To His Excellency General Washington

"Eloisa to Abelard" by Alexander Pope (1717)

Like Wheatley’s American epic, “To His Excellency General Washington,” in “Eloisa to Abelard,” Alexander Pope uses the neoclassical heroic couplet to recreate the high drama and tension of classical style. Just as Wheatley’s work is heavily influenced by Pope’s style, Pope worked within early Roman poet Ovid’s epistle form. Pope used the letter-in-verse style to structure his retelling of the famous medieval tragedy. In “Eloisa to Abelard,” the narrative intrigues and dramatic twists are much more of a focus than Wheatley’s talent for nonfiction epistles; however, both poems balance high drama and bombast typical of classical texts while teasing out nuanced themes and human truths.

"The Sleepers" by Walt Whitman (1855)

Nearly 100 years after Phillis Wheatley composed “To His Excellency General Washington,” Walt Whitman reimagined his own American poetry for the young nation, Leaves of Grass. Unlike Wheatley, Whitman goes to great lengths to leave behind the inherited forms of rhyme and meter in favor of an imagist view of the country. Taking aesthetic liberties, Whitman’s lines are long—spanning across the page and unbound by line breaks. Whitman’s experiments were an attempt to capture the grandeur of the nature’s deep forests and open vistas. In the section of Leaves of Grass commonly referred to as “The Sleepers,” Whitman’s speaker takes a spectral quality, moving from citizen to citizen, eventually embodying a slave watching in despair as his lover is taken down river to auction. In Whitman’s America, as in Wheatley’s, slavery remains the terrible stain on the nation.

"A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi" by Gwendolyn Brooks (1960)

Much of Gwendolyn Brooks’s work is known for its unflinching commentary on American society. Where Wheatley’s poem embraces classical forms to create a new American mythos, Brooks’s poetry resists inherited forms, relying on free verse and a subsequently starker portrait of American life. Composed following the brutal murder and lynching of Emmet Till at the age of 14 in Mississippi, “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi” re-examines the same tropes active in classical poetry from which Wheatley drew inspiration. Instead of honoring the medieval romances of poetic antiquity, Brooks’s poetry functions as a warning against the dangers of fantastic thinking—an interesting reversal on the neoclassical gesture. In 1950, Brooks became the first African American to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize and was named Poet Laureate of the United States in 1985.

"I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison" by Terrance Hayes (2018)

In “I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison,” Terrance Hayes matches Wheatley’s mix of rhetoric, artistry, and metrical prowess to update the vision of America that Wheatley chronicled in her address of the nation’s first president. Like Wheatley’s neoclassical leanings, Hayes’s poem works in a classical sonnet form (historically used to address a beloved), using its simple 14 lines to create scathing rebukes of the country’s racially charged hatred and moral failings. Like Wheatley’s eye for arresting images, Hayes creates surreal nightmare visions that evoke frustration—albeit through impossible constructions.