Anne bradstreet biography poet

Anne Bradstreet (circa – September 16, ) was the first colonial female poet to be published in the New World. She was both the daughter and the wife of Massachusetts Bay Colony Governors. As an accomplished poet she laid the groundwork for other female writers to emerge in an era when women generally tended to family and domestic matters. Through her poetry she eloquently expressed the concerns of a Puritan wife and mother, giving significant historical insight and perspective on the lives of the early settlers to America. In modern times, she is still regarded as one of the most important American woman poets.

Early Life in England

Bradstreet was born Anne Dudley in Northhampton England. She was the daughter of Puritan leader Thomas Dudley and Dorothy Dudley. Her father was a steward to the Earl of Lincoln and as such the family lived the life of privileged gentry. Bradstreet was tutored by her father but was largely self-educated through her reading of the classics, Shakespeare, and the Bible. She was an admirer of French poet Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas who was popular with seventeenth century readers. His epic poem, La Sepmaine; ou, Creation du monde (), was said to have influenced John Milton's own classic epic, Paradise Lost.

At the age of sixteen, young even by the standards of the day, she married Simon Bradstreet. Both Anne's father and husband were Puritan nonconformists at a time when religious intolerance was on the rise in England, under Charles I. They decided to set sail for the American colonies aboard the Arbella, under the leadership of John Winthrop, during the Great Migration of Later both her husband and father were to become Governors of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Leaving the comfort and security of England could not have been easy for Bradstreet. After a difficult journey the family was shocked by the circumstances of early settlers, who were suffering from starvation, and were subjected to the constant th

Anne Bradstreet was born Anne Dudley in in Northamptonshire, England. She married Simon Bradstreet, a graduate of Cambridge University, at the age of sixteen. Two years later, Bradstreet, along with her husband and parents, immigrated to the American colonies with the Winthrop Puritan group, and the family settled in Ipswich, Massachusetts. There, Bradstreet and her husband raised eight children, and she became one of the first poets to write English verse in the American colonies. It was during this time that Bradstreet penned many of the poems that would be taken to England by her brother-in-law, purportedly without her knowledge, and published in under the title The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America.

The Tenth Muse was the only collection of Bradstreet’s poetry to appear during her lifetime. In , the family moved to Andover, Massachusetts, where Bradstreet lived until her death in In , the first American edition of The Tenth Muse was published posthumously and expanded as Several Poems Compiled with Great Wit and Learning. Bradstreet’s most highly regarded work, a sequence of religious poems titled Contemplations, was not published until the middle of the nineteenth century.

Bradstreet’s poetics belong to the Elizabethan literary tradition that includes Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney. She was also strongly influenced by the sixteenth-century French poet Guillaume de Salluste, seigneur du Bartas. Her early work, which is imitative and conventional in both form and content, is largely unremarkable, and her poetry was long considered primarily of historical interest. She has, however, won critical acceptance in the twentieth century for her later verse, which is less derivative and often deeply personal. In , the poet John Berryman paid tribute to her in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, a long poem that incorporates many phrases from her writings.

Anglo-American poet

For the alleged witch, see Anne Bradstreet (Salem witch trials).

Anne Bradstreet (néeDudley; March 8, &#;– September 16, ) was among the most prominent of early English poets of North America and first writer in England's North American colonies to be published. She is the first Puritan figure in American literature and notable for her large corpus of poetry, as well as personal writings published posthumously.

Born to a wealthy Puritan family in Northampton, England, Bradstreet was a well-read scholar especially affected by the works of Du Bartas. She was married at sixteen, and her parents and young family migrated at the time of the founding of Massachusetts Bay Colony in A mother of eight children and the wife and daughter of public officials in New England, Bradstreet wrote poetry in addition to her other duties.

Her early works are broadly considered derivative, but her later writings developed into her unique style of poetry which centers on her role as a mother, her struggles with the sufferings of life, and her Puritan faith. While her works were initially considered primarily of historical significance, she reached posthumous acclaim in the 20th century. Her first collection, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, was widely read in America and England.

Background

In a portrait that was painted by her later poems, Bradstreet is described as "an educated English woman, a kind, loving wife, devoted mother, Empress