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Hang Le Summary for the article “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America or Something Like a Sonnet for Phillis Wheatley” of June Jordan. The article “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America or Something Like a Sonnet for Phillis Wheatley” by June Jordan talks about the first African American poet Phillis Wheatley and her poems. Jordan starts her article by wondering how a person from a country with much suffering can become a poet. However, Phillis Wheatley was the first one who did that incredible thing. Phillis went to America in 1761 when she was seven years old in a naked appearance to become a slave. Jordan then describes slave owners Suzannah and John Wheatley, who purchased Phillis. Jordan draws them as excellent and mindful people when they attend the auction. However, the author implies that they are not actually good people as they are experienced in buying slaves, and they feel joyful when they purchase new slaves. They finally decided to buy the naked seven-year-old girl and name her Phillis. Jordan considers that it is not natural because an African slave becomes the first Black poet in America as well as the second woman to be published here. The author states that Phillis changed Wheatley’s perspective by her intelligence and spirit. Susannah Wheatley taught Phillis how to read and gave her a classical education available to White Harvard men. All Phillis learned from Susannah was about the White’s life and perspective. Jordan then comments on Phillis’s first poem “To the University of Cambridge,” published when she was fourteen years old. Phillis believes that her poetry comes from a passion inside her, and she creates her style for her poems. When Phillis was sixteen-year-old, two more poems came out. One of them, “One Being Brought from Africa to America,” describes the

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situation that Africans are suffered. Also, Jordan illustrates that Phillis finds herself is more than a slave, but an angel. Next, her first poetry book, “Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral,” was published when she was eighteen. Jordan cites some of Phillis’s poems to talk about her works from this period. Her poems are composed of laments, the life of her friends, and even strangers. The author also reminds that Phillis’s poems involve the fantasy of the youth. Phillis is not hesitant to write about her passion for looking for freedom for her and other slaves. Besides that, Phillis focuses on her praise to the revolutionaries as her distinctive matter. She keeps using her words to write about liberty, against the dictatorial, and show confiding toward the American Revolution. Jordan next talks about the incidents that occurred to Phillis after Suzannah Wheatley passed away. Jordan wonders how Phillis’s life would be after she lost her White mother and her mother’s support. At the age of twenty-five, she got married to John Peters, who was Black and fought for the Black’s liberty. Together, they had three children, but they lost all of them. She continues putting her love in her poems with the hope that those poems would be published. In 1784 she died at the age of thirty-one. After the death of his wife, Peters wanted to get back his wife poets’ manuscript, but he failed. When Jordan worked as a judge of a writing contest, she realized that there was no mention of Black people and their lives. Therefore, she wanted to be like Phillis Wheatley and write about the life of Africans in American, no matter those poems got published or not. June Jordan finally confirms that even though the Black poetry might not get published, she and other Black poets still endure keeping Black poetry....