ABSTRACT
Phillis Wheatley was Sheridan's short-lived slave contemporary. She was bom somewhere in west Africa, around 1753, and brought to the new world in a ship that gave her her first name. Wheatley's poetry, with its interleaved accounts of claustrophobic containment and soaring transcontinental, indeed transgalactic flight, pioneers an imaginative manifesto of neoclassicism rewritten as transnationality. Wheatley inherited a checkered history, therefore, of black political articulation in America, one which demonstrated alternations of 'creolized' freedoms and severe and restrictive repressions. Flight is the metonym for freedom from slavery wherein Wheatley compresses an extremely complex transnational imagination. Flight and the imagery of transcendence are the crucial transnational matrix capturing and signifying Wheatley's experiences: capture and rupture from parents; middle passage and the social death of slavery; and adoption of western soil and culture. John C. Shields explains the flight motif in Wheatley's poem as an effect of the Sublime.
