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“Phillis Wheatley's First Effort”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Vincent Carretta
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Extract

Biographical Research at the Massachusetts Historical Society has Discovered in The 1773 Diary of Jeremy Belknap (1744-98), a Congregationalist clergyman, what is likely a text by Phillis Wheatley that predates any known before now. Belknap's diary is interleaved in Bickerstaff's Boston Almanack. For the Year of Our Lord, 1773. The last page includes a twenty-word poem in Belknap's hand that he identifies as “Phillis Wheatley's first Effort———-AD 1765. EE 11.” Belknap transcribes the text twice. The first version is in three lines, as if he could not decide whether it was prose or poetry, with an inserted two-word phrase placed above the first line and located by a caret below it:

Unto Salvation

MrsThacher's Son is gonê her Daughter too

so I conclude

They are both gone to be renewed

Type
Little-Known Documents
Information
PMLA , Volume 125 , Issue 3 , May 2010 , pp. 795 - 797
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2010

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References

Works Cited

Belknap, Jeremy. Diary. 1773. MS N-1827. Jeremy Belknap Papers, Diaries 1758-1798. Massachusetts Hist. Soc., Boston.Google Scholar
Shields, John C. “Phillis Wheatley and Mather Byles: A Study in Literary Relationships.” CLA Journal 23 (1980): 377–90. Print.Google Scholar