On a bright, warm Sunday afternoon, a large crowd gathered in the Carriage House at the Jay Heritage Center to hear about the life of Phillis Wheatley, a young girl from West Africa who, though sold into slavery, became one of the best-known poets of the late 1700s. 

The discussion was between Iain Haley Pollock, a published poet and director of the Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing at Manhattanville College, and David Waldstreicher, a historian of early 19th century America, especially its politics, culture, slavery/antislavery and print culture.

Last year Farrar, Straus & Giroux published Waldstreicher’s biography of Wheatley, “The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence.” He and Haley Pollock discussed how Wheatley’s life and work provide a unique way to look at slavery, Revolutionary War history, feminist history and poetry.

Using Wheatley’s own poetry as well as poems written about her by other poets, Haley Pollock and Waldstreicher painted a literary portrait of Wheatley. She arrived in Boston in as a seven-year-old child on a slave ship in 1761 and lived as an enslaved person in the Wheatley household until she was freed in 1773. She married John Peters, a free black man, in 1778. She had been sickly for much of her life and died in 1784 at age 31. 

Her identity was central to the discussion and how her experience of slavery shaped her life and her pro-Revolutionary stance in 1770s New England. 

“She writes in real time, and she has a feminist element in capturing the enslaved experience, even though it is in a specifically New England way,” Waldstreicher said. 

Unlike the large majority of enslaved people – in some parts of the southern states it was illegal to teach slaves or freed slaves how to write – Wheatley had access to a classical education through the Wheatley family. While living with them she was exposed to Greek and Roman mythology, which would help define her work. 

In the late 1700s, Neoclassicism was a growing movement in art, architecture, and political thought that was inspired by the art, literature, and philosophy of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Wheatley incorporated the movement’s imagery and style into her work, and it made her increasingly popular and influential through her poetry. 

“Her ability to inscribe her own life into the Neoclassical references is amazing,” Haley Pollock said.

Waldstreicher concluded the program by discussing Wheatley’s legacy as a universalist and how her insights into slavery, feminism, and politics of the 1700s are still relevant today, nearly 250 years later.