Bradstreet, Anne [Dudley] c.(1612–72), daughter of Thomas Dudley, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was born in England, where at age 16 she married Simon Bradstreet. Two years later she left her comfortable English home to accompany her husband and father on the voyage of the
Arbella, settling first at Ipswich and later in North Andover, Mass. In the intervals of arduous household tasks and the care of her eight children, she found time for her literary interests, and in 1650 the first edition of her poems was published in England as
The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, the manuscript having been taken without her knowledge to a London publisher by an admiring brother‐in‐law. A posthumous second edition, with her own additions and corrections, was issued at Boston (1678), and a scholarly edition with some additional material was published in 1867. Mrs. Bradstreet's literary influences were obvious and acknowledged, for she was enamored of Quarles, Joshua Sylvester's translation of Du Bartas's
Divine Semaine, Spenser, and Sir Philip Sydney, although she reproaches the latter “miracle of wit” for his
Arcadia. Cotton Mather in the
Magnalia praised her highly, and Nathaniel Ward and others were equally lavish in the commendatory verses that prefaced her poetry. Her longer work consists of poetic discourses on the four elements, the four humors, the four ages of man, the four seasons, and
A Dialogue between Old England and New. The long, rhymed history,
The Four Monarchies, is based closely on Raleigh's
History of the World and treats the Persian, Greek, and Assyrian kingdoms, and the Roman Commonwealth. Her current fame is based rather on the later and shorter poems, in which she looked into her heart or out upon a real New England world, and was less dependent on stock poetic conventions. These include
The Flesh and the Spirit;
Contemplations, her nature poem on the transiency of man's life;
On the Burning of Her House;
To My Dear and Loving Husband, showing a moving use of the Donnean conceit;
On My Son's Return Out of England; and
The Author to Her Book. In the prose
Meditations Divine and Morall, written for her son, she composed simple, pithy, and sincere aphorisms, and in her short spiritual autobiography,
Religious Experiences, she also employs a sweet and simple prose. A moving biographical poem,
Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956), was written by John Berryman.
