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:
“The system was breaking down. The one who had wandered alone past so many happenings and events began to feel, backing up along the primal vein that led to his center, the beginning of hiccup that would, if left to gather, explode the center to the extremities of life, the suburbs through which one makes one’s way to where the country is.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“If I have renounced the search of truth, if I have come into the port of some pretending dogmatism, some new church, some Schelling or Cousin, I have died to all use of these new events that are born out of prolific time into multitude of life every hour. I am as bankrupt to whom brilliant opportunities offer in vain. He has just foreclosed his freedom, tied his hands, locked himself up and given the key to another to keep.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.”
—William James (1842–1910)