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IN THE DENSELY PACKED "To Maecenas," the eighteenth-century African American Phillis Wheatley deploys her knowledge of the Latin classics to plead her case as a poet enslaved. Despite the graceful tribute to Pope's Iliad, "To Macenas" is not just an example of Wheatley's basically derivative handling of neoclassic conventions. It is an authentic re-vision of a classical original, Horace's ode to his patron, Gaius Maecenas, an ode Pope chose not to imitate, possibly because of his ambivalence toward his own Maecenas, the first viscount of Bolingbroke (Stack 244-74; see also 226, 236-43). Why, Wheatley's speaker wants to know, has the Roman comic dramatist Terence "alone of Afric's sable race" had his name inscribed "in the rolls of Fame"? Why, when she, like the great epic poets, has a soul that burns to "mount and ride upon the wind," must she "sit, and mourn a grov'ling mind" (11)?
As a slave, Wheatley was compelled to placate her superiors in ways that Pope was not. Nevertheless, she uses "To Macenas" to express her frustration with her race-based subordination-a subordination whose constitutive inferiority she refuses to internalize. Furthermore, by placing "To Mecenas" first in her book Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, Wheatley sets all that follows within the framework of the ode's complaint (Watson 115-16). I address two aspects of this complaint: her rage at the limitations slavery imposed on her and her commitment to a vocation from whose full practice she felt barred. In insisting throughout her oeuvre on her paradoxical identity as an "Afric muse" (97, 117, 143) and in stressing the peculiar spiritual and epistemic authority of this oxymoronic identity, Wheatley sought to legitimize herself as a poet in a culture that refused to grant her legitimacy on the basis of her talent and accomplishments alone. Without ceding her abjection in any way, she sought the right to participate freely in (Anglo-American) literary culture.
In the light of her African origins and slave status, not to mention her sex, Wheatley had an unusually rich education, most of which, according to her owner, John Wheatley, "her own curiosity led her to." By her own account, she was born in Gambia (144), described in eighteenth-century texts as an Edenically fertile, well-regulated area on the banks...