On Imagination

“On Imagination” is executed in a form that reveals the conflict at the emotional heart of Wheatley herself.

As with the iconic works of the Neoclassical era that the young Wheatley studied—most notably John Dryden, John Milton, and Alexander Pope—the poem, given its weighty subject matter, nothing less than the workings of the imagination itself, expresses its argument in the expected chiseled restraint of the heroic couplet. For most of the poem, the poet maintains decorum appropriate to the most respected poetry of her era by expressing the grandeur of the imagination in lines that are patterned and regular.

Although the stanza length varies, the heroic couplet maintains the poem’s formal coherence: pairs of lines with end rhymes most often executed in iambic pentameter, that is, lines with 10 syllables, or five two-beat units per line.

The exception is the closing stanza. As if to signal her resistance to the constraints and rules of this European model and express her yearning for freedom, the last stanza, while sculpted and measured, rejects the tight format inherited in the heroic couplet.

The rhymes are more scattered moving to the defiant closing couplet that dares not to

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