is and they clearly take pleasure in teaching her, but she herself
00:32:54
Speaker
is also obviously self-teaching. So she has a library at her disposal, but she is also clearly, and there is more and more evidence that there's a black intellectual community in Boston. She has letters with Ober Tanner, who may or may not have been on the Phyllis with her, but her friend Scipio Morehead, the painter,
00:33:21
Speaker
who is an enslaved man whose paintings are lost to us except perhaps for the portrait that prefaces Wheatley's volumes of poems. So, yeah. Okay, so, and so she would have read someone like Pope.
00:33:37
Speaker
you know i'm trying to think oh well popes especially hope yeah pope is um certainly pope um but certainly so much yeah and she's and popes and also popes translation of the ilead right she's clearly quotes directly from his translation of the ilead and she's a total milton head
00:33:58
Speaker
Right? Yeah. That's important. So Milton is everywhere in the culture. I see Milton here in the happy seat. Yes. Okay. We'll talk about that in a minute. Okay. So let's talk about the opening lines of the poem. So here's one question I have for you, which I hope you'll take in any direction you find, you know, stimulating, Jenny. So
00:34:21
Speaker
The opening words of the poem, Hail, Happy Day, it seems like what's being described as a time, but that time is hard for me to place at first glance on any kind of timeline. Is she describing the moment of her writing? Is she describing a future?
00:34:41
Speaker
that is coming? Is she describing a kind of fantasy that doesn't exist on any kind of historical timeline? So I'm just curious about how you take verb tense to work in the opening lines of this poem and what maybe that's signaling for you about the form of address that this poem
00:35:01
Speaker
is taking. I know you are someone for whom the question of address and how poems address particular readers is a really important one to historicize and think carefully about. So take that in any direction you like.
00:35:20
Speaker
I think it's a really important question about Oliver poetry, but because Oliver poetry is basically occasional, the occasion for this poem, I think, dictates the form of address. So I think you're right, right, to point out that the hail happy day when somebody like the morn fair freedom rose in New England to adorn seems quite conventional and not linked to any particular occasion. On the other hand,
00:35:46
Speaker
if we think of the occasion of this poem as writing while Wright Woolridge is basically waiting for her to write the poem, the occasion is the appointment of Dartmouth and the address turns out to be an address to Dartmouth. And so the happy day on which Dartmouth is appointed Secretary of State
00:36:13
Speaker
is I think strategically addressed to Dartmouth as a way to say, of course, you are equated here with freedom, Rose, New England, which seems totally counterintuitive to us because he's being appointed again as a colonial minister. He's not there to actually
00:36:36
Speaker
to New England freedom from England. Or to free the enslaved people of the colonies. I mean, does Wheatley have reason to suspect that Dartmouth has sympathies with abolitionist cause or with enslaved people? Absolutely not. I mean, he's associated with Selena, a countess of Huntington. And in that sense, he
00:37:00
Speaker
may be associated with certain sentiments, dissenting sentiments, but there's no evidence that he's abolitionist in any way. And in this sense, again, the strategy of this poem, David Wallstryker in his new book on biography, his new great biography of Wheatley points out how careful this poem is not to argue on the basis of race.
00:37:30
Speaker
I don't know that I agree with that, but I think it's an interesting point that the argument here is about political position. So my political position as an enslaved person, your political position as a colonized person are being equated and they're being equated exactly in that couplet form that you pointed out, Cameron, that is that the binary opposition of the couplet, the way in which the couplet
00:37:57
Speaker
puts things against one another, because that's the structure, leaves a chiasmus in the middle, right? These things cross one another in the couplet, and then there's this kind of empty space in the middle. And over and over, Wheatley is working that space in order to align
00:38:15
Speaker
tyranny and enslavement, that is political tyranny and enslavement as part of the argument of the poem. And in that sense, this address to Dartmouth is, again, it's strategic. Certainly the consequence would be, as you're saying, an abolitionist consequence.
00:38:32
Speaker
But I think what's out front is the political alignment that is... And she does this over and over. She does this in this other fabulous poem to the students at Harvard, telling them about their privileges. And she says, and Bhiyap tells you to enjoy your privileges. But she's basically claiming a greater authority
00:38:56
Speaker
as an enslaved person, a greater authority to have some sense of the epistemology of freedom than the people who are demanding freedom from British tyranny. Because it's one thing to want a kind of political freedom, and it's another thing to want freedom in your daily life, freedom in your movement, freedom over your own body.
00:39:21
Speaker
Well, that's not the way she puts it. The reason this poem is especially famous is that people like to say, well, this is the place where she actually talks about her own experience. That she talks about her experience because we have no evidence of the place where she was
00:39:46
Speaker
born or the place where she was kidnapped. She doesn't write a narrative of her life. She doesn't write anything like a narrative, no. And so here she says, this is line 24 or so, I, young in life by seeming cruel fate was snatched from Africa's fancied happy seed.
00:40:05
Speaker
So, it's a good question about whether this is personal experience talking, right? Or this is, again, a kind of generic description, I'm an enslaved person, you know, this is what happened to me. And what happened to me gives me a greater understanding
00:40:28
Speaker
of what it is not to be free, as you say, than the people who, of course, enslaving me, who may also want freedom from tyranny. So it's a kind of one-upping, I suppose, if you could think about it, right? And on the spectrum of freedom.
00:40:49
Speaker
Sure. Yeah. And maybe we can come back to those lines in a minute because they're so interesting, the way that I emerges. And I really want to know how you understand, you know, I want you to talk more about what that I is for you and what it's doing there. But even before we get there, I want to stay with the couplets as a kind of formal feature of the poem A Moment Longer, since you were the one to raise her
00:41:16
Speaker
fondness for attachment to Milton earlier. Milton is the one who in the note on the verse in Paradise Lost disavows the couplet as a kind of modern bondage. Wheatley would have been aware of that analogy
00:41:40
Speaker
And I suppose this sort of returns us to the question you'd raised earlier about skepticism or impatience that some Black poets have had with Wheatley over the years or the Black Arts Movement had with her as being kind of to behold and to traditional verse form.
00:42:02
Speaker
But I take like, so I'm looking at a couplet early in the poem, while in thine hand with pleasure we behold the silken rains and freedom's charms unfold. I mean, it's such a fascinating rhyme. So I just want to invite you maybe to say more about, I was so interested in the way you described the chiasmus of couplets, and I wonder if you could make that vivid by choosing an example here or there to help us understand what you mean.
00:42:30
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's just that's a great couple to choose, but just to say that just to go back to your great point about Milton and bondage and another in another poem.
00:42:42
Speaker
he talks about the silken fetters of verse. So the silken rains, the silken fetters. That's conventional for Milton. It's also conventional to think about verse as a kind of fettering, a kind of bondage. But here in that couplet,
00:43:03
Speaker
uh because because of what you said before about the address right so Dartmouth right is the one being addressed Dartmouth congratulates thy blissful sway and and Dartmouth is a governor right he's a secret he's a colonizer uh so um to say that he's bringing freedom rather than tyranny
00:43:27
Speaker
And then to say, each soul expands, each grateful bosom burns. I'm sure that's basically not true, of course. While in Thine hand, that is in Dartmouth's hand, with pleasure we behold, the silken rains and freedom's charms unfold. So the chiasmus there would be between Thine hand
00:43:50
Speaker
and freedom's charms unfolding, and then the pleasure we behold, and the silken rains, right? And so for people who don't know, chiasmus is like a rhetorical figure, right? Jenny, tell me if this definition is going to satisfy what you want it to do. A rhetorical figure where the form is something like,
00:44:12
Speaker
Don't confuse this with a rhyme scheme, but the form is something like ABBA. There's a mirroring that happens where there's a parallel structure, but the order is reversed.
00:44:27
Speaker
You know, when Kennedy says, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country, you hear like country, you, you, country. And it's a form that can be put to great purpose and Milton does it all the time in Paradise Lost, for instance.
00:44:45
Speaker
Yeah, that's super. That is a super helpful way to to gloss it. I in the in the book, when I'm talking about Wheatley, I quote the scholar J. Paul Hunter, who I think has a really great way of describing Pope's couplets. And again, these are the couplets that often are used kind of against Wheatley, that is, she shouldn't be writing in Pope's couplets. Right. But the way that the way that J. Paul Hunter describes Pope's couplets
00:45:15
Speaker
is exactly because of what you just said, Kamran. Hunter says that the route by which the couplet blurs and reconfigures binaries and develops a rhetoric of complex redefinition is circuitous. It challenges the transparency of the apparent rhetoric and blurs and bleeds images of plain opposites into one another.
00:45:39
Speaker
So it's not just that like, write a naive view of a couple, it might be to say, Oh, it's such a simple form. It just says it's like, this is like this, this is like this, but really what's happening because it's because we have both syntax and line break is that if you know, what's producing the rhyme is happening at the end of the line, but grammatically, if there's an inversion, then then often the relationship between
00:46:08
Speaker
the two rhyming lines can be ironic in some way or develop some kind of more subtle relation. Yeah. Yes, that's a great way to put it. And the effect of that, what I say in the book is that in taking popes, I think it really is specifically popes, couple of technology,
00:46:26
Speaker
It's not just that Wheatley's rewiring it, it's that she's replacing its software. She's taking that blurring and making it the point so that in that sense, freedom, captivity, pleasure, pain, crossing them rather than producing
00:46:48
Speaker
a sense in which these things change places. In fact, the definitions of both are thrown into question. So finally, enslavement, not enslavement, will be the binary that gets blurred. Right. Oh, that's great. Okay.
00:47:08
Speaker
I wanted to bring us to some lines actually that almost immediately precede the ones that you had cited a moment ago, Jenny, the ones in which she seems perhaps to begin to tell her story. Let me read these lines again just so they're fresh and then we can talk about them. No more America in mournful strain of wrongs and grievance unredressed complaint, no longer shalt that dread the iron chain,
00:47:37
Speaker
which wanton tyranny with lawless hand had made, and with it met to enslave the land." So there we have iron chain, right? And a different kind of binding, I suppose, from the silken rains earlier in the poem. Talk to us about that iron chain and those lines.
00:47:59
Speaker
So here the form of addresses, you would say Cameron Wright has shifted. So from Dartmouth back to America. So that's part of also what's happening here is that here's this British figure that's gonna come and be the American figure. And yet the crossing goes on and on in which the difference between Dartmouth and America is invoked. That is Dartmouth is not yet America.
00:48:27
Speaker
for her to address America, of course, doesn't really exist. It exists as a colony, but it certainly exists in the discourse of the people who have been protesting colonization. It certainly exists in the discourse of the people, for example, protesting the Stamp Act since 1765. Now it's 1772.
00:48:57
Speaker
In addressing America, though, those complaints are familiar, right? Just as she doesn't really have to introduce herself because she's famous by this point, and she doesn't have to introduce Dartmouth because he's famous. She doesn't have to introduce what the mournful strains are because everybody knows. And so of wrongs and grievance, unredressed complaint, right? Those can just be generic because everybody knows.
00:49:25
Speaker
that this is on the other hand, if you were a if you were a person who thought that there weren't wrongs and weren't grievances, you wouldn't be able to say this. Uh huh. Right. So so so so she's so she's she's she's addressing all of America as if all of America is anti colonial. Yeah. And at the same time,
00:49:55
Speaker
addressing the anti-colonial discourse in the discourse of enslavement. Yeah. Here's what I'm thinking as you say that. When you set up this poem or when you set up its occasion, you said, you know, in a way it has an occasion within an occasion, right? That is, you know, the occasion is his appointment, but then the sort of occasion within that I suppose is
00:50:20
Speaker
the test of her authenticity as the poet who's attached to the publications. So it's sort of like a proof of life demonstration or something, right? It's impossible, I'm sure, to know what she was thinking as she was asked to perform this task, but
00:50:47
Speaker
given the fact that you've told us that she's already famous by now, she's having no trouble getting her poems published and so on, and she knows that there's great interest in her work, and she's writing to Dartmouth, she knows that he's not the only reader of this poem, right? And maybe that helps to sort of explain, or just to,
00:51:16
Speaker
put some historical specificity or concreteness on the kind of rhetorical situation that you're describing here, right? Yeah, 100%. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, go. No, 100%, Cameron. I think that also
00:51:32
Speaker
it's September 1772 when she's writing this poem, and June 1772 is the occasion of the Somerset decision. So the fact that the Somerset, that the people reading this in London, the discourse of the Somerset decision is very fresh. At the same time, in Dartmouth coming to Boston, the discourse of
00:51:56
Speaker
that resistance is very fresh, and so she's talking public. This is public speech, I think you're right. It's not a private address. Of course, it's not because she's addressing a public figure, but I think you're right that she has every reason to think that it will itself be a public document.
00:52:17
Speaker
So, yeah, insofar as it's a public document
Public and Personal Narratives in Wheatley's Work
00:52:20
Speaker
and insofar as it's public speech, so maybe two ways of thinking about public discourse, one as a textual document, the other as a oral enunciation or utterance. How does that inform, Jenny, the way you take the work
00:52:43
Speaker
that the I is doing when it does come up there. So if I write you a letter and I use, or an email, or a text message, or whatever, and I use the first person pronoun, maybe that means one thing. And of course, if I'm, as a writer, doing something for publication, that I might mean something else again.
00:53:06
Speaker
based on the context. I know that you and I could probably talk for a long time about what sort of the quote unquote lyric subject is or has been taken to signify. But when that eye appears in Wheatley's poem here, how does the context of its occasion or the mode of address
00:53:33
Speaker
that you see it as engaged in help you understand what the eye sort of signifies here. Yeah, I think that the way I would think about that is that even before the eye enters, the relation between the person and the poem is at stake here.
00:53:52
Speaker
not only is the relationship between the person in the poem at stake because of the occasion within the occasion, right, in which she's asked to write this, but because it is always already going to be a poem by Phyllis Wheatley and her person upstaged her poems over and over. So the neoclassical form that we've been talking about, but also the neoclassical phenomenology of reading, that is the reading a minor
00:54:21
Speaker
a lesser ode to a public figure, for example, would in a way be put under pressure by the fact that the person who wrote this is this very famous enslaved
00:54:39
Speaker
teenager in Boston. So there's a lot of pressure on the eye even before the eye enters. And that couple that you pointed to or that whole stanza that precedes the supposedly autobiographical stanza, the famous autobiographical stanza, that couple of technology we were talking about
00:55:02
Speaker
which wanton tyranny with Lala's hand had made and with it to enslave the land. That's a gorgeous version of the wanton tyranny. Tyranny is there personified enough to be wanton, and what it's doing is enslaving. This scary personification, in other words,
00:55:30
Speaker
And when she talks about wanton tyranny enslaving the land, is she talking about the British Empire's dominion over the American colonies? But she's also, for readers who want to hear it, talking about American colonists enslaving African people.
00:55:51
Speaker
Well, of course, that's where she goes. But what's interesting is that it's not addressed to those of you who want to hear it. I don't think she's as explicitly code switching as a later poet might be. What she's doing is she's using the discourse of the very people she's addressing, that is both the British colonists, both Dartmouth himself, William Liggett himself, but also
00:56:20
Speaker
these Americans who are resisting what Dartmouth represents, but especially his predecessor, Hillsborough, who was really a problem. So part of the politics of the poem is hoping that William Lego will be better. But I think that when the eye comes in, the question you're posing, which is really for me the question of the poem, is this person, this misnamed person, Phyllis Wheatley, talking about her experience
00:56:50
Speaker
before the Middle Passage, right, or her history, that is, she snatched from Africa's happy seat, or is she, is that line such, such my case? The important line in this argument, that is, she's using her case as one case among millions by this point.
00:57:14
Speaker
as a case in the revocation of freedom, that is, as a case that would define what freedom or what Renato Alcata or what the long emancipation might look like.
00:57:33
Speaker
So these lines are so important, and I just want to, you know, the podcast form is such that, you know, though I've asked people to, you know, invited people to look at the poem, they might not be able to do so. Let's just let me read the lines again. And then I want to see if I'm understanding something you just said correctly. So I'm going to sort of try to rephrase it to you, and I want you to tell me if I've got it right. But so here are the lines.
00:57:58
Speaker
Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song, wonder from whence my love of freedom sprung, whence flow these wishes for the common good, by feeling hearts alone, best understood, I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate was snatched from affric's fancied happy seat. What pangs excruciating must molest, what sorrows labor in my parents' breast,
00:58:26
Speaker
steeled was that soul, and by no misery moved, that from a father seized his babe beloved. Such, such my case, and can I then but pray others may never feel tyrannic sway." So in one way of reading it, that narrative that begins, I mean that's
00:58:50
Speaker
prefaced by the first lines I read, but that really begins in earnest with that eye young in life by seeming cruel fate was snatched from Africa's fancied happy seat. And then this, you know, just kind of totally heart-rending scene of being snatched from, um, um, the, the father, the, the sorrow imagining invite the invitation to imagine the sorrow and the parent who loses the child. Um, in one way of reading it, that's,
00:59:17
Speaker
know, we said that Phyllis Wheatley didn't write a narrative of her life, but maybe that is a kind of, maybe as she's writing those lines, what she's doing is narrating a memory that she has or doing her best to do so. Or maybe what she's doing is recounting a narrative that by then would have been
00:59:41
Speaker
generic and conventionally understood other narratives had been written and one could imagine these scenes. And so that then the intrusion of like what we might want to call the personal in the second way of reading really is quite brief and really only comes in this sort of moment to say like such was my case. I am an instance of the generic story I've just told you.
01:00:09
Speaker
Is that sort of the kind of two ways of reading you're inviting us to entertain here?
01:00:15
Speaker
Yeah, but I think that again, to go back to that binary couplet technology, what she's doing is a collapsing them on each other. So that doesn't mean that it's not personal, right? It means that the personal is the generic. That is that it means that to be a case or as Glissant would say, consent not to be a single being. This happened to so many of us.
01:00:41
Speaker
This is something that you know as generic because you know that this is what happened to us. And this happened to me, which makes it personal. But it also gives me this extraordinary personal authority to tell you about tyranny. Yeah.
01:01:03
Speaker
And she's telling the tyrant. I mean, that's the amazing thing, right? Yeah, I find that moment, that such, such moment to be like the kind of secret heart of the poem in a way, right? It's that kind of stuttering sort of moment where the sort of smooth flow of these couplets
01:01:28
Speaker
slows down and gets interrupted with a little bit of emotive kind of utterance. I don't know. Okay, that's great. So, you know, we're getting near what should probably be an end for this conversation, though. I hope we'll have other ones about this and other things, Jenny. And I want to invite you to talk about, well, for one thing, the way the poem ends,
01:01:58
Speaker
But then also, you know, you've alluded a couple of times to what you take as what you understand as the sort of strategic ambitions that Wheatley had in writing this poem and in writing not just this poem, but in writing many other poems that poetry for her was something she was doing in response to kind of political occasion, but also something she was doing with a kind of
01:02:27
Speaker
a purpose that you understand is strategic. And so I'd be curious to know how those things come to a head, or if they do, for you in the poem's final movements.
01:02:44
Speaker
I think that in this poem, I think you're right, Cameron, to say that that penultimate stanza really is the stanza where there's most pressure on all of these terms. So if you go back to the chasmis, the relation between tyranny and enslavement and
01:03:04
Speaker
or between enslavement and freedom and tyranny and freedom are intersecting through the eye, right? The person is in the center of that chiasmus. There's a tremendous amount of pressure there. And that last stanza really zooms out again. I see. And it zooms out. So Dartmouth was also known as an evangelical. Yeah.
01:03:29
Speaker
person, and so it's zooming back out into the familiar language of what Michael Warner's recently called the evangelical public sphere. It's hailing and evangelical reading public. Not only will Dartmouth give us freedom, but he himself is going to be taken up
01:03:50
Speaker
Redeemed as a kind of reward for his as a kind of reward. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, but also as a but also as a reward for For in some ways believing this Paul right as if right. So that's the as if scenario Right as if this this palm actually succeeded In aligning these terms. So yeah, okay, so
01:04:17
Speaker
I have two questions. One is like a very local one about the last two lines of the poem, but then I want to zoom out from that into a broader question in a way that might invite you to say anything you'd like to say.
Ambitions and Implications of Wheatley's Poetry
01:04:30
Speaker
So about the last two lines. So she's imagining this kind of
01:04:36
Speaker
reward up on high for Dartmouth, for the virtue that she is crediting to him throughout the poem. She said, bear thee upwards to that blessed abode where, like the prophet, thou shall find thy God.
01:04:59
Speaker
him finding his God, you know, it struck me as a reader that that's both a kind of perhaps like a conventional and familiar way of saying like, you know, you're going to go to heaven and you'll have your, you know, your heavenly reward. But it might also be a kind of, am I wrong in reading it as a kind of slightly more pointed injunction to him to like find his religion here and now?
01:05:27
Speaker
know what I mean? To sort of, you know, in other words, to have the, to sort of live by his stated creed in an earthly way. Yeah, I love that reading. I don't
01:05:44
Speaker
I would love to think so. I don't exactly think so, and here's why. She loves the couplet, the whole period loves the couplet, abode God, loves those rhymes. But she uses them against each other all the time. So in her first printed poem on Monsieur's Hussey and Coffin in 1767,
01:06:08
Speaker
She uses that rhyme too. And throughout her poetry, and I guess, you know, what is interesting about this reading, right, is that if you read it in relation to all these other poems that are strategic in their various ways, right, because this is a particular political occasion, and there are lots of other occasions, you'd find that white people go to heaven all the time. And there's something going on there. And
01:06:31
Speaker
I can't, you know, the obvious thing, right, is that white people think they go to heaven all the time. So there's an elegy for, as you wrote, many, many elegy and this particular elegy for an infant, C.E., an Elliot, one of the Elliots, one of the Boston Elliots, who dies when he's a year old. And he ends up, that's a universe poem, he ends up sitting on top of the world and telling everybody,
01:06:56
Speaker
what to do from heaven, this little white baby. So white people are always going to heaven and there's something about the structure of redemption in Wheatley's poetry that I think does actually raise the possibility of a kind of irony. But I think that irony is slightly the wrong term for it.
01:07:20
Speaker
in her poetics and what I think is useful about reading this poem in this way in relation to the other poems in relation for example the one poem everybody reads of Wheatley's which is on being brought and then the question about that poem is always when people only read that poem is she being ironic is she really thinking
01:07:40
Speaker
Because for the few people who haven't read it, the sort of a kind of paraphrase of the poem might be that she's sort of testifying to her gratitude for being saved by religion. So that, well, no, by enslavement. So that poem begins, Twas Mercy brought me from my pagan land. And Tony Morrison writes an entire novel about that word and how disturbing it is.
01:08:10
Speaker
But I think if you read this poem to Dartmouth, and really any of the other poems, you realize, oh no, right? That's not what you first think it is at all. Okay, so yeah, well, in a way you've, you know, I said a few minutes ago that I had two questions, one very local and one more general. And in a way you've answered both of them because the more general one had something, was something like, well, to say that she's being strategic presupposes, I guess,
01:08:40
Speaker
that she has a kind of intention or that she could state, even if only for herself. And here I wonder, is it what to like shock the conscience of white readers of this poem, of British colonials, of
01:09:01
Speaker
of her family? Is it to secure her freedom personally? Is it is it to advance the cause of abolition more broadly? Or is it something am I being too literal minded and wanting to pin it down to a kind of particular outcome? Well, I don't think you're too literal minded. A lot of people have wanted to think that way or wanted her to think that way. But so how do you understand what the goal is of strategy if she's being strategic?
01:09:30
Speaker
I mean, here it's strategic, right, in this particular political situation. It's also strategic to get her volume of poems published, which she does. But beyond that,
01:09:41
Speaker
when we were talking about Milton before and the adventurous song and what she calls herself in another poem of Ventress Afric on recollection, the ambition of this poetry is vast and it's just finding its readers. Both two of the greatest readers I know of Wheatley, James Ford and Dana Murphy
01:10:04
Speaker
both people who are writing books about Wheatley, say, she's choosing me now in the present. There have been readers, and especially Black readers for two and a half centuries, who have responded to this poetry. There's a great, there's the Phyllis Wheatley poetry festival in the 70s, a Black feminist poetry festival in which people are reading Wheatley and
01:10:30
Speaker
and learning what it might be to write a black feminist poetry. So I feel like the ambition is as great as Milton's, right? The ambition is not, the ambition is the Ventress song here, right, is quite adventurous. But that doesn't mean it doesn't have other strategic purposes in the period, it certainly does.
01:10:55
Speaker
Yeah, well, that's a beautiful way to bring those sort of various stars of that constellation together. I want to thank you for it. Jenny Jackson, thank you so much for the conversation and for bringing this poem to listeners who maybe didn't know it already, and in any case, who know it better now.
01:11:21
Speaker
So it was really a pleasure to get to speak with you for the last hour. So thanks again. Thank you, Carmen. It was such a pleasure. Well, you're very welcome. And thank you listeners for making it with us this far. We will have more episodes for you soon. Be well, everyone.