President of Harvard College, and to quotations from the crude and
lengthy elegy which he published in 1667; and print examples from the
execrable versified version of the Psalms made by the New England divines,
and yet deny a place to Phillis Wheatley.

Here are the opening lines from the elegy by Oakes, which is quoted from
in most of the books on American literature:

"Reader, I am no poet, but I grieve.
Behold here what that passion can do,
That forced a verse without Apollo's leave,
And whether the learned sisters would or no."

There was no need for Urian to admit what his handiwork declared. But this
from the versified Psalms is still worse, yet it is found in the books:

"The Lord's song sing can we? being
in stranger's land, then let
lose her skill my right hand if I
Jerusalem forget."

Anne Bradstreet preceded Phillis Wheatley by a little over twenty years.
She published her volume of poems, "The Tenth Muse," in 1750. Let us
strike a comparison between the two. Anne Bradstreet was a wealthy,
cultivated Puritan girl, the daughter of Thomas Dudley, Governor of Bay
Colony. Phillis, as we know, was a Negro slave girl born in Africa. Let us
take them both at their best and in the same vein. The following stanza is
from Anne's poem entitled "Contemplation":

"While musing thus with contemplation fed,
And thousand fancies buzzing in my brain,
The sweet tongued Philomel percht o'er my head,
And chanted forth a most melodious strain,
Which rapt me so with wonder and delight,
I judged my hearing better than my sight,
And wisht me wings with her awhile to take my flight."

And the following is from Phillis' poem entitled "Imagination":

"Imagination! who can sing thy force?
Or who describe the swiftness of thy course?
Soaring through air to find the bright abode,
The empyreal palace of the thundering God,
We on thy pinions can surpass the wind,
And leave the rolling universe behind,
From star to star the mental optics rove,
Measure the skies, and range the realms above,
There in one view we grasp the mighty whole,
Or with new worlds amaze the unbounded soul."

We do not think the black woman suffers much by comparison with the white.
Thomas Jefferson said of Phillis: "Religion has produced a Phillis
Wheatley, but it could not produce a poet; her poems are beneath
contempt." It is quite likely that Jefferson's c