Bradstreet, Anne

Bradstreet, Anne (c. 1612–1672), first published colonial American poet.The daughter of Dorothy Yorke and Thomas Dudley (a relative of Sir Philip Sidney), Anne was born in Northampton, England. At the age of sixteen, she married Simon Bradstreet, with whom she migrated to Massachusetts Bay in 1630. She bore eight children from 1633 to 1652 in the course of various resettlements, which ended in Andover, Massachusetts, where she lived for the last twenty‐seven years of her life. Without her knowledge, her brother‐in‐law Reverend John Woodbridge published the first edition of her verse in London as The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America (1650). Although this book was well received, Bradstreet felt ambivalent about it. Referring to it as an “ill‐formed offspring” taken “by friends less wise than true,” she deplored its imperfections. The publication of this book also appears to have occasioned a shift of artistic perception, for her subsequent poetry was more personal, original, experimental, and aesthetic than the exercises in the first edition. These later manuscript poems, with authorial revisions of the earlier printed verse, first appeared in the posthumous American edition Several Poems Compiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning (1678), which circulated widely in New England. Bradstreet's writings are sometimes informed by anxieties and discontents reflecting the restricted experience of colonial women. Contemplations, a sequence of thirty‐three stanzas emblematically configuring in its imagery and structure the cross‐like intersection of the temporal and the eternal, is arguably her best work.
See also Colonial Era; Literature: Colonial Era; Poetry.

Bibliography

Elizabeth Wade White , Anne Bradstreet: The Tenth Muse, 1971.
Anne Stanford , Anne Bradstreet: The Wordly Puritan, 1974.

William J. Scheick