Phillis Wheatley was only 12 years old when she first published her poems. Phillis Wheatley became well-known poet, and was not only was she the second published African-American poet nonetheless as she was the first published African-American woman. So the question is how this 12 year old slave girl becomes so gifted in poetry and English writing when it was not okay for slaves to learn how to read and write.
In 1971, when Phillis was about eight years old, when she was captured and taken away from her parents, soon after that she was bought as a slave. “The child was a victim of the largest involuntary human migration in history. She had been kidnapped from her family in Africa and forced to spend up to two months crossing the Atlantic. She now faced land again at last (Carretta, 2011)”. “Phillis reached Boston in 1761 at the peak of the annual season for selling imported slaves (Robert). There has been a great deal of confusion about when and by whom the future Phillis Wheatley was first sold in Boston. “The advertisement for the human cargo that included the future Phillis Wheatley first appeared in the Boston Gazette on 13 July 1761, repeating almost verbatim the advertisement from the year before …show more content…
A lot of Phillis poems are canon composed of elegies, she wrote about deaths of noted persons, friends, or even strangers whose loved ones hired the poet. The poems that best establish her skills are most often questioned by critics those that employ classical themes as well as techniques. “In Phillis epyllion "Niobe in Distress for Her Children Slain by Apollo, from Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book VI, and from a "View of the Painting of Mr. Richard Wilson," she not only translates Ovid but adds her own beautiful lines to extend the dramatic imagery”(poetry foundation). In "To Maecenas" she transforms Horace's ode into a celebration of