| Popis: |
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reviews of Phillis Wheatley's first volume of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) describe her virtuosity for tracing the circumference of republican concerns. Those whose purposes it was to maintain the invisible center of a thriving Anglo-American economic culture celebrated her propriety in using an cient poetry; described her genius, valued as an "ornament" of Negro improvement; and noted her literary taste and piety.l The character of this "invisible center" is reflected in the debate between two of Wheat ley's most influential readers: George Washington and Thomas Jeffer son. For Jefferson, the publication of Poems on Various Subjects connected Wheatley's power to a cultural argument linking racism and progress. In an unabashedly critical judgment of Wheatley, Jefferson decried her assimilation by Yankee Protestantism and narrow mercantile interests. In his Notes on Vhginia (Query XIV), he wrote |
