In the autumn of 1773, a slender volume of poetry emerged from a London printing house that would forever alter the landscape of American literature. "Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral" bore the name of its author on the title page: Phillis Wheatley, Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley of Boston. This seemingly simple attribution concealed a profound paradox that would define both the poet's life and her…
“I, who was but a few years ago in the deplorable state of a poor African slave, am now numbered among the poets.”
Neighbourhood:
African American Poets, American Poets, Colonial American Poets, Devotional Poets, Political Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Peace
William Collins, born in Chichester on 25 December 1721 and dead there on 12 June 1759, occupies a small but luminous space in English literary history. He published little, lived only thirty-seven years, and spent much of his adult life under the shadow of debt, disappointment, and severe mental distress. Yet a handful of poems, especially the odes issued in 1746, have secured him a place among the most distinctive…
Neighbourhood:
Augustan Poets, Death & Mortality, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Spirituality, Tenderness
