Ocean (Wheatley)

Ocean is a poem by the African American poet Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784).

The poem was probably intended for Wheatley's second volume of poetry, but it never appeared. Its existence became known in 1998 when a private seller put the manuscript up for auction at Christie's auction house . It was priced at $ 68,500. It was first published in 1999 in the journal Early American Literature .

content

The poem appears to have been written on board the sailor Wheatley returned to Massachusetts from England in the late summer of 1773. The poem begins with a conventional invocation of the muses. The second part, which makes up around half of the poem, is about the creation of the ocean. The poet indulges in a multitude of references to Greek mythology - Chaos, Neptune, Aiolos, Europe and so on - borrowing from Alexander Pope's Iliad translation. Wheatley had bought an eighteen-volume edition of Pope's work in London and was carrying it on board. The second half of the poem deals with an episode that apparently happened on board the ship: the captain (a cape. Calef, in the poem only as "C --- f") shot an eagle accompanying the ship, much to the displeasure of the Poet who now calls on the bird (called Iscarion ). Towards the end, the work noticeably loses its cohesion in terms of both content and form.

literature

• Julian Mason: Ocean: A New Poem by Phillis Wheatley. In: Early American Literature . Volume 34, 1999, Issue 1, pp. 78-83.