Early American Poetry: Selections from Bradstreet, Taylor, Dwight, Freneau, and Bryant

ONE Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672)

ONE Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672) LONDON READERS of 1650 must have been startled by the title of an otherwise unimposing volume: The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America. The name, perhaps, suggested such marvelous thoughts as the image of an Indian princess leaping from the forest with her poems stained by berry juice on birchbark or even the prospect of a wholly new art form, presided over by a successor to the nine Greek Muses. Sobering second thoughts would have come as they read the extended title which explained that these were "several poems compiled with great variety of wit and learning ... by a gentlewoman in New-England:~ Even the addendum left questions enough. What sort of "gentlewoman" inhabited the American colonies? How could she find time to write or nerve to publish? What, in any case, had "wit and learning" to do with any woman, with the possible exception of a few court ladies with unusual opportunities? And yet the poems clearly showed intellectual achievement; they showed respect for the Muses of lyric poetry, love poetry, epic, and history even though the author promptly disclaimed any pretenSion to "tenth Muse" status. Perhaps she would have been better pleased with a later and almost equally memorable title, "the mother of American poetry," but even that would no doubt have troubled her. She prided herself on her maternity and probably, in private, on her verse (referring to it as yet another child in "The Author to Her Book"), but she would hardly have described herself as an American or conceived of an enduring New World literary tradition. 3 4 Anne Bradstreet Anne Bradstreet had been born in England in 1612 and had grown up in the household of the Earl of Lincoln, whom her father, Thomas Dudley, served as steward. The Dudley children enjoyed the pleasures of the Lincolnshire countryside and benefited as well from the stimulation of the earl's library and the spiritual discipline of family prayer and Puritan preaching. They belonged to that reforming branch of the Church of England which tried to return to the simplicity of early Christianity by ridding the Anglican church of all vestiges of Roman Catholicism and by attempting to reconstruct the patterns of congregational church governance they found in the Bible. The young Dudleys also enjoyed the companionship of their father's well-educated, upright, and adventurous friends, including his one-time assistant, Simon Bradstreet, whom Anne married when she was sixteen and he twenty-five. Two years later, in 1630, in response to political pressures from the king against the Earl of Lincoln, persecution of Puritan ministers, and fear of coming disaster in their own country, the Dudleys and Bradstreets left their old life behind them and joined John Winthrop's party aboard the AThella for the hazardous journey to New England, where they would found the Massachusetts Bay colony with Winthrop as governor and Dudley his assistant. In time, Thomas Dudley would serve as governor also, and Simon Bradstreet, always active in colonial affairs, would become the last governor of Massachusetts Bay under its original charter. Life was challenging in America; Anne Bradstreet told her children years later that "I found a new world and new manners, at which my heart rose," but she resigned herself to God's will, joined the church at Boston, and accepted the changes of frontier life.1 There were many moves-from Salem, to Charlestown, to Cambridge, to IpSWich, and finally to what is now Andover, Massachusetts, where the burning of one house forced a move to yet another. After an extended and troubling period of childless1 . Bradstreet's autobiography may be found in "To My Dear Children," a grouping of prose and verse meditations and personal reminiscence, which offers an invaluable complement to her poems. See The Works of Anne Bradstreet, ed. Jeannine Hensley (Cambridge, Mass.: Bellmap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 24()"293. Introduction 5 ness, she became the mother of four boys and four girls, whose progress she recalled delightfully in "I had eight birds hatched in one nest" (1659). She devoted herself to ordering her successive households, caring for her husband and her children, and often handling household responsibilities alone for substantial periods while Simon Bradstreet traveled to Boston, Connecticut, and even England on colonial business. Despite recurring periods of illness, a problem since her childhood, she lived the life of a New England gentlewoman...