"To His Excellency General Washington" is included in The Collected Poems of Phillis Wheatley (1989), available from Oxford University Press.

Another influential poem about a Revolutionary War hero is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Paul Revere's Ride," which can be found in many poetry anthologies, as well as in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Poems and Other Writings (2000) from the Library of America.

African-American poet Robert Hayden expresses his mixed emotions about Wheatley in his poem entitled "Letter for Phillis Wheatley," which can be found in his Collected Poems (1997).

To find out more about what Washington was like, students can go to the words of the man himself. The Library of America has an authoritative collection of his letters and speeches in Washington: Writings, first published in 1997.

Lerone Bennett Jr.'s book Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America (1993) barely mentions Wheatley, but, unlike...