"Farewell to America" - photo 1
"Farewell to America" - photo 2

"Farewell to America"

Starting price
$ 7 000
Auction dateClassic
15.06.2023 10:00UTC -04:00
Auctioneer
CHRISTIE'S
Event location
USA, New York
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ID 967596
Lot 3 | "Farewell to America"
"Farewell to America"

Phillis Wheatley Peters, 1773

WHEATLEY PETERS, Phillis (c.1753-1784). "Farewell to America," printed in The London Chronicle, Vol. XXXIV, No. 2585, 1 July 1773.



In vain for me the Flow'rets rise

And show their gawdy pride,

While here beneath the Northern Skies

I mourn for Health deny'd



First London printing of one of Phillis Wheatley Peters's most famous poems. Printed just after her arrival and written days prior to her departure from Boston for London—her first trans-Atlantic crossing since her childhood experience of the Middle Passage—the poem is addressed to Susanna Wheatley. Although not able to meet with the king or her patron, the Countess of Huntingdon, Phillis was greeted in England as a literary genius and visited with many prominent people, including the Earl of Dartmouth (who gave her a copy of Don Quixote, now at the Schomburg Center), the Mayor of London (who gave her a copy of Paradise Lost, now at Harvard), and Benjamin Franklin—who in a letter wrote that he "offer’d her any Services I could do her."



In this issue, the poem is prefaced: "you have no doubt heard of Phillis the extraordinary negro girl here, who has by her own application, unassisted by others, cultivated her natural talents for poetry." Here in 60 lines in 15 stanzas, the poem would be shortened to 52 lines in the collected edition of her poems (see lot 1). It first appeared in the Boston Evening Post on 10 May of that year. Not in Robinson.



Folio (292 x 211mm). 8pp. Disbound.

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15.06.2023
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