Anne Bradstreet

Who Was Anne Bradstreet?

Anne Bradstreet was the first published poet in American literary history and one of the finest lyric poets of the colonial era — a Puritan woman whose verse navigated the competing demands of theological orthodoxy, domestic life, and genuine literary ambition with a skill and grace that have only recently been fully appreciated. Born in Northampton, England, she emigrated to Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 with her husband Simon Bradstreet and her father Thomas Dudley, both of whom would serve as governors of the colony. She raised eight children in the frontier conditions of early New England and wrote her poetry in the margins of a life organized around faith, family, and survival.

Her first collection, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650), was published in London without her knowledge by her brother-in-law — the first book of poetry written in the American colonies to be published. A second, revised edition, Several Poems (1678), appeared after her death and includes her finest work: the intimate domestic poems and the religious meditations that show her at her most honest and most moving.

Bradstreet’s poetry is significant for TLA because it represents the Puritan literary imagination at its most personal — a sensibility formed by Scripture and shaped by genuine theological struggle, finding in the domestic details of colonial life the materials of genuine lyric poetry.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America — 1650
• Several Poems Compiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning — 1678 — posthumous expanded edition
• To My Dear and Loving Husband — poem),
• Meditations Divine and Moral — prose aphorisms for her son