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…
“It is not impossible that some of the most learned and polished nations of the world may be found to have sprung from Africa.”
Neighbourhood:
African American Poets, American Poets, Colonial American Poets, Devotional Poets, Political Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Peace
Mark Akenside was born on 9 November 1721 in Newcastle upon Tyne, and died in London on 23 June 1770. He was one of the most ambitious English poets of the mid-eighteenth century: a physician of substantial professional distinction, a political partisan, a learned student of philosophy and natural science, and the author of The Pleasures of Imagination, a poem that sought nothing less than to explain how the mind rec…
Neighbourhood:
Augustan Poets, Georgian Poets, Metaphysical Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Joy
