A Study Guide for Phyllis Wheatley's "An Hymn to the Evening"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Phyllis Wheatley's "An Hymn to the Evening," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535818209

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An Hymn to the Evening

Phillis Wheatley

1773

Introduction

Phillis Wheatley's poem An Hymn to the Evening was published in 1773 in her only book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. The book was published in London after efforts to raise sufficient funding in Boston failed. Wheatley had been writing poems since she was twelve, and her first poem On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin was published in 1767. Wheatley began regularly publishing in the Boston newspapers. In 1770, she published the poem that brought her international fame, On the Death of the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield. Reverend Whitefield was a prominent evangelical preacher in New England and also the Countess of Huntingdon's personal chaplain. The Countess of Huntingdon was active in abolitionist affairs in England and provided the patronage needed for to publish Wheatley's book in 1773. She also brought Wheatley's poetry to a larger audience, including the French philosopher Voltaire, who, as Vincent Carretta notes in his introductory essay to Wheatley's Complete Writings wrote to a friend that Wheatley's very fine English verse disproved [the] contention that no black poets existed.

An Hymn to the Evening is one of three hymns that appear in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. The hymn was a common poetic form that poets used to draw a portrait of natural wonder and praise God as the cause. Although Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral consists primarily of elegies, it also contains several odes, as well as meditations on subjects such as imagination and virtue. Wheatley did write a second collection of poetry, but it was lost when she could not find a publisher and her husband sold the manuscript to pay his debts.

Author Biography

Wheatley was born in approximately 1753 in West Africa, probably in either present-day Ghana or Gambia. Taken by slave traders, she was brought to Boston in 1761 aboard the slave ship Phillis and was purchased by John Wheatley. Her name derives from the name of the slave ship and the surname of her owner. She is estimated to have been about seven or eight years old, because