Anne BradstreetReseñas

need to reread the queen

Annie did include a few personal effects among her poems, but in general she’s not the “romantic” figure of Shakespeare (to say nothing of any Regency or Victorian writers), but is more of a strange and brooding Blake, although she is not like old W.B. a member of the new world, but of the old one. Historians’ niceties aside, I think we see Annie best if we see her as basically a product of the Middle Ages—she’s not a theologian, although she is quite pious, but in this sorta folk sense she is a medieval philosopher in verse. She writes of natural philosophy (medieval science) and medicine and normative developmental psychology and personality types, and traditional Western biographical and dynastic history and British and Boston medieval history and politics and rhymes of royalty. She also writes extensively on biblical themes and her own wisdom sayings, and reflections on nature and family, and death and sickness, and the nature of things. She’s all old-school intellectual and philosopher in verse.

It’s not like I had a huge encounter with Annie but she’s a serious writer and a smart woman and a real intellectual who wasn’t made out of stone, and again a woman in a time when not all girls were taught how to read, and even two hundred years later the guy who wrote the introduction to my digital facsimile edition wasn’t sure if she were a great joke or just great, but, you know.

She’s the philosopher with a rhyme for a forgotten world, you know, so that is something.

Beautiful expressions of faith in daily life.

Favourite: “To my dear and loving husband”.

This collection is worthwhile, especially, because of the historical poems that Bradstreet manages to intertwine poetic grace with a sense of wonder. There is where the heart of her work, at least to me, lies. The other poems vary in quality, generally diminishing in importance and style towards the latter part of the collection. Nevertheless, it was still worth reading.

3 stars.

The editor gives a moving Introduction: "In 1630, Anne Dudley Bradstreet was a passenger aboard John Winthrop's Arbella as it moved out of Southampton Waters to lead three other ships toward the New World." With her parents and new husband, the 18yr old Anne, her face marked by small-pox, few thought she would survive the perils of the colony. In fact her husband became a magistrate and she gave birth to 8 healthy children, and a book of poetry that was the sensation of its own age and ours.

Anne is clearly Unitarian and even atheist in her declamations. Believers will be misled by the fact that she never curses God, not realizing you have to believe in God to curse the pains and His relentless attentions. She frankly confesses no experience, none, with miracles. Her faith is in Hope, in caring, and in recovery, not the abstracts of redemption. She was often ill and expresses it well. And three poems on the death of children, not her own. Each poem is a Unitarian prayer.

A gorgeous, charming little gem of a book.

I love Bradstreet’s religious themes, but also I loved her personal accounts of life. Although her writing was from a comparatively primitive pioneer era, her poems on motherhood and womanhood, on struggling to find balance in life, on developing and sustaining her Christian faith, and on writing still resonate with me in this very different age.

Ironically, the volume of her own poetry that was published in her lifetime (without her permission) was full of poems that I just could not get into for boredom (a poem on the four elements, one on the four humors of man, etc.). The poems that most resonated with me, those that I would call “the Best,” were the personal, womanhood-inspired poems, ones that she never intended for publication but that reflect her struggles and worries: poems of the heart. I loved those ones.

more on my blog

This is a short collection of Bradstreet's poetry. Bradstreet (1612-1672) was an early colonist of New England settling eventually in Ipswich (just north of Salem) when it was still frontier. A volume of her poetry was published in England during her lifetime but her poems were not published in America during her lifetime. I was looking for something in particular as I read through the volume, so it is perhaps unfair of me to comment on the collection as a whole, but despite the sometimes thick 'Puritan-speak', there are some real gems here.