Phillis demonstrated an extraordinary degree of agency in the creation and distribution of her writings. Her letter to Whitefield’s patron, the Countess of Huntingdon, reflects her under-appreciated skill as a rhetorician in prose. She had written enough poems by early 1772 to propose publishing a book, which appeared in London in 1773 as Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Phillis spent six weeks in London to help promote the upcoming publication of her Poems. There she met Benjamin Franklin, among other socially and politically prominent men and women. The elaborate format of her Poems would have been remarkable even for a well-known author. The nature of the “critical examination” Phillis supposedly underwent remains disputed. Poems demonstrates Phillis’s skills in a variety of poetic forms. The year 1773 was pivotal in Phillis’s professional and personal lives. Her future looked promising.