The Age of Phillis and Collage — The Age of Phillis (Roundtable)

Abstract

As I told our group at one of the first meetings, I was approaching Jeffers’s poems as someone who had taught Wheatley Peters to undergraduates, but without much suc-cess. Wheatley Peters seemed to cause (I seemed to cause) a mix of discomfort and strained, dutiful attention in my “diverse” classes featuring mostly white authors. Students sometimes expressed frustration, too, at the disconnect between the tragedies, losses, and dis-placements summarized in the biographies and the formal constructions and tone of the po-etry. My attempts to provide context also fell flat. The parallels to Pope and the bare bio-graphical summaries did not help. Introducing responses to her from poets like Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Movement made things even less comfortable, because I had not made any connections between those poets, their situations, and their poetics in our class.