The Beautiful Writings of Anne Bradstreet

Warrick. [Painter]. (n.d.) 

Anne Bradstreet, one of the first colonial era poets, sets a strong base for later poets. A marvel before her time, Bradstreet was able to create amazingly intricate and beautiful poems that extended past the memoires and religious texts supported during the times by men like John Winthrop, Roger Williams, and Thomas Harriot. "Today... we view Bradstreet simply as “the first authentic poetic artist in America's history” and even as “the founder of American literature” (Caldwell, P. 1988). Her poetry truly influenced the beginning of an independent mindset during the early colonial period.

What makes Anne so amazing, on a personal level, is the staying power she is able to enact with poems like To my Dear and Loving Husband, In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Anne Bradstreet, and Here Follows Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House, July 10th, 1666. With these highly affective and emotional poems, Bradstreet creates a new scheme of poetry - where the ability to create and imagine is rewarded.

During this era, many of the poems were highly religious in nature. Bradstreet follows this theme through in poems such as In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Anne Bradstreet:

With troubled heart and trembling hand I write.
The heavens have changed to sorrow my delight.
How oft with disappointment have I met
When I on fading things my hopes have set.
Experience might 'fore this have made me wise
To value things according to their price.
Was ever stable joy yet found below?
Or perfect bliss without mixture of woe?
I knew she was but as a withering flower,
That's here today, perhaps gone in an hour;
Like as a bubble, or the brittle glass,
Or like a shadow turning, as it was.
More fool, then, I to look on that was lent
As if mine own, when thus impermanent.
Farewell, dear child; thou ne'er shalt come to me,
But yet a while and I shall go to thee.
Meantime my throbbing heart's cheered up with this--
Thou with thy Savior art in endless bliss.

Such an absolutely beautiful poem so full of longing, and inherent sorrow - yet her only deemed point of joy is expressed in the final two lines - that in the midst of all her sorrow her religion allows her to stay sane.


It's poems like these, where the imagination and fluidity of her poem truly shines. There so much raw emotion in her poetry.

Another example of a different type of passion shows through in her tributes to her husband. As a housewife and mother to many children, the love she held for her husband was expected to be something similar to servitude. She excels in bringing out not only her matronly love for her husband in the following poem, but also a strong sense of companionship and true passion:


If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me, ye woman, if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold,
Or all the riches that the east doth hold.
My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
Nor aught but love from thee, give recompense.
Thy love is such I can no way repay,
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love let's so perservere
That when we live no more, we may live ever.


This truly paves the way for later authors, like Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Ralph Emerson, to be able to clearly and construtively outlet their emotion. She also provides another new trend in poetry, the ability to manipulate words not for political or religious meaning alone - but also to write poetry for the sheer beauty of it. Her words are not at all like narrative works around the time she was born, because this isn't an inpersonal narrative, or a fiery sermon. They are musings and thoughts, constructed not to gain affliliation or to prove anything - but written because she felt the way she felt.

She is truly a marvel.

References 

Bradstreet, A. (1678). To My Dear and Loving Husband. Ed Baym, N et all. (2008). The Norton anthology of American literature. p. 108.
Caldwell, P. (1988). Why our first poet was a woman: Bradstreet and the voice of an American poet voice. Prospects, 13 , pp 1-35 doi:10.1017/S0361233300006670 
Warrick. [Painter]. (n.d.) Anne Bradstreet. [Oil on Canvas]. Retrieved 27 Oct 2011 from http://www.acpl.lib.in.us/amv/artists_catalog/bwarrick.html

Emily Dickinson and Early-American Poetry

Over the years there have been and continue to be many influential authors in American Literature. 

If there were not the exceptional authors that we have than poems and stories would not have reached the great potential that we see today. One of these exceptional authors would have to be Emily Dickinson. Without Dickinson’s poems American literature would be set back for many years.  

For many reasons, Emily Dickinson was a great asset to American literature. Dickinson paved the road for many of the great poets that we see today. During Emily’s life there seemed to be a lack of poetry writers. Emily wrote different from other poets, she not only wrote about all of the different problems in society but she also wrote about he own beliefs in family, love, nature and also about death.  With Emily’s poetry surfaced other poets took noticed and expanded on their own writtings. 

"No one has persuasively traced the precise stages of Dickinson's artistic growth from the supposedly "somber Girl" to the young woman who, within a few years of her return from Mount Holyoke, began writing a new kind of poetry, with its distinctive voice, style, and transformation of the traditional form" (Baym, 2008, p. 1118).

Dickinson's riddled approach to nature and life shone through in her metaphoric poetry. 

A lady red upon the hill
Her annual secret keeps;
A lady white within the field
In placid lily sleeps!

The tidy breezes with their brooms
Sweep vale, and hill, and tree!
Prithee, my pretty housewives!
Who may expected be?

The neighbors do not yet suspect!
The woods exchange a smile--
Orchard, and buttercup, and bird--
In such a little while!

And yet how still the landscape stands,
How nonchalant the wood,
As if the resurrection
Were nothing very odd!

This poem shows her amazing ability to capture something simple, like the changing of the seasons, with the mirth and ingenuity that is hard to find, even today.

As a woman before her time, Dickinson also captured her words in a way that was then uncommon:

Today poetry is one of the most popular forms for writing. This was not always true. During the mid 1800’s, there were many events going on in the world. Some of these events are the Civil War and The First World War . Since there were so many important events taking place in the world, there was no time for poetry. Many people strictly read and wrote events about the two wars. Even though this time period was very hard for poets, Dickinson found ways to get through to readers. She always addressed her three main themes of poetry death, love, and nature. These themes gained popularity the more they were published. Readers of all genres took notice of how thoughts can be transformed beautifully into a poem. This caused the demand for poetry to increase, and from that year on poetry has gained more and more popularity (Emily Dickinson-QSV, nd).

 References:

Emily Dickinson-QSV, (n.d), Emily Dickinson’s Significance in American Literature, retrieved October 30, 2011, http://sites.google.com/site/emilydickinsonqsv/significance-in-american-literature 

Baym, N. (Ed.), (2008), The Norton anthology of American literature (Shorter 7th ed., Vol.           1). New York, NY: W. W. Norton.