“"No more snickering," Alice Walker counseled, at "the stiff, struggling, ambivalent lines," of the first published African-American poet, Phillis Wheatley. This kidnapped and enslaved Black woman wrote in the only materials available to her, in the only language in which she could write, and in the only cadence she knew as song. Of Wheatley, Walker also wrote: "It is not so much what she sang, as that she kept alive... the notion of song."”