Phillis Wheatley: Enslaved, Woman, and “Poet Laureate of the American Revolution”.

Phillis Wheatley (ca. 1753–1784) has "appropriately been called 'the mother of African American literature,' but with equal justice she can be described as the 'poet laureate of the American Revolution.' In the eighteenth century, neither title seemed likely ... Phillis arrived in America on a slave ship in July 1761 a seven-year-old child, parentless, speaking no English, naked and terrified, being offered for sale on the Boston docks. She was to prove a prodigy ... within sixteen months she was fluent in English and by age eleven she was composing poems that were admired around Boston ... By age fourteen she was publishing occasional poems in local newspapers, and others of her writings were circulating in manuscript ... Her 'Elegiac Poem on the Death of George Whitefield' in 1770 received acclaim in England and across the American colonies. By early 1772, when she was still only nineteen, she had produced so much poetry that her local supporters and patrons were working with her to publish her poems in book form ... Wheatley explicitly link[ed] the ideal of freedom from British tyranny with the ideal of freedom for enslaved African Americans. Wheatley clearly hoped that Americans would see both of these as political and moral imperatives." From The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.