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Phillis Wheatley

Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753–1784) was taken from West Africa as a child, enslaved in the Wheatley household in Boston, and became the first African American woman to publish a book of poems. Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral appeared in London in 1773, after Boston gentlemen signed that a young enslaved woman could have written it. She addressed Washington; she wrote in the Augustan line. The couplets are accomplished. The fact of the volume is the thunder.

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