SOURCE: "From 'uncultivated Barbarian' to 'Poetical Genuis': The Public Presence of Phillis Wheatley," MELUS, Vol. 18, No. 3, Fall, 1993, pp. 21-32.

In the following essay, Nott argues that Wheatley deliberately transformed herself into a poet worthy of public attention, in order to secure the power that adheres to such attention.

The first edition of Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) included an attestation that the volume was the work of its purported author. "To the PUBLICK" was signed by Massachusetts's royal governor Thomas Hutchinson, lieutenant governor Andrew Oliver, and sixteen other Bay Colony notables, including John Hancock and John Wheatley, "her Master." The signatories assured the volume's readers that Poems on Various Subjects was indeed "written by Phillis, a young Negro Girl, who was but a few years since, brought an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa, and has ever since been, and now is, under the Disadvantage of...