Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672)

One of the most notable characteristics of American literature is the distinction of its women writers, particularly in poetry. The first accomplished poet on American soil, of either sex, was Anne Bradstreet.

Educated by tutors in her native England, she was immersed in the Bible. She also had access to the large library of the Earl of Lincoln, who employed her father. Thomas Dudley, as his estate manager. Shakespeare was still alive when Anne was born and, like many budding poets, she found in Shakespeare, and in other great poets of England, sources of inspiration and technique that would one day run like threads of gold through the fabric of her own work.

However, what most determined the course of her life was not a poetic influence but a religious one. Anne Bradstreet was born into a family of Puritans. Accepting their reformist views as naturally as most children accept the religious teachings of a parent, Anne married, at the age of sixteen, a well-educated and zealous young Puritan by the name of Simon Bradstreet. Two years later, in 1630, Simon brought his wife across the Atlantic to the part of New England around Salem that would become known as the Massachusetts Bay Colony. There, while her husband rose to prominence (he became a governor of the colony), Anne Bradstreet kept house in Cambridgeport and Ipswich. She raised four boys and four girls and, without seeking an audience or publication, found the time to write poems. These might never have come to light had it not been for John Woodbridge, her brother-in-law and a minister in Andover. He went to England in 1647 and there, in 1650, without consulting the author herself, published her poems under the title The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America * * * By a Gentlewoman of Those Parts.

In one stroke, an obscure housewife from the meadows of New England was placed among the nine Muses of art and learning sacred to the ancient Greeks. In itself, this was embarrassing enough. But in the middle of the seventeenth century, the real arrogance was that a woman would aspire to a place among the august company of established male poets. Conscious of the boldness she might be charged with, Bradstreet was resigned to criticism. But The Tenth Muse fared better with critics and the public than she expected, and she felt encouraged to write for the rest of her life.

Today, Anne Bradstreet is remembered not for her elaborate earlier poems but for a few simple lyrics about the birth of children, the death of grandchildren, her love for her husband, her son's sailing to England, her own illnesses.

Literature of the South. In addition to the Puritans of New England, there was another literary tradition in the New World. This literature came from the Southern planters, a group of people whose background and. social views varied considerably from those of the Puritans.

Many reasons can be suggested for the differences. One factor may have been climate. The Southern climate was kinder; it was warm and soft and the land was enormously fertile. The Northern climate was harsh: springs and summers were brief and winters were long and cold. Even the land in New England was hard; its outcroppings of granite and bedrock broke plows and made farming difficult.

But economic and religious factors were even more important the land holdings in New England were small for the most part, many colonists were small farmers or tradesmen who lived in villages and owned very little land. But the Southern planter was an aristocrat and the virtual ruler of a huge territory. He maintained this area by keeping a large number of slaves (though there were slaves in New England in those days too).

In religion, most Southerners belonged to the Church of England. In general, they were much more interested in the outside world—in literature, music, art, politics, and the world of nature— than they were in the scrupulous examination of their own souls. But the Puritans, who had rejected the established church, were constantly looking inward and questioning themselves. Where the Southerner saw the world as something to be conquered and enjoyed, the Puritan—who loved the world as much as anyone else did—feared that its beauties were lures and sources of temptation.

The Southern planters shared the world view of the English Renaissance, with its emphasis on classical literature and the growing spirit of scientific inquiry. Thus, when the Southerners wrote about the New World, they were apt to write about it in traditional ways. Characteristically, the first purely literary work of the South was a translation of a Latin classic, Ovid's collection of myths called the Metamorphoses. Even a work as original as The Sotweed Factor (1708), Ebenezer Cooke's humorous tale of a tobacco merchant, was written in bouncy couplets, the popular form for satirical verse in England.

In many ways, William Byrd is a representative figure for the Southern writers of the Colonial Period. Born in Virginia more than fifty years after the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth, Byrd was truly a Renaissance man in the New World. He translated Greek and Latin works, composed original poetry (mostly satiric verse), and wrote about mathematics and medicine.