David Waldstreicher's The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence is an illuminating book that details the works of a person many people know about. Prior to reading this book, I knew the broad outline, that Wheatley had been a slave who gained famed for her talent with poetry and been the first African American poet to have a published book.

Waldstreicher presents a multi pronged work, it is a history, biography and literary analysis. However, we are limited by the available source records to the words and thoughts of Wheatley, her 'family' and those of whom she interacted. Phillis Wheatley was named for the slave ship that brought her to America, her birth name being lost to time. Much of the rest of her early life is not detailed, Waldstreicher is much more focused on her work and how it was received in pre- and revolutionary era America. We do learn some details of her home life, but much of the focus is on Wheatley's poems, both those that were signed and those that have been attributed to her based on content, time of publication and a shared commonality of word choice.

While much of her life is not explored, the Phillis Wheatley portrayed here is a very talented writer and a politically savvy operator. Who she dedicated her poems and who was sent them are just important as the connections she makes to further her career, despite rampant racially motivated disbelief of her capabilities.

Worth a read for any one seeking information about early American literature, American Poetry or the African American experience of Colonial and Revolutionary America.

I have known OF Phillis Wheatley for a long time but not much ABOUT her, perhaps because rhyming couplets is about my least favorite kind of poetry. It was the order of the day in the 18th century, though, to be fair. After reading this book, I still don't enjoy rhyming couplets! but I have a much better appreciation of the sophistication beneath the ba-dump-ba-dump rhythms and flowery language.

The great strength of this book is the way Waldstreicher delves into the social context of Wheatley's work in the Boston of her time. She lived there during a period of great social ferment, and everything she wrote was calculated in some way to draw upon her knowledge of and position in that society, whether she was trying to hedge her bets with elegies or highlight her experience as an enslaved African person. Details about various politicians and preachers can get a little exhausting at first, but without this information it's not possible to fully appreciate the nature of her work.

With detailed textual study, Waldstreicher has added a number of anonymously published poems to her oeuvre, including my favorite which was a response to a poet who argued against abolition of slavery. It won't take long before you're nauseated by the repetition of the "we won't be slaves" motif in patriot rhetoric even as the enslaved population of Boston increased. Although Wheatley was emancipated upon her owner/patroness's death, she did not live to see slavery abolished in her state - and slavery was significant there despite how we'd like to think of the north - there was not the huge slave economy that existed in the southern plantation states, but there were several thousand slaves in Boston at the time of the Tea Party.

While I still don't really want to sit down and read pages of rhymed couplets, this book gave me a new respect for the intelligence and savvy of Phillis Wheatley in the context of her life and times.

Phyllis Wheatley has always been a mystery to me because of my curiosity. Waldstreicher composed a detailed description of her life and took his readers on a journey of a deeper view of her life and her works.