Victory by Simile
Andrea Brady: Phillis Wheatley’s Evolution, 4 January 2024
The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys through American Slavery and Independence
by David Waldstreicher.
Farrar, Straus, 480 pp., £24, March 2023,978 0 8090 9824 8 Show More
by David Waldstreicher.
Farrar, Straus, 480 pp., £24, March 2023,
“... hand ‘so we might have some conception of the amount of genius that slavery is murdering’. But Thomas Jefferson compared her to a parrot and thought her poems ‘below the dignity of criticism. The heroes of The Dunciad are to her as Hercules to the author of that poem.’ In a context where figures including Kant and Hume used aesthetics to confirm racist ... ”