Memory and Poetry > Phyllis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral
Phyllis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral is preoccupied with memory, which Wheatley’s poetry describes as an embodied material experience. In “Of Recollection,” Wheatley describes memory as “enthron’d within the human breast,” developing a bodily theory of memory that challenges popular Cartesian assertions that the mind and body were firmly divided.