JANUARY 31st
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"However undeserving I may be of such encomium and panegyrick, the style and manner exhibit a striking proof of your great poetical Talents."
National Portrait Gallery
To Phillis Wheatley*
Cambridge, 28 February 1776
Mrs. Phillis,
Your favour of the 26th of October did not reach my hands ’till the middle of December. Time enough, you will say, to have given an answer ere this. Granted. But a variety of important occurrences, continually interposing to distract the mind and withdraw the attention, I hope will apologize for the delay, and plead my excuse for the seeming, but not real neglect.
I thank you most sincerely for your polite notice of me, in the elegant Lines you enclosed; and however undeserving I may be of such encomium and panegyrick, the style and manner exhibit a striking proof of your great poetical Talents. In honour of which, and as a tribute justly due to you, I would have published the Poem, had I not been apprehensive, that, while I only meant to give the World this new instance of your genius, I might have incurred the imputation of Vanity. This and nothing else, determined me not to give it place in the public Prints.
If you should ever come to Cambridge, or near Head Quarters, I shall be happy to see a person so favoured by the Muses, and to whom Nature has been so liberal and beneficent in her dispensations. I am, with great Respect, Your obedt humble servant,**
G:o Washington
Phillis Wheatley’s First Published Book
National Museum of African American History & Culture
* Phillis Wheatley (Peters) was transported to Boston from West Africa in 1761 and enslaved by John Wheatley and family; she was approximately 7 years old. She eventually became a celebrated poet in both England and the United States, and according to John C. Fitzpatrick was “treated more as an inmate of the family than as a slave.” At approximately age 20 she published her first book of poems (London, 1773 — see above). She was freed on 3 March 1774 and married John Peters, a free black American, on 1 April 1778. She died on 5 December 1784. — PF
** they would meet during this year (the poem appeared in the Pennsylvania Magazine, April 1776) — FO6
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