Given my own interest in early African American literary culture, one of the things that strikes me about Wendy Raphael Roberts's Awakening Verse: The Poetics of Early American Evangelicalism is the chapter on Phillis Wheatley and the idea that revivalist poetics—or more precisely the rejection of such poetics—was a way to achieve respectability. Roberts argues that while Wheatley's poetry engages a revivalist aesthetic, directed at readers of the “plainest capacity,” she privileges more the “dignified style of Christian belletrism”—situated in classicism—aimed at a more elevated audience (21). Wheatley negotiates these two poetic styles, according to Roberts, as an effort to produce a kind of poetry that would honor her spiritual inclinations and also “align Africans with culture and intellect” (130). Roberts maintains, “The more accomplished and cultured Wheatley's verse, the more wonder she might produce in her white readers and the more she could chip away at the justifications for...

You do not currently have access to this content.