SOURCE: "Snatching a Laurel, Wearing a Mask: Phillis Wheatley's Literary Nationalism and the Problem of Style," Style, Vol. 27, No. 2, Summer, 1993, pp. 222-51.

In the following essay, Kendrick contests the common biographical and critical assessment that Wheatley was fully assimilated into white culture. He proposes that Wheatley's written works display a distinctive authorial voice that remained aware of her marginal status as a slave.

Any analysis of Phillis Wheatley's poetry must first reconcile the problems presented by her styl(us), for the central problem that Wheatley herself had to address was that of how to make an inscription that would not leave a clearly visible trace, one that would not clearly mark (and reveal) both the poet and her poetic agenda in a single stroke. Yet the mature poet must possess a signature styl(us) that both authorizes and authenticates his or her discourse, a means by which the...