On Imagination

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1773

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Literary Context: Narratives of Enslavement

Wheatley’s 1773 collection of poems in which “On Imagination” first appeared is cited historically as the first book published by an African American. It is important to note, however, that at the time of the publication, Wheatley was African, certainly, but hardly an American. From a legal standpoint, she was property owned by a prominent and wealthy New England family.

Narratives of enslavement, as a genre, emerged in the decades after Wheatley’s death as a critical expression of those brought to the US enslaved. These narratives, usually from the first-person point of view, typically described not only the difficult passage from their home culture but also the adjustment to the onerous conditions of their enslavement.

On its face, “On Imagination” does not seem to qualify. Wheatley does not detail her kidnapping, the grim two-month ocean passage from Africa, or even the limitations of her life with the Wheatleys. Yet at the emotional heart of her celebration of the imagination is the reality that the speaker can only be free in the radiant un-reality of her fancy.

That the conditions of her enslavement were much less severe than many recorded in other narratives—Wheatley was enslaved as a domestic servant in the house of a generous family who treated her with dignity—does not minimize the reality that Wheatley endured the indignities of enslavement. As a child, she was kidnapped from the life and world she knew and the family she loved, brought to the US in chains, and auctioned off on the docks of northern Boston. For more than 20 years, she toiled in the home of a family with legal documents that certified that she was their possession. As with many enslavement narratives, Wheatley’s poem testifies to the power of the dream of being free.

Cultural Context: The Philosophy of the Imagination

When Phillis Wheatley died in 1784, William Wordsworth, who would revolutionize the perception of the poet and upgrade the engine capacity of the imagination, was already 14. Wheatley was anchored in the poetics and prosody of Neoclassical British literature, particularly the works of Alexander Pope, John Milton, and John Dryden that she poured over in the Wheatley library. Yet Wheatley is a transitional figure. Her vision of the power of the imagination anticipates the arguments of the British Romantics some half a century after her death.

In the Neoclassical Era, poets decried the dangers of the imagination and regarded poets (and people) who gave in to the fancy as unhinged and irresponsible. The poet was to engage objectively and with careful judgment in the real world and then render their perceptions in poetic lines that were tight and disciplined. The imagination, while enticing, was, at best, playful daydreaming and, at worst, a mental illness.

For Wheatley, the imagination was a refuge. Its energy was expansive and limitless. The real-time world was the danger, and the tragedy was that the imagination was ultimately limited to the creation of artifacts that provide only momentary consolation to the poet and to those who engage in the poem.

In this perception, Wheatley anticipates not only the visionary works of the first great generation of Romantics, among them Wordsworth and William Blake, but also the uncompromising defiance of the American Transcendentalists: the quiet revolution of Emily Dickinson in her dazzling world of possibility there in her Amherst bedroom, the lavish mysticism of Irish lyric poet William Butler Yeats, and ultimately the angry spiritualism of the American Beats.