Events
- February 29, March 14 and April 18 - Susanna Wheatley attempts to get subscribers for a book of poems by her slave, Phillis Wheatley, by advertising in the Boston Censor, but the effort fails, largely because not enough readers believed that a black person had enough talent to write poetry.
- October 4 - Because many white people in colonial Massachusetts found it hard to believe that a black woman could have enough talent to write poetry, Phillis Wheatley was brought before a panel of eminent intellectuals in Boston who were gathered together to question her. The group included John Erving, Reverend Charles Chauncey, John Hancock, Thomas Hutchinson, the governor of Massachusetts, his lieutenant governor, Andrew Oliver, the Rev. Mather Byles, Joseph Green, the Rev. Samuel Cooper, James Bowdoin and Samuel Mather. They concluded she had in fact written the poems ascribed to her and signed an attestation which was added to the preface to her book Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral published in Aldgate, London in 1773 after printers in Boston refused to publish the text.
Read more about this topic: 1772 In Poetry
Famous quotes containing the word events:
“I have no time to read newspapers. If you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events which make the news transpire—thinner than the paper on which it is printed—then these things will fill the world for you; but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When the world was half a thousand years younger all events had much sharper outlines than now. The distance between sadness and joy, between good and bad fortune, seemed to be much greater than for us; every experience had that degree of directness and absoluteness which joy and sadness still have in the mind of a child”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“Whatever events in progress shall disgust men with cities, and infuse into them the passion for country life, and country pleasures, will render a service to the whole face of this continent, and will further the most poetic of all the occupations of real life, the bringing out by art the native but hidden graces of the landscape.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)