To His Excellency General Washington

"Eloisa to Abelard" by Alexander Pope (1717)

Like Wheatley’s American epic, “To His Excellency General Washington,” in “Eloisa to Abelard,” Alexander Pope uses the neoclassical heroic couplet to recreate the high drama and tension of classical style. Just as Wheatley’s work is heavily influenced by Pope’s style, Pope worked within early Roman poet Ovid’s epistle form. Pope used the letter-in-verse style to structure his retelling of the famous medieval tragedy. In “Eloisa to Abelard,” the narrative intrigues and dramatic twists are much more of a focus than Wheatley’s talent for nonfiction epistles; however, both poems balance high drama and bombast typical of classical texts while teasing out nuanced themes and human truths.

"The Sleepers" by Walt Whitman (1855)

Nearly 100 years after Phillis Wheatley composed “To His Excellency General Washington,” Walt Whitman reimagined his own American poetry for the young nation, Leaves of Grass. Unlike Wheatley, Whitman goes to great lengths to leave behind the inherited forms of rhyme and meter in favor of an imagist view of the country. Taking aesthetic liberties, Whitman’s lines are long—spanning across the page and unbound by line breaks. Whitman’s experiments were an attempt to capture the grandeur of the nature’s deep forests and open vistas.