Authority and Challenge: “Where Shall a Sov’reign Remedy Be Found?”

Abstract

This chapter reads Wheatley’s work in Miltonic context, focusing on early poems of evangelical authority and on the challenge that family grief and loss pose to that authority. It explores the prefatory pieces and first major grouping of verses in Wheatley’s 1773 POEMS, showing how the poet’s repeated invocation of Miltonic sources identifies her inaugural volume as an eighteenth-century American successor to Milton’s seventeenth-century poetical works. This chapter traces how Wheatley uses Milton to construct an African, American, Protestant, and female poetic voice of ministerial authority, and then explores how the public and especially family elegies that close this first group of poems challenge that authority, homing in on the important verse “On the Death of a young Gentleman” and the need for a “sov’reign … verse” able to remedy grief.