Anne Bradstreet
From Free net encyclopedia
Image:Bradstreet1.gif Anne Bradstreet (ca. 1612 – September 16 1672) was the first American woman writer and the first American poet to have her works published.
Bradstreet was born in Northampton, England. She was the daughter of Thomas Dudley and Dorothy (Yorke) Dudley. Her father was chief steward to the Earl of Lincoln, and she grew up in cultured circumstances. At the age of sixteen she married Simon Bradstreet. Both Anne's father and husband were later to serve as governors of the Massachusetts Bay Company. Anne and Simon, along with Anne's parents, immigrated to America aboard the "Arbella" during the "Great Migration" in 1630.
Bradstreet was an unusually well-educated woman for her time. This allowed her to express herself through poetry. She wrote about politics, history, medicine, and theology. Her personal library of books was said to have numbered over 800, many of which were destroyed when her home burned on July 12, 1666.
Much of Bradstreet's poetry is based on observation of the world around her, focusing heavily on domestic and religious themes. 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", which were written for her family and were not published until the mid-19th century.
In 1647 Bradstreet's brother-in-law, Rev. John Woodbridge, sailed to England, carrying her manuscript of poetry without her knowledge. Anne's first work was published in London as "The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America". The purpose of the publishing appears to have been an attempt by devout Puritain men (i.e. Thomas Dudley, Simon Bradstreet, John Woodbridge) to show that a godly and educated woman could elevate the position held by a wife and mother, without necessarily placing her in competition with men.
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, 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.
In 1678 her self-revised version "Several Poems Compiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning" was posthumously published in America.
Bradstreet died in 1672, in Andover, Massachusetts. While the precise location of her grave is uncertain, she may have been buried next to her husband in the Old Burying Point in Salem, Massachusetts, or in the Old Burying Ground on Academy Road in North Andover.