- April is National Poetry Month
- Join the Vorhoff Library as we celebrate a woman poet each day during the month!
- Early American Women Poets
- Posted April 1, 2009
At the beginning of this celebration of American poetry, why not look back to the beginnings of American poetry?
The first published poet to write in America was Anne Bradstreet (1612?-1672), one of the first settlers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In Mistress Bradstreet: The Untold Life of America's First Poet, Charlotte Gordon illuminates both the life of this early poet as well as the history of Puritan New England. Phillis Wheatley (1753?-1784) was the first person of African descent to publish a book in the English language. Her work is even more remarkable when it is considered that she was brought over on a slave ship from Africa only a decade before her work was published. Like Anne Bradstreet, she lived in Boston, where she was educated by her master's family and freed around the time of the American Revolution. In The Trials of Phillis Wheatley, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. examines Wheatley's work, the founding fathers' response to it, and how Wheatley influenced later black literature. Both these poets were writing very much in the English tradition of their day. Especially with Wheatley, this can be a jolt--she is much closer, in many ways to John Milton than to modern black women poets.
One of Wheatley's poems follows; for more information about these poets, and more of their poems, click on their names above.
Poem of the day:
On Being Brought from Africa to America
by Phillis Wheatley
'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, Negros, black as Cain,
May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.
