Britannica Sources used in this answer

How did Phillis Wheatley challenge proslavery arguments through her poetry?

Created from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles.

Phillis Wheatley's first book of poetry — African American literature Frontispiece and title page of *Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral* (1773) by Phillis Wheatley, the first Black woman to become a poet of note in the United States. The portrait on which the frontispiece's engraving is based is often attributed to Scipio Moorhead, an Black artist and writer who, like Wheatley, was enslaved and living in Boston.

Phillis Wheatley challenged proslavery arguments by using her poetry to demonstrate the intellectual and spiritual equality of Black people, directly countering the contention that African peoples were inherently inferior or incapable of artistic expression.1

By mastering complex classical genres, form, and meter, Wheatley provided a powerful rebuttal to the racist claim that a lack of serious literature proved the intellectual inadequacy of Black individuals. Her work, particularly the collection Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, utilized the Christian gospel of universal brotherhood to argue that Black people were spiritual equals to whites.1

In her well-known poem "On Being Brought from Africa to America," she explicitly rebuked those who viewed Black people with scorn, asserting that they could be "refin’d" and join the "angelic train". Furthermore, she occasionally employed the American struggle for independence as a subtle metaphor for racial freedom, positioning her literary talent as a testament to the humanity and potential of the enslaved.21