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|  |  |  |  | The Heath Anthology of
American Literature, Fifth Edition
Paul Lauter, General Editor
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Anne Bradstreet (1612?-1672)
Anne Dudley Bradstreet is among the best known of early North
American poets, the first in the British colonies to have a book of poetry
published. She was born in England to Dorothy Yorke, whom Cotton Mather
described as “a gentlewoman whose extract and estate were considerable,” and
Thomas Dudley, steward to the Earl of Lincoln at Sempringham. As a child she
had access to private tutors and the Earl’s library, a circumstance that
allowed her educational opportunities unusual for women of her time. Her family
was part of the nonconformist group of Puritans actively planning for the
settlement of Massachusetts Bay Colony. In 1628, Anne Dudley married Simon
Bradstreet (also nonconformist), and in 1630 (with Winthrop’s group) she
arrived with her husband and parents in Massachusetts. Many years later she
wrote to her children of her first impressions of North America, where she
“found a new world and new manners, at which [her] heart rose. But after [she]
was convinced it was the way of God, [she] submitted to it and joined to the
church at Boston.”
The Bradstreets soon
left Boston for Newtown (now Cambridge), then Ipswich, and after 1644 they
moved to North Andover, where Bradstreet remained until her death in 1672.
While her husband and her father began long careers in public service to the
new colony, she raised eight children and wrote poetry. The Tenth Muse
Lately Sprung Up in America was published in London in 1650 at the
insistence of John Woodbridge, Bradstreet’s brother-in-law. The poems had
evidently circulated among various members of Bradstreet’s family. Taking a
manuscript copy to London, Woodbridge inserted a preface to assure readers of
the book’s authenticity:
...the
worst effect of his [the reader’s] reading will be unbelief, which will make
him question whether it be a woman’s work, and ask, is it possible? If any do,
take this as an answer from him that dares avow it; it is the work of a woman,
honored, and esteemed where she lives, for her gracious demeanor, her eminent
parts, her pious conversation, her courteous disposition, her exact diligence
in her place, and discreet managing of her family occasions, and more than so,
these poems are the fruit but of some few hours, curtailed from her sleep and
other refreshments.
Woodbridge’s care to point out that Bradstreet’s poems were not
written in neglect of family duties says much about Renaissance suspicions
regarding literary women.
The 1650 edition of Bradstreet’s poems contains
her early conventional verse: quaternions, elegies, and dialogues that reveal
more about the literary influences upon her writing (Quarles, DuBartas,
Sylvester, Sidney, Spenser, Thomas Dudley) than about her responses to a new
environment. Despite opposition from “carping tongues” who said her “hand a
needle better fits” than a pen, Bradstreet continued to write. A Boston edition
of her poems appeared posthumously in 1678, with a substantial quantity of new
material, much of it her finest work.
This later work, from
which most of the selections included here are taken, develops from the
conventional public verse of the first edition to more private themes of
family, love, nature, sorrow, faith, and resignation. However varied the
subject matter, Bradstreet’s poetry consistently reflects the Puritan spiritual
and communal vision that informed her life. Further, the assertiveness about
women’s abilities in public pieces such as “The Prologue” grows into an
uninhibited use of images drawn from women’s experiences, particularly her own.
In her mature poems, as in the prose meditations she left to her children,
Bradstreet “avoided encroaching upon other’s conceptions, because [she] would
leave [them] nothing but [her] own.” The poet’s voice becomes distinct and
individual, revealing tensions between conventional literary subject matter and
her own experience, between rebellion against and acquiescence to her frontier
circumstances, between her love of this world and her concern for the afterlife
of Puritan doctrine. While Bradstreet’s didactic motives frequently remain,
they become less overt. She intends no moralizing in verse, but simply to react
to her own experiences. With those personal reactions, she occasionally makes
the Puritan aesthetic within which she worked satisfy a larger aesthetic, one
more accessible to modern readers. As the first widely recognized woman poet in
a North American literature not known for its attention to women writers, Anne
Bradstreet is a model for future generations.
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Pattie Cowell
Colorado State University
| Texts
In the Heath Anthology
In Honour of Queen Elizabeth
(1643)
The Prologue [To Her Book]
(1650)
Upon the Burning of Our House July 10th, 1666
(1666)
A Letter to Her Husband, Absent Upon Public Employment
(1678)
Before the Birth of One of Her Children
(1678)
In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet, Who Deceased August, 1665, Being a Year and Half Old
(1678)
On My Dear Grandchild Simon Bradstreet, Who Died on 16 November, 1669, Being but a Month, and One Day Old
(1678)
The Author to Her Book
(1678)
The Flesh and the Spirit
(1678)
To Her Father with Some Verses
(1678)
To My Dear and Loving Husband
(1678)
To My Dear Children
(1867)
Other Works
The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America
(1650)
from Meditations Divine and Moral
(1678)
Several Poems Compiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning
(1678)
| Cultural Objects
Puritan Gravestones and Attitudes Toward Death
Would you like to add a Cultural Object?
| Pedagogy
There are no pedagogical assignments or approaches for this author.
| Links
"A Dialogue between Old England and New" (1630)
(http://history.hanover.edu/texts/braddial.html)
Excerpted from Old South Leaflets, vol. 7, and offered by the Hanover Historical Texts Project.
"Let's save the last touchstone of Anne Bradstreet"
(http://www.bostonphoenix.com/alt1/archive/books/reviews/04-97/BRADSTREET.html)
An article about the status of Bradstreet's material legacy (grave, home).
Anne Bradstreet: Selected Bibliography
(http://www.gonzaga.edu/faculty/campbell/enl310/bradbib.htm)
Extensive list of secondary resources.
Selected Poetry of Anne Bradstreet
(http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/rp/authors/abrad.html)
11 poems available for reading online.
| Secondary Sources
Pattie Cowell and Ann Stanford, eds., Critical Essays on Anne Bradstreet, 1983
Raymond A. Craig, A Concordance to the Complete Works of Anne Bradstreet, 2000
Wendy Martin, An American Triptych: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich, 1984
Rosamond Rosenmeier, Anne Bradstreet Revisited, 1991
Ann Stanford, Anne Bradstreet: The Worldly Puritan, 1974
Elizabeth Wade White, Anne Bradstreet: The Tenth Muse, 1971
(Representative Poetry Online) (Women Writer's Project)
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