from a recent essay about the poetry of Marie de France, Jan Kochanowski, and Phillis Wheatley:

In an era when the Bible was often the only book in a New England house, Phillis Wheatley received an extraordinary education. The average free white man in Boston never glimpsed such riches. But for an obsessed reader, too much is never enough. Although the Wheatleys' slave girl had faith in herself—“While an intrinsic ardor prompts to write, / The muses promise to assist my pen”—she must have struggled to make peace with the knowledge that only university men would have the opportunity “to scan the heights / Above, to traverse the ethereal space.”

            Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) was Wheatley’s only published collection of poetry. The title suggests a stricture of tone and topic that the poems themselves sometimes belie. Or perhaps Wheatley’s conception of religious and moral was a more complicated amalgam of conviction and “intrinsic ardor.” She was, after all, well acquainted with Milton’s Paradise Lost, which might easily be construed as an argument for imagination as a moral virtue.