Blog #7: Classical Forms and Radical Questions: Phillis Wheatley at 250

Introduction: Reflections on Black History Month and the Atlantic World

Happy Black History Month! As I reflect on my research on Catharine Macaulay, a white woman of the eighteenth century, and on my own position, as a white woman writing in the twenty-first century, I am reminded of the interconnectedness of the Atlantic World and my own world. It may seem obvious, but Macaulay lived in a time of interconnected peoples and places, certainly including Black people, enslaved people, and other Indigenous, displaced, or minoritized populations and communities. 

In my own writing on the Atlantic World and its engagements with classical antiquity, I have had to consider long and hard the ways in which non-white, and in the American context, Black and Indigenous persons would have connected with classical texts and ideas. Much of this reflection begins with the very language I use, and that people in the Atlantic World used, to describe “antiquity” or “classical reception” itself.

Classical Reception and Catharine Macaulay

By “classical antiquity,” I mean to refer to Greco-Roman antiquity, roughly from the period of the 8th century BC to the 5th century AD, in which the civilizations of Ancient Greece and Rome flourished and influenced much of Europe, North Africa, and West Asia. This is an incomplete definition, and one that necessarily excludes other ancient societies, but is one that has resonated with the women I’ve studied. Scholars often describe the study of this engagement as “classical reception,” the examination of how and why the texts, ideas, images, and material cultures of Ancient Greece and Rome have been received, refigured, and adapted in different historical and cultural contexts. [1] Antiquity is never fixed; it changes as each modernity engages with it, and studying reception therefore requires attention to temporality, politics, cultural frameworks, history, and memory. [2]

Perhaps more importantly, reception has most often been deployed as a means to tie the classics and the history of the West as unfurling unbroken through time from Atlantic modernity and the European Enlightenment; through the Renaissance and the Middle Ages; ultimately to its origin in Ancient Greece and Rome. [3] Yet the West does not have a single, simple origin in classical antiquity. The narrative of continuity itself has an ideological purpose: it has justified Western expansion, imperialism, and ongoing systems of white racial dominance. Classical values, framed as timeless, are “grasped only as fleeting and ephemeral moments that can be pointed to just when they vanish (‘There!’)—they are epiphanic—while all that remains of them once they are gone is the empty gesture of pointing itself, which may in the end be all that classicism can rightfully lay claim to.” [4]

Thus, retracing the history of classical reception means retracing the history of these ideological identifications. My work on Macaulay has forced me to reconsider how classical reception functions across racialized hierarchies and illuminates the opportunities the classics could provide as an entry into the political sphere, and the structures of power that shaped the lives of the Atlantic World.

The USPS Black Heritage Phillis Wheatley Stamp

This month, these reflections extended beyond my scholarly work to the world around me. It felt particularly fitting when, just last week, my mom sent me some of my belongings from the US to my home in London. While at the post office, she discovered something exciting: the US Postal Service had honored Phillis Wheatley, the first published Black American poet, with the 49th stamp in its Black Heritage series. The timing was poignant: the first-day-of-use event for the Wheatley stamp, held on January 29, 2026, was free and open to the public at the Old South Meeting House in Boston, a congregation that, in the eighteenth century, had included Wheatley herself.

The USPS shared a brief biography of Wheatley in their National News. Included amongst other biographic details were that Wheatley was an enslaved poet educated in America; that she published her “Poems on Various Subjects” in 1773; that she was freed from slavery that same year; and that she went on to write to figures like George Washington. She has since been heralded as “the mother of African American literature,” with abolitionists before the Civil War using her accomplishments to affirm the intellectual capability of enslaved persons and argue against slavery. 

But this summary, though celebratory, only tells part of her story. Describing Wheatley as remarkable because she wrote poems that even George Washington read risks reducing her life and work to a novelty for white audiences and obscures the broader significance of her intellectual and artistic agency.

Antonio Alcala, an art director for USPS, designed the stamp using a portrait by Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955), an artist known for addressing the invisibility of Black figures in Western art and creating a “counter-archive” that restores their presence. Marshall’s portrait depicts Wheatley not as an enslaved poet writing for white audiences, but as a free woman of color asserting her intellectual authority. In his words:

“Phillis Wheatley-Peters, died, aged 31, a free woman of color, facing forward. The image I made for this stamp sought to memorialize her, as such. That is how I chose to commemorate her legacy.”

In memorializing Wheatley as a free woman of color, Marshall presents her not merely as an enslaved poet writing for white audiences, but as a figure claiming agency and intellectual authority, a framing that invites us to imagine her beyond the constraints of her time.

But let’s rewind. What does Wheatley have to do with Macaulay? And what can this episode with a stamp teach us this Black History Month 250 years after the nation’s founding?

Macaulay, Wheatley, and the Atlantic World

At first glance, Macaulay and Wheatley seem worlds apart: one a white English historian, the other an enslaved Black poet in Boston. But both engaged with classical language and ideas, though from vastly different social positions. In previous reflections, I noted:

“Hollis was not the only artist portraying a famous female writer in the Atlantic world, either. In this next section of the writing, I find it might be fruitful to compare Macaulay’s portrait to that of Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved poet in Boston whose poetry engaged with revolutionary rhetorics of freedom as a means of linking the struggle of American revolutionaries with that of enslaved people in America. Her work engaged with the same Enlightenment and classical languages that shaped Macaulay’s politics but from an entirely different social position.”

Considering Macaulay and Wheatley together helps illuminate the range of possibilities classical reception offered across the Atlantic World, while also revealing how structures of power shaped who could claim authority, whose voices were heard, and whose labor (intellectual, artistic, or otherwise) was recognized or constrained. [5]

To bring this point home, I’d like to offer a close reading of one of Wheatley’s poems, one that showcases not only her unique view of classical antiquity but also points to why the USPS’ description of her as merely writing a book of Poems and writing to Washington does her no justice. I will then offer a few reflections on how her work can speak to us today and how we might honor her legacy this Black History Month.

Phillis Wheatley: Life, Education, and Literary Context

To understand how Wheatley came to think about the ancient past and her identity as an enslaved woman, it is necessary to consider her biography. Kidnapped from West Africa and transported to Boston on The Phillis, she was about eight years old when purchased by John and Susanna Wheatley, evangelical Christians who, unusually, provided her with a broad education. [6] Under their guidance, and with instruction from their daughter Mary, Wheatley learned to read and write in English (and likely Latin, and perhaps even some Greek). [7] By the age of fifteen, she was composing and publishing her own poetry, and by nineteen, she sought subscribers in Boston to support the publication of her volume of poems.

Wheatley used her poetry to contrast the ideals of classical political tradition and Revolutionary discourse with her reality as an enslaved poet. She was not alone in engaging with the classics: other Africans in the early modern period also read and wrote in Latin. The best-known among them include Juan Latino (1516–ca. 1594), who translated Horace and wrote poetry in Latin, as well as Anton Wilhelm Amo (1703–1753) and Jacobus Eliza Johannes Capitein (1717–1747). [8] Wheatley, too, might have had some notion of an ancient African past. [9]

Wheatley rose to international fame because of the elegy she wrote to George Whitefield, the celebrated Methodist preacher of the Great Awakening. [10] Whitefield toured America six times, promoting a vision of a unified Christian community that transcended churches, nationalities, and racial boundaries, converting large numbers of Black and Indigenous Americans. [11] His death in 1770 provoked extraordinary public mourning: funeral processions extended over a mile, with some six thousand attendees, and newspapers across the colonies suspended political coverage to report on the event. [12]

Wheatley’s poem to Whitefield exemplified both eulogy’s potential to carry significance beyond the boundary of a community and to address a larger public and also showed how an author could shape their role as a public poet by drawing on the rhetorical traditions they put to practice in preaching for evangelical revivals. [13] Her poem quickly became the most popular Whitefield elegy in the colonies, appearing in at least seven editions. [14] London newspapers advertised it as “An Ode of Verses, composed in America by a Negro Girl seventeen years of age, and sent over to a gentleman of character in London.” [15] By the end of 1770, her work was reprinted across New York, Philadelphia, Rhode Island, and Boston. [16]

Wheatley’s elegies were further unique because they have been read, and I urge ought to be at least analyzed through a lens that understands them as both subtle assaults on the white European canon, and as Max Cavitch has suggested, the “subliterary impertinence of an African girl who found in vicarious mourning a means of gaining qualified social acceptance.” [17] In crafting her poetry, Wheatley forged a sense of national identity accessible to all Americans, white or Black, free or enslaved, male or female, by blending collective mourning with patriotic rhetoric. She positioned herself as a mediator, lending her voice to the community, the mourner, and the dead, shaping expressions of grief intelligible to those around her and asserting a measure of authority in the process. [18]

In the early 1770s, Wheatley expanded her focus to a full book of poetry. Facing racial prejudice and limited publishing opportunities in Boston, she and Susanna Wheatley turned to London. Leveraging her previous success with the Whitefield elegy and cultivating influential evangelical networks, Wheatley oversaw the production, promotion, and patronage of her Poems (1773), ensuring both her financial benefit and literary authority. Her London journey not only facilitated the successful publication of her volume in 1773 but also allowed Wheatley to expand her social, political, and intellectual reach, establishing her as a central figure in a transatlantic literary community while negotiating her identity as an African, a woman, and an enslaved person within broader revolutionary and evangelical discourses. It is within this expanded Atlantic framework that her most politically charged classical adaptation, “Niobe in Distress for Her Children Slain by Apollo,” must be read.

Phillis Wheatley’s Niobe

The poem that best exemplifies Wheatley’s political power, emerging at the intersection of her classical knowledge, gender, evangelical faith, and enslaved status, is “Niobe in Distress for Her Children Slain by Apollo, From Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book VI. And From A View Of The Painting Of Mr. Richard Wilson.” In it, Wheatley asserts the contradictions of liberty and enslavement within the colonies, engages revolutionary rhetoric to link the struggles of colonists and enslaved people, and offers a vision of community among Black women, both literally and through literature.

In her poem, Wheatley reimagines the Ovidian story of Niobe, the Theban queen who insults the goddess Latona and suffers horrific punishment. When Niobe claims she is as powerful as Latona, boasting fourteen children to Latona’s two, she persuades Theban women to reject Latona’s feast and their worship of Latona altogether. In retaliation, Latona sends Apollo and Diana to kill Niobe’s children. Wheatley centers the allegorical body as a site of identity and violence: Niobe, like enslaved mothers in the Atlantic World, suffers at the hands of power beyond her control.

While some scholars read Wheatley’s Niobe as emblematic of Black motherhood under slavery, others interpret the poem as allegory for colonial resistance. Wheatley’s text allows both readings to coexist. By aligning Niobe’s rebellion with contemporary struggles, she addresses revolutionary ideals while critiquing the oppression of enslaved people. And in reworking Ovid more generally, Wheatley diverges from English moralistic interpretations of the same text: whereas many English adaptations foreground Niobe’s pride as a cautionary tale, Wheatley lingers on shock, suffering, and injustice. Her version ends not with Niobe’s transformation into stone but suspended in the moment of maternal horror, which captures the scene before metamorphosis. The effect is to freeze the reader in the spectacle of grief rather than resolve it into moral closure. [19]

The poem’s first lines frame Niobe’s suffering within the logic of despotism: “to man the dreadful spring / Of ills innum’rous,” and describe her as a “Phrygian queen, all beautiful in woe” (1-2, 10). Wheatley signals political meaning through imagery: Phrygian a garment concerned with possibilities of American revolution or a universal emancipation. Whereas the Phrygian cap was given to emancipated slaves in Rome to signify their freedom, it also became a symbol of liberty in revolutionary Boston. Phrygian caps were part of a standard iconography of liberty, notably appearing in Paul Revere’s engraving of Samuel Adams as well as on the masthead of the Boston Gazette. [20]

Wheatley further spends time in the first stanza delineating both her own artistic genealogy (between Homer, Ovid, Richard Wilson) and that of Niobe. [21] This artistic genealogy is important for understanding “Niobe in Distress”: her poem identifies two interpretations of the ancient myth – the Ovidian interpretation as well as Wilson’s oil painting of “The Destruction of the Children of Niobe” (1760). His painting depicts Niobe, still in human form, reaching toward her living daughters threatened by the bows of Apollo and Diana. While her arms reach toward the girls, her eyes cast downward, forecasting the story’s tragic end, Niobe’s grief-stricken transformation into stone. Wilson’s dart oil on canvas leaves his audience caught in a space between terror and morning, a state Wheatley mirrors in her version of the Niobe myth – one that challenges Ovid’s retelling but also leaves her audience contemplating the cries of mother watching the destruction of her children. Wheatley ends the poem amid this action, freezing at the point of maternal horror and profound grief, much like the image Wilson captures in his painting. 

It is possible Wheatley saw the original Wilson Niobe she cites in her title in her trip to London, but all the more possible she referenced one of the many prints of the 1761 engraving of Wilson’s Niobe made by William Wollett, engravings which were eagerly purchased by the middling classes on both sides of the Atlantic. [22] It’s further ironic that Wheatley claimed relation to Wilson because in many ways such a claim defied Wilson’s own elitist approach to classical landscape. His dependence on middling-class consumers of his engravings notwithstanding, Wilson sought and believed in old-style patronage throughout his career. He desired in his classical paintings to be inaccessible to the bourgeoisie, despite the success of his paintings, backed by the work of printmakers and slaves. 

In defiance of both Wilson and Ovid’s interpretation of Niobe, Wheatley further used her “Niobe in Distress” as a poem of loss and mourning, part of the majority of her poems that focused on tragedy. Much like her earlier elegies, Wheatley positions herself as a mourner, using a language of grief to construct a community uniting herself with other grievers. In this role, she asserts a unique form of authority – rooted in her identity as a Black woman and in her invocation of classical cultural metaphors – allowing her to speak to and for others, especially, in the context of this poem, Black women. 

The poem also portrays grief as labor. [23] As Jessica Millward eloquently argues in her article “Black Women’s History and the Labor of Mourning,” the history of Black women is a study in mourning. [24] Enslaved women especially faced mourning as their reality of enslavement often left mothers without children, as articulately painted in Wheatley’s poem. [25] Children were sold; children ran away; children died; children were killed. Enslaved women existed in a constant state of mourning. [26] In Metamorphoses, and in Wheatley’s interpretation of Ovid, Niobe quite literally moves from a person to a commodity, as Wheatley would have from freedom to enslavement. Similarly, Niobe’s humanity is lost in grief because she becomes a physical thing, and object, through her weeping. Wheatley, as a public-facing poet, is the opposite – to the white patrons and readers who would read her work, she became humanized through her grieving. By being quite literally on commission to mourn white enslavers as a means to make her name in poetry and produce monetary revenue, Wheatley found herself, like many other Black women, that grief work would fall on her. Her sadness demonstrated the humanity she needed to secure the patronage of rich, white supporters. Yet at the same time, she could take control of this interplay. As a poet, she could control the relationality between the writer and the deceased – she could control a mechanism of immortality in presenting her poems about the deceased in the present, while alive, to other living members of society. 

At the same time, Niobe engages colonial audiences, juxtaposing maternal suffering with revolutionary critique. Latona and Apollo are rendered as tyrants quashing a rebellion wherein Niobe’s resistance, which filled “Each Theban bosom with rebellious res” prompted Apollo to “punish pride, and scourge the rebel mind” (96, 104). While Wheatley does retain the idea of hubris as an aspect of Niobe’s character — Niobe’s refusal to submit to Latona can be figured as analogous to colonial resistance to British authority. [27] For example, the language of rights and payments with which Wheatley’s Niobe lectures her people for submitting to the demands of Laton draws on pre-Revolutionary patriotic rhetoric surrounding taxation. More specifically, her rhetorical question to her people – “Why vainly fancy your petitions heard?” — speaks to the concerns of enslaved people and freed Black people in Massachusetts. In January and April of 1773, enslaved African Americans for the first time took up the form of petition as a means to appeal for an end to slavery and advocate for basic rights, leveraging growing sentiments for liberty during the American Revolution against their own position as enslaved. As her “Niobe” poem was not included in her 1772 proposal for Poems, and her poem claims to be based not only on Ovid’s text but also Wilson’s painting of Niobe, which she could have seen in her London trip in 1773, she likely composed the poem after these petitions appeared. [28] As John Levi Barnard argues in his Empire of Ruin, the second petition is particularly relevant to Wheatley’s poem, as it linked “civil and religious liberty” together as the “same grand object” pursued both by patriots and the enslaved, a language Wheatley would reiterate almost verbatim in a letter to Samson Occom in 1774. [29]

In Niobe, Wheatley demonstrates the strategic deployment of classical form. Her engagement with elite literary traditions allows her to critique empire and slavery while gaining access to transatlantic audiences. Her classical allusions are neither ornamental nor deferential; they are tools for intervention. Wheatley’s poem navigates the tension between public literary performance and intimate communal grief, creating a space where Black women’s voices and experiences are visible, authoritative, and enduring.

The Reception of Poems and its Consequences

The publication of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) transformed Wheatley from a promising colonial poet into an international figure, and, inadvertently, into a living indictment of slavery. Reviews appeared across Britain and Scotland, with newspapers excerpting multiple poems and remarking upon the remarkable spectacle of an enslaved African woman mastering classical and Christian forms. At least two British reviewers openly noted the hypocrisy of the Boston patriots who celebrated Wheatley’s talent while maintaining her enslavement. [30] In doing so, her poetry forced the contradiction between slavery and liberty into public view.

And although Wheatley herself had returned to Boston before these reviews circulated, their transatlantic resonance mattered. Her work forged the very Atlantic community it described: read in France, Britain, and the American colonies, her poems moved across imperial circuits of print culture even as her own body had been violently transported across the Atlantic years before. [31] By 1773, she had become, in effect, a one-woman antislavery argument, her learning and refinement challenging racial hierarchies that underwrote both colonial society and imperial power.

Ultimately, the English criticism of Boston’s racist hypocrisy provoked her manumission. John Wheatley freed her in late 1773 or early 1774, only months before Susanna Wheatley’s death. [32] Freedom, however, did not temper her political voice. On February 11, 1774, she wrote to the Mohegan minister Samson Occom, in a letter reprinted in eleven colonial newspapers, in which she drew parallels between Biblical Israelites and enslaved Africans, and between Egyptians and American slaveholders, exposing the “strange Absurdity” of colonists who cried for liberty while exercising “oppressive Power over others.” [33] Her language carefully balanced evangelical theology and revolutionary rhetoric, allowing her to criticize American hypocrisy without rejecting the moral vocabulary that structured both patriot and loyalist discourse.

Wheatley thus became a significant figure in the intertwined politics of slavery and revolution. Her classical references, biblical analogies, and appeals to liberty were not ornamental but strategic. They enabled her to speak simultaneously to multiple audiences—patriots and loyalists, evangelicals and secular readers, while insisting that the logic of freedom must extend to enslaved people. In doing so, she pressed Revolutionary ideology toward its most radical implication: the abolition of slavery itself.

Wheatley and Revolutionary War Poetry

Wheatley’s later Revolutionary War poems, including her correspondence with George Washington, further complicate her political positioning. While some scholars have hesitated to read these poems as subversive, her patriotic verse continues to operate within the same framework established in Niobe and her letter to Occom: classical language, evangelical morality, and Revolutionary rhetoric converge to test the coherence of American liberty. After her manumission, Wheatley did not retreat from politics; rather, she entered more directly into the public debate over the meaning of the Revolution and the moral obligations it entailed.

In the years following her manumission, Wheatley became increasingly political. As Eric Slauter suggests, she may have muted some overtly political elements in Poems to secure publication and cultivate an international readership. But once Wheatley returned from England to America after the publication of her book, and America committed to the Revolutionary War, Wheatley played up the overtly political elements of her poems. She met with free Black men like John Quamino and possibly Zingo Stevens, the latter a founder of the Free African Union Society, the first Black philanthropic organization. She declared her support for the revolutionary cause, sent George Washington a poem, and wrote poems on other revolutionary figures. Yet this patriotism was never uncomplicated.

“To His Excellency General Washington” (1775) exemplifies this complexity. Framed within neoclassical epic conventions, the poem situates Washington within “Columbia’s scenes of glorious toils,” casting the American struggle as a new epic narrative. The figure of Columbia, whether understood as a feminine personification of America or as a composite of classical deities, anchors the poem in a transatlantic classical vocabulary. [34] By invoking epic form, Wheatley inserts the American Revolution into the lineage of Virgilian and neoclassical political poetry.

Yet the poem also subtly unsettles its hero. Rather than cataloguing Washington’s triumphs, Wheatley asks: “Shall I to Washington their praise recite? / Enough thou know’st them in the fields of fight” (23-24). Washington appears not as the sole embodiment of national glory but as a leader whose authority depends upon his relationship to his troops. Positioned grammatically between “I” and “their,” he is neither purely subject nor object but a figure whose legitimacy rests on collective struggle. [35] Wheatley’s rhetorical posture suggests concern that leadership might become detached from the people in whose name it fights.

The poem’s penultimate stanza further sharpens this tension. America is described as “freedom’s heaven-defended race,” yet “the eyes of nations” remain fixed upon the conflict (32-3). The Revolution is thus staged before an international audience, precisely the transatlantic public that had already witnessed the contradiction of an enslaved poet celebrated by liberty-loving colonists. Wheatley’s patriotic language therefore carries an implicit warning: if America claims epic status as the champion of liberty, it must withstand global scrutiny of its slaveholding practices.

Throughout her career, Wheatley used neoclassical form as both passport and instrument. By recreating herself as a poet fluent in the highest cultural capital of her day, she gained entry into elite literary and political discourse. Within that space, she persistently linked the patriot struggle to the ancient and modern politics of slavery. Her classical allusions were not decorative but strategic, allowing her to articulate critiques of colonial and later American inequities without abandoning the moral and aesthetic frameworks her audiences revered.

The limits of that strategy were material as well as rhetorical. Despite the success of Poems, Wheatley struggled to secure a second publisher and eventually fell into poverty. The Atlantic networks that had elevated her proved fragile. Yet even in these constraints, her project remains clear: to expose the tension between Revolutionary liberty and racial bondage, and to insist through epic, elegy, and correspondence, that American identity could not be disentangled from the question of slavery.

Wheatley’s poetry thus operates less as flattery than as intervention. Like a carefully constructed classical epic, it enters the citadel of power using familiar (literary and political) forms. But once inside, it presses a destabilizing question: what becomes of a nation that invokes Rome and Scripture in the name of freedom while denying both to others?

Wheatley 250 Years Later

Two and a half centuries later, that question remains unsettled. Phillis Wheatley’s poetry demonstrates the extraordinary ways Black women have navigated oppression, claimed intellectual authority, and shaped public discourse. Her elegies, “Niobe in Distress,” and her Revolutionary War poems reveal a writer deeply engaged with classical tradition, alert to the contradictions of American liberty, and determined to assert agency even within the constraints of enslavement. To remember her merely as a prodigious poet praised by George Washington is to miss the sharper edge of her work: she was a perceptive critic of her society who used classical forms and transatlantic literary networks to press the logic of freedom to its limits.

Recent scholarship has helped restore this complexity (and Marshall’s interpretation of his design or the stamp allows this complexity, too). Rather than viewing Wheatley solely as an enslaved woman writing deferentially to white patrons, historians increasingly situate her as a free Black intellectual operating within, and reshaping, Atlantic political culture. This reframing allows us to see her Revolutionary poetry not as contradiction but as strategy: a continuation of her effort to hold American ideals accountable to their professed commitments.

Wheatley’s legacy also invites us to consider the longer history of Black women’s intellectual and political labor. Her poetry belongs to a tradition in which Black women have transformed grief, exclusion, and archival silence into sites of authority and critique. In the discipline of History, scholars like Saidiya Hartman and Marisa Fuentes have developed methodologies of critical fabulation that confront the erasures of slavery’s archive and recover the lives of women whose voices were systematically suppressed. Their work, like Wheatley’s, exposes the structures of power embedded in the production of knowledge itself.

Beyond the academy, the pattern persists: Black women have repeatedly borne the labor of mourning while simultaneously demanding structural change. Wheatley’s Niobe, suspended in maternal grief, resonates in a nation where the deaths of Black children continue to provoke both public sorrow and political struggle. The historical continuity is not metaphorical but structural: grief becomes advocacy, and mourning becomes critique.

The USPS stamp commemorating Wheatley on the 250th anniversary of American independence offers a symbolic recognition of her place in national memory. Yet commemoration alone cannot contain the force of her intervention. Wheatley’s work challenges us to move beyond celebration toward accountability. If her poetry pressed eighteenth-century readers to confront the contradiction between liberty and slavery, it presses us to confront the unfinished work of justice in our own time.

Black History Month, then, is not only an occasion for recognition but for reflection and actionable change. Wheatley’s example reminds us that intellectual authority can emerge from the margins, that literary form can function as political argument, and that the language of freedom demands consistency. To honor her legacy is not simply to admire her artistry, but to take seriously the destabilizing question at the heart of her work, and to consider how we answer it today.

Works Cited

1. Umachandran, Mathura, and Marchella Ward, Critical Ancient World Studies: The Case for Forgetting Classics. (Taylor & Francis, 2023), 509.
2. Reception necessarily involves the collaboration between persons across time, between the reception critic and other receivers, between us now and those in the future. However, classical reception is by no means a perfect metaphor or mode of thinking to conceive of this passage of time throughout antiquity until now. The most recurrent criticism of reception is its connection to passivity, as if reception were only about moments in time in which antiquity ‘is’ received. That reception is a term specifically chosen to emphasize the activity of readers (rather than the passivity of receiving texts) does not counter this problem: even if the relationships between texts are truly dynamic, the metaphor of reception by which the relationship that is figured remains to be negotiated in the linear. Nor would this do justice to the dynamics to the power play within processes of reception: these dynamics are extremely active and interactional.
3. Naoíse Mac Sweeney, The West : A New History in Fourteen Lives (New York, New York: Dutton, 2023), 2.
4. Porter, “What Is ‘Classical’ about Classical Antiquity?”, 38.
5. So Wheatley and Macaulay both engaged in the same world of classical idioms. They also existed in similar social circles; Wheatley was read by Jefferson, Washington, and Warren, all of whom knew about, and many of whom wrote to Macaulay. Wheatley was sponsored by the Countess of Huntingdon, who was also friends with, and sometimes connected to, the Bluestocking circle Macaulay was a part of. These women very much, then, existed in the same political, social, and cultural spheres, but their emphases on how they understood the classics differed. 
6. Phillis Wheatley was captured and taken to America aboard a schooner, the Wheatley, which came to Boston on July 11, 1761, after gathering slaves in Senegal, Sierra Leone, and the Isles de Los, off the coast of Guinea (Gates, Henry Louis, and American Council of Learned Societies. The Trials of Phillis Wheatley America’s First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers. ACLS Humanities E-Book (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2003), 17). Among its cargo was a slender female child who was supposed to be around seven years old based on the “shedding” of her front teeth, “naked,” and covered by “a quantity of dirty carpet about her like a filibeg” (Gates, The Trials of Phillis Wheatley, 17). This little girl was about to join the more than half of Boston’s population under the age of sixteen, where men of African descent outnumbered women of African descent by more than five to three because slave traders preferred importing young men (Carretta, Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage, 18). Enslaved persons were often sold at taverns or other places of business because Boston lacked a marketplace dedicated to the sale of enslaved people (Caretta, 18). It was there that Wheatley would be sold to be the personal servant of Susana Wheatley. 
7. Mac Sweeney, The West, 254. In Wheatley’s Boston, no Black children could be counted among the more than 800 students enrolled in the city’s two grammar or Latin schools and the three vocational schools (Gates, The Trials of Phillis Wheatley, 18). Instead, Wheatley gained her classical education through access to canonical texts made available to her at the Wheatley home and from neighbors’ libraries (Shields and Lamore, New Essays on Phillis Wheatley, 36).
8. Dominik, W. J. (. R. (2006). Afrika (RWG). In Der Neue Pauly Online. Brill. 
9. Not only did Greco-Roman antiquity stretch into networks that covered West Africa (like through iron trade, for example), but West Africa itself has an ancient past outside of the Mediterranean world she could have been familiar with, as well. 
10. Jerome Dean Mahaffey, The Accidental Revolutionary George Whitefield and the Creation of America (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2011), 175.
11. Katy L. Chiles, Transformable Race: Surprising Metamorphoses in the Literature of Early America (2014), 35; Wheatley, Wheatley, and Vincent Carretta.The Writings of Phillis Wheatley. Oxford University Press, 2019. It is also important to note that one of the most important models and inspirations for Wheatley was the Mohegan preacher and teacher Samson Occom. Occom, like Wheatley, studied Latin and Greek in addition to Hebrew. He further served as a schoolmaster and missionary to Montauks on Long Island. He became a sensation in Boston, introduced at court to crowds by George Whitefield, preaching to thousands, more than three hundred times in all.
12. Mahaffey, The Accidental Revolutionary George Whitefield and the Creation of America, 172.
13. Astrid Franke, “Phillis Wheatley, Melancholy Muse.” The New England Quarterly 77, no. 2 (2004): 231.
14. Karen Ann Weyler, Empowering Words: Outsiders and Authorship in Early America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013), 47. A custom wood cutout that accompanied most editions of Wheatley’s poem certainly aided her in not only gaining popularity but was the most visually appealing of all the Whitefield elegies. The woodcut pictures Whitefield resting just beyond his coffin, ornamented with a skull, his initials, date of death, and age at which he died. Whitefield is dressed in clerical robes and an elaborate wig.
15. Wheatley and Carretta, The Writings of Phillis Wheatley. 
16. Carretta, Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage, 94.
17. Cavitch, American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman, 51.
18. Franke,“Phillis Wheatley, Melancholy Muse,” 233.
19. Jennifer Thorn, “‘All Beautiful in Woe’: Gender, Nation, and Phillis Wheatley’s ‘Niobe.’” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 37, no. 1 (2008): 235.
20. John Levi Barnard, Empire of Ruin Black: Classicism and American Imperial Culture (Oxford University Press, 2017), 51.
21. These lines are taken almost directly from Ovid, down to the translation of “ethereal axis” from atherium axem. But by changing their position and speaker, Wheatley gives the verse some new meaning, granting Niobe some external assertion of her qualifications that appeared at the beginning of Wheatley’s own poem (Morrison, Rachel C. “‘How Strangely Chang’d’: The Re-Creation of Ovid by African American Women Poets” (ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2018), 8).
22. Thorn, “‘All Beautiful in Woe,’” 243. Richard Wilson’s career was dedicated to proving both the English could paint classical landscapes that rivaled the Italian and French, while the artist could still be the social equal of the nobly born (Ibid).
23. Situated between poetic discussions of dead children and African creative production, “Niobe in Distress” frames Wheatley’s Niobe as commentary on the gendered context under which she produced Black art but also the context of loss, suffering, and rebellion echoed in themes of Black maternal life as well as political unrest. As Nicole Spigner argues, Wheatley alters the Ovidian Niobe story in three crucial ways: 1) poetic form, when Wheatley writes with heroic couplets and in iambic pentameter; 2) content, when Latona identifies Niobe’s sentiments and the actions of Theban women as “rebellion”; and 3) resolution, wherein Wheatley does not describe Niobe as transforming into stone but ends the poem with Niobe still holding the body of her dead daughter (Springer, “Phillis Wheatley’s Niobean Poetics, ” 323). 
24. Jessica Millward, “Black Women’s History and the Labor of Mourning,” Souls (Boulder, Colo.) 18, no. 1 (2016): 161–65. While Millward’s thesis focuses on articulating the necessity to grieve and utilizing public spaces to mourn, African American women’s historians are shaping an academic discourse to help process the constant state of trauma that often accompanies our scholarly production, she includes an important discussion of the legacy of black women and mourning tracing back to enslavement.
25. Jessica Millward, Finding Charity’s Folk : Enslaved and Free Black Women in Maryland, (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2015), 4; See also Jennifer L. Morgan (Jennifer Lyle), Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), 2004.
26.  Millward, “Black Women’s History and the Labor of Mourning,” 162. As Darlene Clark Hine points out, there are examples of enslaved women who refused to have children and those who simply walked away from their children. Failure to develop a bond with children was a way to manage the inevitable grief associated with losing that child in the future (Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women: Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance,” in her Hine Sight: Black Women and the Re-Construction of American History (New York: Carlson Publishing, 1994), 37–48).
27. Barnard, Empire of Ruin, 49.
28. Ibid., 51.
29. Ibid.
30. Robinson, Phillis Wheatley and Her Writings, 39.
31. In 1774 Deborah Cushing wrote to her husband to that she “sent to [him] one of Phillis Wheatley’s books which you will wonder at but Mrs. Dickinson and Mrs. Clymen and Mrs. Bull with some other Ladys were so pleased with Wheatley and her performances they bought her Books and got her to compose some pieces for them” (Deborah Cushings to Thomas Cushings, September 19-21, 1774, Cushing Family Papers II, 1773-1857, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston [MA]). Over 30 years later Samuel Miller wrote that “a correspondent in France has applied to me for a copy of Phillis Wheatley’s Poems” (Samuel Miller to John Eliot, August 24, 1807, Andrews-Eliot Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston [MA]).
32. William H Robinson, “Phillis Wheatley in London.” CLA Journal 21, no. 2 (1977): 200.
33. “The following is an Extract of a Letter from Wheatley a Negro Girl of Mr Weatley’s.” Providence Gazette (Providence, Rhode Island) XI, no. 533, March 26, 1774: [2]. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers. 
34. The name “Columbia” was used as early as 1761 to designate English America as opposed to “Brittania” ( Thomas J. Steele, “The Figure of Columbia: Phillis Wheatley plus George Washington.” The New England Quarterly 54, no. 2 (1981): 264). Alternatively, Thomas Steele has argued that Wheatley’s figure of Columbia was a composite of both Phoebus Apollo and Pallas Athene.
35. Toscano, “Epic Regained: Phillis Wheatley’s Admonitory Poetics in the ‘Little Columbiad,” 192.