Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH COLONIAL LITERATURE
Despite this dependence, Bradstreet showed
independence of mind and spirit quite remarkable
for a woman of her era. She felt that the Bible
was not fullling the religious enlightenment
and transcendence she sought. In America, she
eventually saw rsthand, so to speak, the hand of
the God to whom she would devote herself. Even
as she fullled a woman’s “appointed” domestic
role and duties as wife and mother, Bradstreet
realized her individual voice and vision through
the poetry she wrote from her childhood on. Her
poetic ambitions appear through the complex
poetic forms in which she wrote, including
rhymed discourses and “Quaternions,” or fourpart
poems focusing on four topics of fours: the
four elements, the four humors, the four ages of
man, and the four seasons. Her ambitions show Image 2.6 | “The Tenth Muse”
Author | Anne Bradstreet
also in the poets whose work she emulated or
Source | Wikimedia Commons
learned from, poets including Sir Philip Sidney
License | Public Domain
(1554–1586), Edmund Spenser (1552–1599),
and John Donne (1572–1631).
Her ambition may not have been to publish her work. It was due to another
male relative, her brother-in-law John Woodbridge (1613–1696), that her
manuscript of poems was published. He brought the manuscript with him to
London where it was published in 1651 as The Tenth Muse Lately Spring Up in
America, By a Gentlewoman of Those Parts. The rst book of poetry published by
an American, it gained strong notice in England and Europe.
Image 2.7 | Etching of a House from The Works
of Anne Bradstreet in Prose and Verse
Artist | Unknown
Source | Wikimedia Commons
License | Public Domain
These poems use allusion and erudition
to characterize Bradstreet’s
unique, “womanly” voice. Poems
later added to this book, some
after her death, augment this voice
through their simplicity and their
attention to the concrete details
of daily life. With personal lyricism,
these poems give voice to
Bradstreet’s meditations on God and
God’s trials—such as her own illness,
the burning of her house, and the
deaths of grandchildren—as well as
God’s gifts, such as marital love.
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