Prologue: “The Humble Afric Muse’s Seat”

Abstract

Phillis Wheatley’s Miltonic Poetics responds to the critical and disciplinary divisions and prejudices that have limited recognition of how Wheatley positions herself as an American Milton in her 1773 POEMS. Calling for new theorization of the methods of literary history and (inter) textual analysis, this volume shows how Wheatley uses Milton to develop a sublime poetics whose assertions of imaginative power and fanciful freedom both envision an ideal Anglo-American nation and resist the coercions of the English transatlantic. Arguing that Wheatley uses Milton’s inaugural miscellany as her structural model and his poetical works as her library of English literary and Protestant materials, the author identifies five thematic sections in POEMS: ministerial authority and elegiac challenge; poetics of fanciful and imaginative sublimity; transatlantic trauma, travel, and loss; the charity of major elegiac consolation; and poetical envisioning of an ideal polity.