English Department and Leonard Lief Library Present a Reading and Discussion

Phillis Wheatley’s Miltonic Poetics

by Paula Loscocco

In 1773, Phillis Wheatley’s book Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, was published in London - making her the first published African-American woman poet.

Lehman Associate Professor of English Paula Loscocco’s new book, Phillis Wheatley’s Miltonic Poetics, responds to critical and disciplinary divisions and prejudices that have limited recognition of how Wheatley positions herself in her Revolution-era Poems as an American Milton.

Calling for new theorization of the methods of literary history and intertextual analysis, Phillis Wheatley’s Miltonic Poetics shows how Wheatley uses Milton to develop a sublime poetics whose assertions of imaginative power and fanciful freedom both envision an ideal Anglo-American nation and resist the coercions of the English transatlantic.

Paula Loscocco is editor of the three-volume Katherine Philips (1631/32-1664): Printed Works 1651-1729.