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Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672) was the first person in America, male or female, to have a volume of poems published. She herself wasn’t American and had been born in England, but she was among a group of early English settlers in Massachusetts in the 1630s.
Perhaps the most important aspect of Anne Bradstreet's poetic evolution is her increasing confidence in the validity of her personal experience as a source and subject of poetry. Much of the work in the 1650 edition of The Tenth Muse... suffers from being imitative and strained.
She is the first Puritan figure in American Literature and notable for her large corpus of poetry, as well as personal writings published posthumously. Born to a wealthy Puritan family in Northampton, England, Bradstreet was a well-read scholar especially affected by the works of Du Bartas.
Anne Bradstreet was one of the first poets to write English verse in the American colonies. 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,” written
Bradstreet’s most highly regarded work, a sequence of religious poems titled Contemplations, was not published until the middle of the nineteenth century. Bradstreet’s poetics belong to the Elizabethan literary tradition that includes Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney.
Nov 10, 2009 · In “To My Dear and Loving Husband,” Bradstreet persuasively presents her views on how to resolve the basic contradictions of Puritan faith—in other words, how to live in this world while keeping an eye on heaven. In the opening quatrain, her ability to reason, to construct an argument, commands center stage.
Contemplations. By Anne Bradstreet. 1. Sometime now past in the Autumnal Tide, When Phoebus wanted but one hour to bed, The trees all richly clad, yet void of pride, Were gilded o’re by his rich golden head. Their leaves and fruits seem’d painted but was true.