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Letter from the Editors

Dear Readers,

Each weekday in April, Poetry Daily brings its email newsletter readers a special poem, selected by a contemporary poet whose work has appeared on Poetry Daily, as part of its annual fund-raising campaign and in celebration of National Poetry Month. This year, Poetry Daily is presenting these poems and comments to its website readers.

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Warmest regards,

Don Selby & Diane Boller
Editors

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Cornelius Eady's Poetry Month Pick, April 30, 2009

On Being Brought from Africa to America
by Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784)

'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew,
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
"Their colour is a diabolic die."
Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,
May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.
 

Cornelius Eady Comments:
Poor Phillis Wheatley. June Jordan and Audrey Lourde were much braver poets, Gwendolyn Brooks more elegant with her line. On the worse day of his life in the worse poem he ever wrote, Robert Hayden could mop the floor with Wheatley's heroic couplets.

Most readers know the list of gripes attached to this poem, and the book it appears in, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, by Phillis Wheatley, Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley, Of Boston, in New England. I think you need the full title to get a sense of world she crashes into with these poems. This is why the book has that famous illustration of her sitting at a desk, quill in hand, writing. Or about to write. Thinking. Or the petition, signed by her master and so many white male witnesses (including John Hancock), swearing to the proof of what you're about to read: Trust us! She's a poetry-writing slave! Really! In the 20th Century it would be called the shock of the new; here it's just a new shock.

Wheatley ultimately disappoints us modern readers because her poems are in service to the ideas and morals she'd been raised with since being brought into the Wheatley household as a child of seven, but this is exactly why I find this poem so exciting. In a sense, Poems on Various Subjects is not unlike most first books; the poems are an accumulation of experience filtered through shared language. Wheatley's poems want you to know that she's a reader, that she's fluent in mythology, that she's devout, that she knows what you know.

But there's an oh-so-brief shift in the tone of "On Being Brought from Africa to America"; here she decides to tell them what they don't know; how complicated it is to be her, to be there, to be in love with and inside a language and yet to hear that same language define you as, well, unrefin'd. Unlike the other poems in the book, it is the only one where the reporting comes fully from that beautiful/ugly land she must have been living in since stepping off the boat, or perhaps the moment when those scratches on the page began to make sense. It is the first American poem, I feel, that sets its sights on that living contradiction from someone inside that contradiction, and in doing so, the poem feels breathtakingly modern, as if she were waiting for us all to catch up.
 

About Cornelius Eady:
Cornelius Eady has published more than half a dozen volumes of poetry, most recently Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems (2008). His book Brutal Imagination (2001) was a National Book Award finalist; The Gathering of My Name (1991) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; and, Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (1985) won the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Eady is cofounder of Cave Canem, an organization committed to the discovery and cultivation of new voices in African American poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing program at the University of Notre Dame.

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