Wheatley had reason to be optimistic as she saw Boston Harbor from the water at the end of her second Atlantic crossing. Bell’s initial prepublication ads had stressed the Countess of Huntingdon’s support. The actual announcement for the book appearing in the London Chronicle three months later in early September stressed that she had recently been
conversed with by many of the principal Nobility and Gentry of this Country, who have been singularly distinguished for their learning and abilities, among whom was the Earl of Dartmouth and the late Lord Lyttelton, and others who unanimously expressed their approbation of her genius, and their amazement at the gifts with which infinite wisdom has furnished her.
A week later the testimonials and reviews spread over an entire page.
This high praise—it could hardly have been higher—was followed by very strong reviews in leading venues like the Gentleman’s Magazine. (The one major dissenting review did not appear until December in the Monthly Review.) Her book, coming on the next ship, was her property, the tangible expression of her freedom, and the source of future security. How could she realize that property as a guarantee of what emancipation could mean? Even as the book demonstrated that she had patrons, it also had to serve as her calling card in a bid for future support.
In both of the letters in which she described her emancipation with rather different emphases, to Wooster and to Thornton, she was looking, explicitly, for help. Her literary patronage and her continued, if legally free, status in a patriarchal household could not be separated.
Patronage had multiple meanings for an enslaved, young, colonial female poet. It made for strange bedfellows and perhaps stranger rhetoric. But it always had, for colonists as well as for her favorite classical, and neoclassical, poets—some of whom, like Horace and Pope, had more than a little to say about slavery. In her book, in the revisions she made while in London, the search for patronage became more than a thread. It became the story—one we can understand if we read her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral in their stitched and bound order, as a story. The Horatian patronage tale, in turn, helped Phillis Wheatley to argue, and some readers to understand, that the book’s publication was not really compatible with the continued enslavement of its author. By dealing both forthrightly and allegorically with patronage in a world of slaves and freed men and women, from the book’s very first, introductory verse, Wheatley made her book that much more effective as an argument against both slavery in general and her own enslavement in particular.
Inserted by her excited publisher into the advertisement, the name-dropping of the recently departed Lord Lyttelton at the head of those whom Wheatley had impressed spoke volumes because Lyttelton had bespoken volumes. Bell wanted more than financial backing: he wanted the endorsement of the foremost aristocratic patron of poets in mid-eighteenth-century Britain. Wheatley understood this strategy, and it shaped how she framed and edited her book. The fact that George Lyttelton died a few weeks after meeting Wheatley, before he could see more than her manuscript, should not obscure what this lordly patron tells us about Wheatley’s prospects and hopes. Bell must have understood that she had actually imitated Lord Lyttelton in such a creative way, in the opening poem of her book, as to make a meeting imperative as soon as she arrived in London, much as she had gotten to London by writing to and about the Countess of Huntingdon and Lord Dartmouth.
Lyttelton was no afterthought. Though largely forgotten today, in some ways he was a bigger fish to land than Huntingdon or even Dartmouth because he was someone who had won real, material support for poets: the kinds of sinecures and outright grants of money from the royal treasury or his friends’ pockets of which most poets could only dream. It’s a measure of Wheatley’s ambition and her needs that the first poem in her book can be read as an extended invitation to Lyttelton to consider her as another British genius to discover and support.
A patriot-poet in his youth who had been inspired and befriended by Alexander Pope, during the 1730s Lyttelton had gained favor as a literary “talent-spotter” for the Prince of Wales, who invested in the opposition to Prime Minister Robert Walpole. George Lyttelton mostly gave up writing poems when he turned evangelical and ascended to high political office, but he nurtured national treasures like James Thomson and Henry Fielding, continued to be anthologized, and stayed in the patronage game in very much the way that Bell’s ad suggested. London magazines called him “Maecenas,” after the Roman politician, poet, and patron of Virgil and Horace, so often that the nickname became “a source of embarrassment.” He showed particular interest in female writers and even made exceptions to his turn from poetry to history for certain female friends, as when he co-wrote Dialogues of the Dead (1760) with the salonist Elizabeth Montagu, and some verses to preface Elizabeth Carter’s Poems on Several Occasions (1762). Both Montagu and Carter were members of a literary coterie that sought to make merit, rather than sex or class, its guiding rationale. Lyttelton proposed support for English women writers, as opposed to French ones, as a patriotic duty. By 1770, aspiring writers like Wheatley went to Lyttelton to ask him to subscribe for their books. His name on a list could by itself help sell a book.
Supporting poets was a way to not only participate in literary life but also gain and retain a reputation for discernment and virtue. In the new style of midcentury England, patrons raised up brilliant commoners to show how much they themselves deserved their nobility and wealth. After the death of his neighbor the poet William Shenstone in 1763, Lyttelton had taken up the cause of their mutual friend “the poetical shoemaker” James Woodhouse. The shoemaker’s first bid for recognition had been an elegy asking for access to Shenstone’s famous gardens at his estate, the Leasowes, which Shenstone had festooned with verse epitaphs in an ultimate literalization of the pastoral tradition by which walking, reading, writing, and working become all the same thing. Shenstone himself had made a recurrent theme of poets’ poverty and their need for patrons and a rural retreat: “Ye sons of Wealth! Protect the Muses’ train; / From winds protect them, and with food supply.” Woodhouse dedicated his revised Poems on Several Occasions (1766) to Lyttelton and filled it with his elegies to Shenstone, his own former “Maecenas.”
These patronage relations did not always work out, at least in the sense of creating careers or livelihoods for the ordinary men and women celebrated as natural geniuses by aristocrats. But sometimes they functioned in the shorter term as genuine artistic collaborations. Patronage remained an important part of British literary culture not only because of the economics of publication but also because of how, in a deeply hierarchical society, the very existence of patronized “found” poets, who were fed books and friends as well as money in order to produce more neat little leather-bound volumes, helped readers and writers think about what poems and poets were and what they were for. Patronage as a kind of friendship itself became a common subject of poems. The same issue of the Gentleman’s Magazine that reviewed Wheatley’s book also carried an elegy on the great patron Lyttelton’s sudden death on August 22: “To raise poor Merit from his lowly cell / And cheer his heart, from penury set free / Oh cans’t thou blame, O Woodhouse, if I tell / That Lyttelton, kind friend, did this for thee?”
Patrons like Lyttelton sought to balance the genius in their found protégés with the demands of classical learning by making themselves the judges of when education or taste was sadly lacking and when talent triumphed over status. Late-eighteenth-century writers expressed the tensions in the patronage system through riffs on ancient Greek and Roman poets, ruminations on fame, odes to rustic retirement, and meditations on gratitude to the great and the generous. After all, the notion that the ancients had excelled, more than the moderns, at poetry was often attributed to the lordly cash bequests and sinecures that, it seemed, the increasingly professional, metropolitan, and often impoverished class of English authors had lost. So many London writers who hailed originally from the provinces, like Oliver Goldsmith and Samuel Johnson, made their reputation with poems but their living (or not) with prose that they themselves derided as hackwork. As he tried to make it in the marketplace, Johnson mocked Lyttelton’s taste and pretensions, in part because he knew all too well that only a very few would gain lasting “preferment.”
When Wheatley decided to begin her Poems with a direct address, “To Maecenas,” precisely as Horace began his books of Odes, his Epodes, his Satires, and his Epistles, she didn’t have to tell readers why she would imitate and elaborate on the most self-conscious and slave-conscious of poets, the one who addressed matters of patronage and literary ambition so artfully, so directly, and so often. She could be direct through indirection, through Horace:
To Maecenas
MAECENAS, you, beneath the myrtle shade,
Read o’er what poets sung, and shepherds play’d.
What felt those poets but you feel the same?
Does not your soul possess the sacred flame?
Their noble strains your equal genius shares
In softer language, and diviner airs.
The link to ancients and possible patrons through previous generations of admirers and imitators can be made another way, through an explicit imitation. Compare young George Lyttelton’s appeal to Pope, from 1732, republished in 1758 in what became the most popular anthology of the eighteenth century, Robert Dodsley’s Collection of Poems in Six Volumes by Several Hands:
POPE! to whose reed beneath the beachen shade,
The nymphs of Thames a pleas’d attention paid;
While yet thy Muse, content with humbler praise,
Warbled in Windsor’s Grove her sylvan lays;
Though now sublimely born on Homer’s wing,
Of glorious wars, and godlike chiefs she sing;
Wilt thou with me re-visit once again,
The chrystal fountain, and the flow’ry plain?
Wilt thou indulgent hear my verse relate,
The various changes of a lover’s state;
And while each turn of passion I pursue,
Ask thy own heart if what I tell be true?
Lyttelton’s exchange with Pope is clearly a model. Yet hers must be different, for Lyttelton was not only an aspiring poet but also Pope’s social superior, and a man. He could joke about the London women who swooned for Homer’s champion because he had actually walked and recited with him. Lyttelton hadn’t needed a modern Maecenas so much as a literary mentor and friend.
Wheatley’s imagined Maecenas is an “equal genius,” but he isn’t a poet: he’s a lover of poets, a victor who might share his reward (myrtle and shade). Possibly, with “diviner airs,” he’s more religious. Any of Wheatley’s friends and most of her readers would believe themselves more pious than the ancients. Any of them might qualify as a person of great feeling. But it isn’t necessarily Mather Byles; Selina, Countess of Huntingdon; Susanna Wheatley; or even Lyttelton himself to whom Wheatley appeals. It’s all of them at once, and anyone who is willing to join in as a promoter or a sympathetic reader. It’s any and all possible future patrons who, like Maecenas, might themselves be remembered by association with the memorable writers of their time. And it’s any reader who has learned to expect a poet to abase herself, with earnest pledges and knowing winks, before a tradition she must imitate in order to demonstrate genius.
These dialogues about patrons, genius, and verse were often also a conversation with, and about, Alexander Pope, not coincidentally Wheatley’s favorite. As he wrote and quipped his way to stardom and a gentleman’s estate, mocking mere scribblers and court poets along the way, Pope had made a proper relation to the ancients and to patrons a theme of many of his poems. His creative translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey celebrated Homer’s natural genius and his moral sense, especially in the extensive commentary and explanation aimed at those who (like himself, Woodhouse, and Wheatley) had limited or no Greek and Latin. One reason Pope defended Homer was that he worried, as Dryden had, that his Roman exemplars Horace and Virgil had been “well-mannered court slaves” who wrote to validate a decadent emperor and please the rich and powerful. Ironically, in waging these battles, he could draw on some of those same Roman poets who, in their own republic’s fall and empire’s rise, found risks and opportunities—and wrote about them. Pope had written “imitations” of Horace’s satires and epistles, for example, that sought to demonstrate his own independence, moderation, and good taste. Two of them, in 1737 and 1738, praised his young friends George Lyttelton and William Murray (later Lord Mansfield) as epitomes of forthright, fearless political rectitude.
Horace became the most translated and revered of the Roman poets in eighteenth-century Anglo-America, even more than Virgil, because of his winning combination of morality, sophistication, and in-group humor. Much of this derived from his self-consciousness about the dilemmas of the life-hardened author among patrons and in the marketplace. In one of the first of the ample notes to his ubiquitous midcentury translation of Horace, Philip Francis called Horace’s “flattery” of his patron, Maecenas, “bold, yet delicate.” Eighteenth-century translators also make clear how often Horace referred to slaves and frankly addressed relations of all kinds with people whom later, twentieth-century translators would euphemize as “servants” and “lads.”
This was because slavery had been a major social question in Horace’s world, not to mention a matter of personal interest to him. Horace’s father had been a former slave, a fact his rivals or enemies apparently never let him forget. As the slaving Roman empire expanded, and vast lands were expropriated and given to soldiers for their service, freed persons came to constitute a high proportion of the populace in Rome. There they became a source of political instability. Neither citizens, landowners, nor slaves, freedmen were, in effect, the mainstay or even majority in the crowds that demagogues could use against the propertied senators who ran the republic. Horace himself had served as a soldier and a bureaucrat, and lost that status, but his patron, the sometime poet Maecenas, had prospered under Augustus. Maecenas eventually managed to secure a farm for Horace, from which he wrote ambivalently about his waning metropolitan relevance.
Whether in odes, satires, or verse epistles, a hallmark of Horace’s writing is his ironic wit about the fate and feelings of people like himself: masters in a slave society where some slaves became free. In several of his poems that begin “To Maecenas,” he praises his patron for overlooking his own origins in a “Race of Slaves.” In one satire, Horace has his slave Davus completely mock his master’s inability to be satisfied with what he has. Davus becomes the Stoic philosopher while the master and poet is reduced to a mere man of flesh, a slave in spirit. Two odes somewhat creepily praise a slave named Phillis, describing an infatuation that seems neither mutual nor appropriate. In the first poem in his first book of Epistles, addressed like so many of them to Maecenas, he describes himself as like a liberated gladiator (gladiators were trained slaves). In the tenth epistle, he’s a fugitive slave. The last describes his book itself as an aging object in the marketplace—like a manumitted, perhaps because no longer desirable, slave boy—flying to “Afric,” then Spain, flung about only to end up teaching letters to schoolboys, yet testifying still to the moderate virtues of the author, “a Free-man’s son” who, though he has slavery on the brain, is nevertheless clearly a master.
Horace is masterful, but as a writer he depicts himself as vulnerable, self-critical enough to compare himself to his own or anyone’s slave. He plays with his own and his readers’ feelings. When Wheatley begins by putting her Maecenas under Pope’s “myrtle shade,” where Lyttelton himself had got his start, she offers the kind of compliment she hoped to receive: “What felt those poets but you feel the same? / Does not your soul possess the sacred flame? / Their noble strains your equal genius shares / In softer language and diviner airs.” Like Pope she immediately renews the link to the ancients and makes them over in modern, even fashionable language: in her generation, the language of feeling, more than faintly pious, generalized to apply even to distant, unknown readers.
The stress on feeling, and the bond between poets and readers, as opposed to the differences between slaves and masters or Africans and Europeans, informs the next stanza, on Homer, the “Great Sire of verse,” and what it is like to read him. It’s thrilling. The reaction is “deep-felt.” The gods’ emotions are heard, seen, felt in the body as severe weather. The still-roiling debate about the ancients versus the moderns had seized upon Homer as possibly an example of primitive virtues (and, to Pope, as the most inventive writer of all time, the epitome of “genius”)—or, alternately to “modern” skeptics on the other side of the controversy, as limited artistically and morally by his archaic barbarisms. Wheatley admits that Homer appeals to emotions over reason, but suggests, like Homer’s translator Pope, that what “moderns” decry as the ancient habits, overwrought similes, and sheer brutal violence in Homer also give way to “gentler strains” that may even approach the “diviner airs” of her Maecenas: “When gentler strains demand thy graceful song, / The length’ning line moves languishing along. / When great Patroclus courts Achilles’ aid, / The grateful tribute of my tears is paid.” There is plenty of crying in Homer, especially in The Odyssey, a testament to the ways poetry for Homer “belongs to the defeated and the dead” (or as Pope put it, The Iliad is for kings and heroes, but The Odyssey is for everybody). Describing her readerly response—tears—as “tribute” also directly compares the devoted, perhaps naive but deeply affected, “grateful” reader to the characters in Homer who regularly—on pain of retribution—offer ritual tributes to the gods and are deeply moved by their evident powers. Poetry itself becomes an epic game, and Wheatley’s introductory verse epistle, it becomes clear, is a poem about epic poems’ writers and readers: a recovery of the sacred flame, at once modern and ancient.
Moving on to the great Roman poet Virgil, though, not coincidentally the poet of imperial renewal who most glorified power and who said much less than Homer or Horace about the enslaved, she introduces a note of insecurity, appropriate for the first-time author: “O could I rival thine and Virgil’s page, / Or claim the Muses with the Mantuan Sage … But here I sit, and mourn a grov’ling mind / That fain would mount, and ride upon the wind.” Maecenas, she says, isn’t subject to these insecurities. This is a common self-deprecating gesture, one indulged in by Horace occasionally (but usually about his status or human failings, not his poems), and by Mather Byles explicitly in his Poems on Several Occasions, in contemplation of Milton. Wheatley takes the humility much further: “But I less happy, cannot raise the song, / The fault’ring music dies upon my tongue.” Why would she be less happy? Because she is not quite yet a celebrated writer, at least not in the metropole. Or is there another reason that she’d have a “grov’ling,” downbeaten, submissive mind?
No sooner has Wheatley introduced this counterpoint, a nod to skepticism about her abilities or achievement and a hint at her enslaved status, than she pivots to a later Roman poet-playwright: “The happier Terence all the choir inspir’d, / His soul replenish’d, and his bosom fir’d.” In the poem, Terence’s name is followed by an asterisk which leads to a footnote at the bottom of the page that makes the reference clear: “He was an African by birth.”
But say, ye Muses, why this partial grace,
To one alone of Afric’s sable race;
From age to age transmitting thus his name,
With the first glory in the rolls of fame?
Terence is happier because he is blessed by the muses, and renowned (his plays were especially popular assigned reading for students of Latin in the eighteenth century). So Wheatley does not have to be the first African. There is no color bar in the classical canon. She needn’t falter—if she gets patronized.
There is still more to Wheatley’s identification with Terence. The standard biographies and commentaries made it clear that Terence had been a captive and enslaved. Like Wheatley, he had also been suspected of not having actually authored his verse. But then he had been freed as a result of his success. Terence is a precedent for emancipation as well as literary “grace.”
Perhaps even more important, Terence elaborated on the Greek, and later Roman, Plautine tradition of plays that revolve around slaves and masters, in which the slaves are often more clever and are sometimes rewarded with freedom. Much as Horace claimed to have revived Greek forms, and Pope to have rescued and reinvigorated Homer, Wheatley establishes herself as a worthy beneficiary of this Roman tradition of creative imitation and revival. She reminds readers that nothing could be more classical than poetry about slavery, than slaves making poetry, or slaves gaining freedom. Anyone claiming that African slaves couldn’t write English neoclassical verse had to be, simply, ignorant as well as unfeeling.
Having performed this end run around Virgil and racist condescension through Terence, she can return to the praise of the patron and name her ambitions:
Thy virtues, great Maecenas! shall be sung
In praise of him, from whom those virtues sprung:
While blooming wreaths around thy temple spread,
I’ll snatch a laurel from thine honour’d head,
While you indulgent smile upon the deed.
Instead of Wheatley herself being “snatched” from her father’s house, as she will describe later in the volume, or the infant Charles Eliot being “snatch’d” by God from his parents, she does the snatching herself. Byles, in his poem praising Milton as his muse, had imagined himself “boldly snatch[ing] / A spreading Branch from his immortal Laurels.” The literati, however, would have recognized not Byles’s provincial product from thirty years earlier but more likely a direct reference to a famous incident in which Elizabeth Carter, poet and translator, visited Alexander Pope’s gardens at Twickenham on the river Thames in 1738 when the poet was absent and dared to take a laurel sprig for herself. Was Carter’s bold symbolic gesture itself a riff on the famous “rape of the lock,” the curl snipped from a woman that Pope had satirized as a mock-epic battle? Carter’s twig led to a prolonged series of epigrammatic commentaries upon the deed by everyone from Samuel Johnson to Stephen Duck, and a very careful response by Carter, initiating a tradition of English women writers—and others like Woodhouse—addressing Pope, Shenstone, and other poet-patrons through meditations on their semipublic, proprietary gardens as metaphors for the literary public.
So in “To Maecenas” we again come full circle, to the occasion of publication: Wheatley’s London visit, what it portended, and the role of the patrons in determining how she would be read and more, in a flurry of references that begin with London’s great river Thames and proceed to link her favorite images to come in Poems—sun, water—to an idealized reader, listener, and defender. Her book may be called Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, but its first subject is Wheatley herself—Wheatley in transition from slavery to freedom, from attic scribbling to occasional publication and local fame to bookmaking and a name in the republic of letters. Coinciding with her long ship passage from Boston, when she likely wrote the poem, the ambiguous, allegorical identity of Maecenas seems deliberate and appropriate. She is traveling as much away from the pious Susanna as she is floating to any particular patron like Lady Huntingdon or Lord Lyttelton. She hopes to be heard and defended, but not just by one: by many.