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Phillis Wheatley’s poems are often read as concerned first and foremost with the category of the human. But is this really how her poems think? Building on a growing body of work that foregrounds Wheatley’s ecological attunement, this talk will contend that Wheatley’s poetry conceives Earth as preceding and exceeding the human and its various relations. To prioritize questions of personhood in advance or at the expense of the planet is, for Wheatley, to cosmologize awry. Focusing in particular on Wheatley’s use of allusion—which tends to loom large in debates about her personhood as asserted in poetry—I consider how Wheatley’s poems model syncretic reading and writing as salvage work. They do so to assert a heterocosm wherein voice and planet alike resist abstraction into and as extractable resource.
Devin M. Garofalo is an assistant professor in the Department of Literature at UC San Diego and editor of Victorian Poetry. She is the author of Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Cosmologies of the Human: Worlds Unmanned (forthcoming from Oxford UP) and co-editor with Nathan K. Hensley of The Barbara Johnson Collective (forthcoming from Northwestern UP). Her work has appeared in diacritics, Victorian Literature and Culture, and the Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and Race, among other venues.