Authors
Anne Bradstreet (c. 1612-1672)
Biography
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Questions for Discussion and Writing
An encounter with Bradstreet's poems can be a breakthrough moment if you are reading chronologically through <abbr title="Norton Anthology of American Literature">NAAL</abbr>, for she is one of the very first American artists who seems complex, complete, and fully human in the modern sense. As a way of getting acquainted, you might want to look for at least two voices, two sides of one personality speaking in her poems: there is Mistress Bradstreet the devout Puritan, leading parishioner and well-known wife of a colony official; and there is Anne, mother, lover, grandmother, who feels the full range of joy and pride and grief and who struggles to reconcile these powerful perceptions and feelings with the severe theology which pervades her community and her faith.
1. If you are looking for "Anne," you might begin with The Author to Her Book, which evidently was written as the epigraph to the second edition of her collection of poems. Given that Bradstreet is a strict Puritan writing in 1666, in the wake of enormous sectarian turmoil in the English-speaking world, is there anything odd or dangerous about this metaphor of her book as the "ill-formed offspring" of Bradstreet's "feeble brain"? How does it contrast with the proprieties of her city and her time?
2. You might also glimpse "Anne" by reading through the sequence of three elegies for Bradstreet's grandchildren, written between August 1665 and November 1669. An elegy, especially a Christian one, is supposed to close with consolation, with an affirmation that death, even the death of a child, is part of a divine plan and ultimately for the good. Bradstreet makes that kind of affirmation at the end of each elegy--but how would you differentiate the mood of the last from the mood of the first two?
3. Bradstreet often makes use of the old poetic strategy of the "debat," a poem with two voices presenting opposite sides in some ongoing controversy, political, moral, or spiritual. The strategy was popular from the Middle Ages onward through Milton. Read The Flesh and the Spirit, A Dialogue Between Old England and New, and Upon the Burning of Our House. If a "debat" runs the risk of being mechanical, how and how well does Bradstreet handle that risk in each poem?