Nov 02, · But the vacillation in the poem suggests that the sense of loss outweighs, at least at times, the potential comfort promised by Puritan theology. (Richardson )In the critical essay by Ann Standford, Anne Bradstreet Dogmatist and Rebel, she tells us that Anne Bradstreet comforts herself with good Puritan blogger.comted Reading Time: 8 mins Anne Bradstreet: Poems essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Anne Bradstreet's blogger.comted Reading Time: 3 mins Anne Bradstreet is one of the most remembered American poets who lived during the ages of the 17th century. She faced many challenges and obstacles simply because she was a woman living under Puritan law. It is clear to see that she used her poetry as an outlet, to express views that bordered on feministic ideals as well as Puritan ideals
Anne Bradstreet: Conflict Between Puritan Theology and Personal Feelings Example | Graduateway
Anne Bradstreet was the first woman to be recognized as an accomplished New World Poet. Her volume of poetry The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America received considerable favorable attention when it was first published in London in Eight years after it appeared it was listed by William London in his Catalogue of the Most Vendible Books in Englandand George III is reported to have had the volume in his library.
Bradstreet's work has endured, and she is still considered to be one of the most important early American poets. Although Anne Dudley Bradstreet did not attend school, she received an excellent education from her father, who was widely read— Cotton Mather described Thomas Dudley as a "devourer of books"—and from her extensive reading in the well-stocked library of the estate of the Earl of Lincoln, where she lived while her father was anne bradstreet essay from to There the young Anne Dudley read VirgilPlutarchLivy, Pliny, Suetonius, HomerHesiod, Ovidanne bradstreet essay, Seneca, and Thucydides as well as SpenserSidneyMiltonRaleighanne bradstreet essay, Hobbes, Joshua Sylvester's translation of Guillaume du Bartas's Divine Weeks and Workesand the Geneva version of the Bible.
Anne bradstreet essay general, she benefited from the Elizabethan tradition that valued female education. In about —the date is not certain—Anne Dudley married Simon Bradstreet, who assisted her father anne bradstreet essay the management of the Earl's estate in Sempringham. She remained married to him until her death on September 16, Bradstreet immigrated to the new world with her anne bradstreet essay and parents in ; in the first of her children, anne bradstreet essay, Samuel, was born, anne bradstreet essay, and her seven other children were born between and DorothySarahSimonanne bradstreet essay, HannahMercyDudleyand John Although Bradstreet was not happy to exchange the comforts of the aristocratic life of the Earl's manor house for the privations of the New England wilderness, she dutifully joined her father and husband and their families on the Puritan errand into the wilderness.
After a difficult three-month crossing, their ship, the Arbelladocked at Salem, Massachusetts, on July 22, Distressed by the sickness, anne bradstreet essay, scarcity of food, and primitive living conditions of the New England outpost, Bradstreet admitted that her "heart rose" in protest against the "new world and new manners.
Once in New England the passengers of the Arbella fleet were dismayed by the sickness and suffering of those colonists who had preceded them. Thomas Dudley observed in a letter to the Countess of Lincoln, anne bradstreet essay, who had remained in England: "We found the Colony in a sad and unexpected condition, anne bradstreet essay, above eighty of them being dead the winter before; and many of those alive weak and sick; all the corn and bread amongst them all hardly sufficient to feed them a fortnight.
The Bradstreets and Dudleys shared a house in Salem for many months and lived in spartan style; Thomas Dudley complained that there was not even a table on which to eat or work. In the winter the two families were confined to the one room in which there was a fireplace. The situation was tense as well as uncomfortable, and Anne Bradstreet and her family moved several times in an effort to improve their worldly estates.
From Salem they moved to Charlestown, then to Newtown later called Cambridgethen to Ipswich, and finally to Andover in Although Bradstreet had eight children between the years andwhich meant that her domestic responsibilities were extremely demanding, she wrote poetry which expressed her commitment to the craft of writing. In addition, her work reflects the religious and emotional conflicts she experienced as a woman writer and as a Puritan.
Throughout her life Bradstreet was concerned with the issues of sin and redemption, physical and emotional frailty, death and immortality.
Much of her work indicates that she had a difficult time resolving the conflict she experienced between the pleasures of sensory and familial experience and the promises of heaven. As a Puritan she struggled to subdue her attachment to the world, but as a woman she sometimes felt more strongly connected to her husband, anne bradstreet essay, children, and community than to God.
Bradstreet's earliest extant poem, "Upon a Fit of Sickness, Anno. O Bubble blast, how long can'st last? That always art a breaking, No sooner blown, but dead and gone, Ev'n as a word that's speaking. O whil'st I live, this grace me give, I doing good may be, Then death's arrest I shall count best, because it's thy decree. Artfully composed in a ballad meter, this poem presents a formulaic account of the transience of earthly experience which underscores the divine imperative to carry out God's will.
Although this poem is an exercise in piety, it is not without ambivalence or tension between the flesh and the spirit—tensions which grow more intense as Bradstreet matures. The complexity of her struggle between love of the world and desire for eternal life is expressed in " Contemplations ," a late poem which many critics consider her best:.
Then higher on the glistering Sun I gaz'd Whose beams was shaded by the leavie Tree, The more I look'd, the more I grew amaz'd And softly said, what glory's like to thee? Soul of this world, this Universes Eye, No wonder, some made thee a Deity: Had I not better known, alas the same had I.
Although this lyrical, anne bradstreet essay, exquisitely crafted poem concludes with Bradstreet's statement of faith in an afterlife, her faith is paradoxically achieved by immersing herself in the pleasures of earthly life.
This poem and others make it clear that Bradstreet committed herself to the religious concept of salvation because she loved life on earth. Her hope for heaven was an expression of her desire to live forever rather than a anne bradstreet essay to transcend worldly concerns. For her, heaven promised the prolongation of earthly joys, rather than a renunciation of those pleasures she enjoyed in life. Bradstreet wrote many of the poems that appeared in the anne bradstreet essay edition of The Tenth Muse during the years to while she lived in the frontier town of Ipswich, approximately thirty miles from Boston.
In her dedication to the volume written in to her father, Thomas Dudley, who educated her, encouraged her to read, anne bradstreet essay, and evidently appreciated his daughter's intelligence, Bradstreet pays "homage" to him.
Many of the poems in this volume tend to be dutiful exercises intended to prove her artistic worth to him. However, much of her work, especially her later poems, demonstrates impressive intelligence and mastery of poetic form. The first section of The Tenth Muse includes four long poems, known as the quaternions, or "The Four Elements," "The Anne bradstreet essay Humors of Man," " The Four Ages of Man ," and "The Four Seasons.
In these quaternions Anne bradstreet essay demonstrates a mastery of physiology, anatomy, astronomy, Greek metaphysics, and the concepts of medieval and Renaissance cosmology. Although she draws heavily on Sylvester's translation of du Bartas and Helkiah Crooke's anatomical treatise MicrocosmographiaBradstreet's interpretation of their anne bradstreet essay is often strikingly dramatic.
Sometimes she uses material from her own life in these historical and philosophical discourses. For example, in her description of the earliest age of man, infancy, she forcefully describes the illnesses that assailed her and her children:. What gripes of wind my infancy did pain, What tortures I in breeding teeth sustain? What crudityes my stomach cold has bred, Whence vomits, flux, and worms have issued? Like the quaternions, anne bradstreet essay, the poems in the next section of The Tenth Muse —"The Four Monarchies" Assyrian, Persian, Grecian, and Roman —are poems of commanding historical breadth.
Bradstreet's poetic version of the rise and fall of these great empires draws largely from Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World The dissolution of these civilizations is presented as evidence of God's divine plan for the world. Although Bradstreet demonstrates considerable erudition in both the quaternions and monarchies, the rhymed couplets of the poems tend to be plodding and dull; she even calls them "lanke" and "weary" herself. Perhaps she grew tired of the task she set for herself because she did not attempt to complete the fourth section on the "Roman Monarchy" after the incomplete portion was lost in a fire that destroyed the Bradstreet home in expresses Bradstreet's concerns with the social and religious turmoil in England that impelled the Puritans to leave their country.
The poem is a conversation between mother England and her daughter, New England. The sympathetic tone reveals how deeply attached Bradstreet was to her native land and how disturbed she was by the waste and loss of life caused by the political upheaval.
As Old England's lament indicates, the destructive impact of the civil strife on human life was more disturbing to Bradstreet than the substance of the conflict:. O pity me in this sad perturbation, anne bradstreet essay, My plundered Towers, my houses devastation, My weeping Virgins and my young men slain; Anne bradstreet essay wealthy trading fall'n, my dearth of grain.
In this poem, Bradstreet's voices her own values. There is less imitation of traditional male models and more direct statement of the poet's feelings. As Bradstreet gained experience, anne bradstreet essay, she depended less on poetic mentors and relied more on her own perceptions, anne bradstreet essay. Another poem in the first edition of The Tenth Muse that reveals Bradstreet's personal feelings is " In Honor of that High and Mighty Princess Queen Elizabeth of Happy Memory ," written inin which she praises the Queen as a paragon of female prowess.
Chiding her male readers for trivializing women, Bradstreet refers to the Queen's outstanding leadership and historical prominence. In a personal caveat underscoring her own dislike of patriarchal arrogance, Bradstreet points out that women were not always devalued:. Nay Masculines, you have thus taxt us long, But she, though dead, will vindicate our wrong, Let such as say our Sex is void of Reason, Know tis a Slander now, but once was Treason.
These assertive lines mark a dramatic shift from the self-effacing stanzas of "The Prologue" to the volume in which Bradstreet attempted anne bradstreet essay diminish her stature to prevent her writing from being attacked as an indecorous female activity.
In an ironic and often-quoted passage of "The Prologue," she asks for the domestic herbs "Thyme or Parsley wreath," instead of the traditional laurel, thereby appearing to subordinate herself to male writers and critics:. Let Greeks be Greeks, and women what they are Anne bradstreet essay have precedency and still excell, It is but vain unjustly to wage warre; Men can do best, and women know it well Preheminence in all and each is yours; Yet grant some small acknowledgement of ours.
In contrast, her portrait of Elizabeth does not attempt to conceal her confidence in the abilities of women:. Who was so good, so just, so learned so wise, From all the Kings on earth she won the prize. Nor say I more then duly is her due, Millions will testifie that this is true. She has wip'd off th' aspersion of her Sex, That women wisdome lack to play the Rex. This praise for Queen Elizabeth expresses Bradstreet's conviction that women should not anne bradstreet essay subordinated to men—certainly it was less stressful to make this statement in a historic context than it would have been to confidently proclaim the worth of her own work.
The first edition of The Tenth Muse also contains an elegy to Sir Philip Sidney and a poem honoring du Bartas. Acknowledging her debt to these poetic mentors, she depicts herself as insignificant in contrast to their greatness. They live on the peak of Parnassus while she grovels at the bottom of the mountain, anne bradstreet essay.
Again, her modest pose represents an effort to ward off potential attackers, but its ironic undercurrents indicate that Bradstreet was angered by the cultural bias against women writers:. Fain would I shew how he same paths did tread, But now into such Lab'rinths I am lead, With endless turnes, anne bradstreet essay, the way I find not out, anne bradstreet essay, How to persist my Muse is more in doubt; Which makes me now with Silvester confess, Anne bradstreet essay Sidney's Muse can sing his worthiness.
Although the ostensible meaning of this passage is that Sidney's work is too complex and intricate for her to follow, it also indicates that Bradstreet felt his labyrinthine lines to represent excessive artifice and lack of connection to life. The second edition of The Tenth Muse These poems added to the second edition were probably written after the move to Andover, where Anne Bradstreet lived with her family in a spacious three-story house until her death in Far superior to her early work, the poems in the edition demonstrate a command over subject matter and a mastery of poetic craft.
These later poems are considerably more candid about her spiritual crises and her strong attachment to her family than her earlier work. For example, in a poem to her husband, " Before the Birth of one of her Children, " Bradstreet confesses that she anne bradstreet essay afraid of dying in childbirth—a realistic fear in the 17th century—and begs him to continue to love her after her death. She also implores him to take good care of their children and to protect them from a potential stepmother's cruelty:, anne bradstreet essay.
And when thou feel'st no grief, as I no harms, Yet love thy dead, who long lay in thine arms: And when thy loss shall be repaid with gains Look to my little babes my dear remains. And if thou love thy self, or love'st me These O protect from step Dames injury. Not only is this candid domestic portrait artistically superior to of "The Four Monarchies," it gives a more accurate sense of Bradstreet's true concerns. In her address to her book, Bradstreet repeats her apology for the defects of her poems, likening them to children dressed in "home-spun.
Because they are centered in the poet's anne bradstreet essay experience as a Puritan and as a woman, the poems are less figurative and contain fewer analogies to well-known male poets than her earlier work, anne bradstreet essay. In place of self-conscious imagery is extraordinarily evocative and lyrical language.
In some of these poems Bradstreet openly grieves over the loss of her loved ones—her parents, her grandchildren, her sister-in-law—and she barely conceals resentment that God has taken their innocent lives. Although she ultimately capitulates to a supreme being—He knows it is the best for thee anne bradstreet essay me"—it is the tension between her desire for earthly happiness and her effort to accept God's will that makes these poems especially powerful.
Bradstreet's poems to her husband are often singled out for praise by critics.
Anne Bradstreet: Biography
, time: 3:35Anne Bradstreet: Poems Essays | GradeSaver
Dec 09, · The first words of the pirit's stanza "Be still, thou unregenerate part," suggest that the pirit and the Flesh are part of the same being. Anne Bradstreet therefore recognizes Sources Bradstreet, Anne. "To my Dear and Loving Husband" The Flesh and the Spirit" blogger.com Taylor, Edward. "Huswifery" Nov 02, · But the vacillation in the poem suggests that the sense of loss outweighs, at least at times, the potential comfort promised by Puritan theology. (Richardson )In the critical essay by Ann Standford, Anne Bradstreet Dogmatist and Rebel, she tells us that Anne Bradstreet comforts herself with good Puritan blogger.comted Reading Time: 8 mins Anne Bradstreet often contemplates nature, God, and Man in her work. By observing the majesty of her natural surroundings in "Contemplations," she reflects on the greatness of her glorious Creator. This leads her to think about the Fall of Man, Estimated Reading Time: 8 mins
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