Phillis Wheatley’s Sarah Moorhead 345 PBSA 107:3 (2013): 345–354 Wendy Raphael Roberts (Humanities 333, 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany, NY 12222) is an Assistant Professor of English at the University at Albany, State University of New York. She has published on early modern and eighteenth-century religious poetry, as well as evangelical literature more broadly. Her book in progress rethinks the sources of British North American poetry through the everyday verse practices of eighteenth- century evangelicalism Phillis Wheatley’s Sarah Moorhead: An Initial Inquiry Wendy Raphael Roberts W hen “An Elegiac Poem” (1770) penned “By Phillis, A Negro Girl, In Boston” appeared in print, the work immediately became the most popular George Whitefield elegy in the colonies and England. The elegy catapulted Phillis Wheatley to transatlantic fame and linked her image with that of the first modern celebrity in America. The cu- riosity that drew thousands at a time to hear Whitefield and sustained interest over three decades of itinerancy suddenly mobilized around a slave girl speaking from the pulpit of a revival poem. It is this part of her captivating presence—the audacity of her flawless performance as a poet-minister—that I will speak to today. My paper will introduce two ideas. The first, which will more or less be taken for granted in my presentation, is that the eighteenth century saw the development of what I call revival poetry. Isaac Watts’s verse revolution that instigated a pervasive hymnal culture crucial to the development of evangelicalism also spurred a popular poetics that expanded the authority of the poet through the reimagined role of the poet-minister. This is the argument of my book in progress, “Redeeming Verse: The Poetics of Revivalism.” I will be talking about two poems in order to argue a second, smaller point: that Wheatley signaled her authority as a revival poet by employ- ing the poetic discourse developed around Whitefield and building on This content downloaded from 169.226.011.193 on January 05, 2017 06:23:06 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).