Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T11:37:52.820Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“Phillis Wheatley's First Effort”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Vincent Carretta
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Biographical Research at the Massachusetts Historical Society has Discovered in The 1773 Diary of Jeremy Belknap (1744-98), a Congregationalist clergyman, what is likely a text by Phillis Wheatley that predates any known before now. Belknap's diary is interleaved in Bickerstaff's Boston Almanack. For the Year of Our Lord, 1773. The last page includes a twenty-word poem in Belknap's hand that he identifies as “Phillis Wheatley's first Effort———-AD 1765. EE 11.” Belknap transcribes the text twice. The first version is in three lines, as if he could not decide whether it was prose or poetry, with an inserted two-word phrase placed above the first line and located by a caret below it:

Unto Salvation

MrsThacher's Son is gonê her Daughter too

so I conclude

They are both gone to be renewed

Type
Little-Known Documents
Information
PMLA , Volume 125 , Issue 3 , May 2010 , pp. 795 - 797
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Belknap, Jeremy. Diary. 1773. MS N-1827. Jeremy Belknap Papers, Diaries 1758-1798. Massachusetts Hist. Soc., Boston.Google Scholar
Shields, John C. “Phillis Wheatley and Mather Byles: A Study in Literary Relationships.” CLA Journal 23 (1980): 377–90. Print.Google Scholar