Anne Bradstreet (ca.1612-72)
Introduction
b. c. 1612, Northampton, Northamptonshire?, Eng.
d. Sept. 16, 1672, Andover, Massachusetts Bay Colony [U.S.]
one of the first poets to write English verse in the American colonies. Long considered
primarily of historical interest, she won critical acceptance in the 20th century as a
writer of enduring verse, particularly for her sequence of religious poems
"Contemplations," written for her family and not published until the mid-19th century.
Her father, Thomas Dudley, was chief steward to the Puritan Earl of Lincoln, and
she grew up in cultured circumstances. She married Simon Bradstreet, another prot?g?
of the earl's, when she was 16, and two years later she, her husband, and her parents
sailed with other Puritans to settle on Massachusetts Bay.
She wrote her poems while rearing eight children, functioning as a hostess, and
performing other domestic duties. The Bradstreets moved frequently in the Massachusetts
colony, first to Cambridge, then to Ipswich, and then to Andover, which became their
permanent home. Bradstreet's brother-in-law, without her knowledge, took her
poems to England, where they were published as
The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650). The first American edition of
The Tenth Muse was published in revised and expanded form as
Several Poems Compiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning (1678).
Most of the poems in the first edition are long and rather dully imitative works based on
the standard poetic conventions of the time, but the last two poems--"Of the vanity of
all worldly creatures" and "David's Lamentation for Saul and Jonathan"--
are individual and genuine in their recapitulation of her own feelings.
Her later poems, written for her family, show her spiritual growth as she came fully to
accept the Puritan creed. She also wrote more personal poems of considerable beauty,
treating in them such subjects as her thoughts before childbirth and her response to
the death of a grandchild. These shorter poems benefit from their lack of imitation and
didacticism. Her prose works include "Meditations," a collection of succinct and pithy
aphorisms. A scholarly edition of her work was edited by John Harvard Ellis in 1867.
In 1956 the poet John Berryman paid tribute to her in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet,
a long poem which incorporates many phrases from her writings.
(Source: Encyclopedia Britannica)
