Thoroughly researched, beautifully rendered and cogently argued ... The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley is at once historical biography at its best, literary analysis at its sharpest and a subversive indictment of current political discourse questioning the relevance of Black life in our country’s history ... Through his close readings of Wheatley’s poetry, Waldstreicher manages to both render a life and conduct a séance with an 18th-century Black woman whose thoughts and feelings are hard to discern ... Revelatory.
Historian David Waldstreicher knows Wheatley's world ... He places Wheatley squarely in her times and shows how she navigated them. In that he succeeds, but his limitation — and that of the book — is that despite his best efforts, Wheatley as a person remains a cipher. The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley is not a cradle-to-grave biography, and a reader eager for details of this path-breaking writer's life will be frustrated ... Waldstreicher vividly re-creates Wheatley's Boston ... We don't know Phillis Wheatley — who she loved, how she struggled, how she navigated the daunting tasks of the everyday. If only a world class novelist would fill in the blanks. Wheatley's life is a story crying to be told.
In the absence of personal detail, Mr. Waldstreicher... expertly re-creates the complex political realities of pre-Revolutionary America. He is especially good at parsing the subtle messages that Wheatley concealed in her verse, explosive devices meant to detonate the racial politics of her time.
Wheatley emerges in these pages as a literary marvel. Waldstreicher’s comprehensive account is a monument to her prowess ... The greatest achievement of Waldstreicher’s biography is the portrayal of Wheatley as a serious poet ... His painstaking interpretations equal Wheatley’s own intentional verse, making it a joy to follow along as he unpacks her words and their arrangement ... But while thorough, the narrative is not immersive in the way of some other historical biographies swimming in setting and character sketches. One never feels as though the texture and verve of 18th-century Boston are fully captured ... Although Waldstreicher spends hundreds of pages meticulously portraying Wheatley in the richness of her context and tracing the intricacies of her intellectual contemporaries and antecedents, he chooses not to do the same for his own predecessors and interlocutors.
[Waldstreicher] offers a Phillis Wheatley ready for her TikTok close-up ... While it is not at all wrong to wonder whether the trauma of the poet’s Middle Passage sparked her drive to write so forcefully and so well, it is a question, not a certainty ... For Waldstreicher, bringing Wheatley to the present, to the modern reader, often paradoxically means talking about her poems in ways that would have been strange to Wheatley herself ... Wheatley’s poem is much richer than Waldstreicher seems to think it is.
The attention that Waldstreicher pays to the complexity of Wheatley’s identities as an African, a woman, and an enslaved person (among other identities) in his close readings of her poetry is sometimes missing from his discussion of her life ... Wheatley’s poetry comes into sharper focus, but Wheatley herself remains elusive.
