David Petrain, Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY
In a recent contribution on Phillis Wheatley's use of the classical tradition, Emily Greenwood pinpointed a blind spot in current scholarship: critics tend to discount or neglect the potential complexity of the poet's engagement with Greek and Latin literature. Since then important new work has continued to appear on Wheatley's late 18th-c. American context, her life as an enslaved and then manumitted Black woman, and the full extent of her preserved writings (Carretta, Hairston, Roberts, Waldstreicher, e.g.), but her dynamic appropriation of classical texts remains underexplored. As a specimen of the kind of reading her work demands, I argue that references to Homer in the first and last poems of Wheatley's 1773 poetry collection have a structural function, framing her collection around an epic parallel to her own life experience as a child violently separated from her parent.
Wheatley opens the collection with an address "To Maecenas" that evokes the works of the ancient poets she claims as models. Her section on Homer concludes:
When great Patroclus courts Achilles' aid,
The grateful tribute of my tears is paid;
Prone on the shore he feels the pangs of love,
And stern Pelides tend'rest passions move.
These intricate verses refer first to Patroclus' request to enter battle on Achilles' behalf at the start of Iliad 16, which Wheatley would have known primarily through Alexander Pope's translation. In Pope's rendering, Achilles likens Patroclus to a crying girl and himself to her mother: his "pangs of love" are quasi-parental. But "prone on the shore" recalls instead the openings of Iliad 23 and 24 and the aftermath of the request, as Achilles sleeps by the sea and tosses in grief over Patroclus' death. Wheatley thus creates from Homer a composite of love and loss in which she vicariously participates, and which echoes the account of her own abduction from Africa in a later poem, when she asks "what pangs excruciating" must torment the parent from whom she was taken. Wheatley's allusion would be more pointed still if she could have intuited the possible reference in Achilles' simile to the forcible capture of women and children during wartime (Gaca).
The final piece in the collection is Wheatley's response to a multi-part riddle posed by a different poet. One of the answers is "young Euphorbus of the Dardan line": the warrior who struck the first blow against Patroclus forms a ring composition with the nexus of Homeric references treated above. Wheatley also brings herself into fuller view in this final poem's initial couplet:
The poet asks, and Phillis can't refuse
To show th'obedience of the Infant muse.
The author names herself here for the first time. Her language of obedience and impossible refusal unsettles the conventions of authorial modesty with an implicit reminder of her enslaved status. The conceit of the "Infant muse," finally, returns us to the scene of childhood separation that she has woven throughout her book, from both her own experience and the affective echoes of it that she brilliantly discovered in Homer.