Anne Bradstreet
Introduction
Anne Bradstreet was one of the first writers who did not get her ideas just from theology. She looked around to nature and things you could see, feel, or hear as her inspiration and proof about God’s existence. This is important because at that time theology was the primary source of information and Bradstreet’s poetry was “unconventional.”
Anne Bradstreet’s life
Anne Dudley Bradstreet (1612.1672) is among the prominent women poets in the history of American Literature. She was born in Northampton England. Due to her family status, she was able to gain good education. Bradstreet is considered to be the first American poet and the first woman to publish her work is colonial America. Anne’s poem collections are; By a Gentlewoman of those Parts and The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America. Her work also serves as a documentary of the life of a puritan wife in struggle with the hardships of colonial life in New England. Her work shows a testimonial of the plight of women during her time. The life of Anne Bradstreet was of constant struggle with illness and adaptation of the new land in America.
Annotated Bibliography
1. Almost a Golden World: Sidney, Spenser, and Puritan Conflict in Bradstreet’s ‘Contemplations’ By: Oser, Lee, Renascence, 00344346, Spring2000, Vol. 52, Issue 3.
The almost a golden world: Sidney, Spenser, and puritan conflict in Bradstreet’s ‘contemplations’ is a collection of various critics who have compared and contrasted the works of Spenser, Sydney, and Bradstreet. Critics like Jeffrey Hammond, Elaine Showalter and others have talked much about Bradstreet’s works.
Anne Bradstreet sense of Puritan poetry writing was influenced by Philip Sydney and Edmund Spencer. Her Puritan poetry shows how poetry and theology can interact. From the English precursors, she received a strong Puritan art affirmation which she blended these art with a style of uncanny legacies. The art produced a new literature culture which critics have largely dealt with on the basis of theoretical constructs. Eileen Sholwalter has for instance, branded Bradstreet reversionary writings as being more on gender issues than nationality. Bradstreet’s poetry according to her anticipates the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne who is another Spenserian. The main a theme or her works are historical aspects, political, and a strand of theology.
Jeffery Hammond in his article The Sinful Self contains a literary milieu for Anne’s Bradstreet. He says Bradstreet works is a conceptualization of her meditative failure and confessed preoccupation of the natural beauty (II, iii). Bradstreet has adopted much from Spenser and Sydney with their sense of classical traditions which is assimilated into the Christian world. Sidney, Spenser, and Bradstreet work are classified as Neo-Platonism. Bradstreet religious life and artistic concerns is evident in her poetic career because in many ways, they respond to rival orthodoxies that lead the conflicts of 1630. From this conflict, Dudley saw how doctrine can subvert one own brand of religious and civil authority.
Bradstreet presents his father Dudley as a man of honor, wisdom and pious (203). This is found in her sonnet known as To her Father with Some Verses” the poem realizes seriousness and alliance of levity. It gives urbanity in a rhyme that couplet. The sonnet gives logical and tight structures of puritan diction. This poem acts a reminder of the role of theology in Christen art. Bradstreet’s acknowledges that her father as a man of authority.
Bradstreet idea of the complexity in Puritanism is seen in her poetry. Andrew Delanco defined Puritanism as a movement that developed due to the use of an official language in the religion which did not define the complexity of experience (148). Bradstreet’s poetry shows this complexity by voicing the contradictions that have stood the systematizing of doctrines. Her poems present the divine intimacy with the presentation of God supernatural distance in a Calvinistic realization. In one of the stanzas, she defines God as being he who dwells in the high places. This shows the abstractness of god, distance, and power (205).The poems show the inspiration of religious and artistic expression. This shows the presenting tension of the powerful and ironic of religious and poetic aspects.
2. Anne Bradstreet and performativity. By: Blackstock, Carrie Galloway, Early American Literature, 00128163, Dec97, Vol. 32, and Issue 3
Carrie Galloway presents Bradstreet as a woman who presented herself as mandated by Puritanism. The article by Carrie on Anne Bradstreet and performativity not only task of Bradstreet’s personal life but of her works. Her works according to Carrie present Puritan theory in fusion with tradition. This aspect displaces postmodern theory of rivalry and feminism. Bradstreet identity is shown in an intricate and deliberate manner of her multiple self. This enables her readers to examine her self-assertion through the possibilities of performity especially in a patriarchal context.
Her poems show the related identities in acts of reality. Bradstreet is distinction underlies the male figures in her life. Which is seen in female characters making alternatives to behaviors of their male counterparts? In her later poems, Bradstreet negatively reacts to patriarchy, but still maintains various aspects of her in confirmation to forbidden integration. In her collection The Tenth Muse lately Sprung Up in America (1650) it depicts an era where women are subordinate to God and to men. Women who did not bow done to patriarchy in the society were considered dangerous to the society and to themselves. Worse still to a woman like Bradstreet, who wrote poetry, was against Puritanism. Bradstreet therefore, had to undergo splitting and conflicting experience in her life in the process of developing her identity and affirming herself in the society. Bradstreet negotiated against the religious prohibition and cultural domain which dictated gender roles.
In the stanza of the poem The Tenth Muse lately Sprung Up in America. She depicts female inferiority and about a sensitized Muse made by nature to be wounded or weak in the brain and irreparable which has certainly no cure (26). This implies that Bradstreet viewed patriarchy as suppression to women. Patriarchy is likened as being natural weakens that is imposes deliberately. In support of feminism, she claims that cultural construction should let women be what they are and the Greeks are Greeks (39). Therefore, there is no inherent weakness and deficiency in women.
In her love poems, Bradstreet talks of her love for her husband and to God. She artfully exploits the relationship that is spiritual with orthodox allusions that claim the importance of subordination, submissiveness and virtuous woman which emphasize the place of a woman in the world and the world to come (163).
3. Bliss lost, wisdom gained by Michael Ditmore
The bliss lost, wisdom gained by Michael Ditmore is present the enigmas and emblem in Anne Bradstreet’s, Contemplation. Contemplation (1678) by Anne Bradstreet’s is an early American Literature collection with discordance and puzzles of artistically compiled poems. The common features of these poems are the religious dimensions of Bradstreet Christian faith in terms of poetry. Most of her poems including Contemplations shows her a position as being a non- alarmist or conformist posture. She is also neither resistant, submissive or disquiet in terms of religion.
Her multifaceted side is seen when reading the poems from the theological or religious conclusion, from the use of symbols, wording, thematic movement and allusive resonance. The poem became very popular as a wisdom poem in practicing Christianity and professing the religion. This poem is from the book of Ecclesiastes. It has a Christian thematic clarity and, coherence of structure with a grim view of vanity in human. During the renaissance period, human concern mainly dealt on morality and mutability exploit on theological nuances and scriptural allusions giving a stereological theme. The absence of this theme signifies a Christian culture which complicates the poem of a devotional type.
Contemplation has direct phrases from the bible. For example,” times now past” (1.1). This shows the scriptural model in Genesis 24: 63 about patriarch Isaac which is also similar to English practitioners who were devoted to Christian disciplines. The speaker in the poem talks of solitary ventures in nature in consideration to the providential of the Deity. He describes the physical creation and afterwards, we follow the spiritual and moral reflections morality, deviate and human condition which is juxtaposed against nature. By analyzing the poem, Contemplation we can observe various themes such as spiritual a presumption, consciousness of mortality and biblical history.
Bradstreet has managed to survey her own experience in an ultimate gain of wisdom and ameliorative resolution and hope in spit of the inability to magnify and laud the creator. The vicious arrogance, ubiquitous horror, deliberates ignorance and treacherous infidelity which are human conditions. The poems structural and thematic reasoning follow the requirements of prototypical procedure and rhyme in opening stanzas. Visual imagery and emblems are ordinary depicted in mundane ways to give a full allegory and interesting bizarre concoctions.
4. Now Sisters. Impart Your Usefulness, and Force.’ By: Harvey, Tamara, Early American Literature, 00128163, Mar2000, Vol. 35, and Issue 1
Nathaniel Ward praises Anne Bradstreet for doing what is right but warns of letting men do what they are supposed to do. This in short shows that Ward is mocking the female poet due to writing poetry which has been a male tradition. This is a patriarchal assumption that existed during the renaissance period. The activity of writing poetry is likening to the furs of Homer, the boots of Chaucer and the spurs of a rider. A woman writing poetry is a transgression of cultural expectation which may be doomed as an illusions or accidental.
The Pen is associated with the phallic. So, when Bradstreet uses it, it softens the ensemble of her poems. These assertions are found in Wards article the Prologue. Many a critics have analyzed this book in comparisons to Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse. They have favored Bradstreet’s’ poem for having more expressive qualities and feminine. Ward’s article has been criticized for being unease and inadequate in tackling the issue of traditional a male preserve. The Prologue simply tries to portray a woman an s being simply powerless. It rejects the values of expressive poems seen in Bradstreet’s personality in her poems.
Many scholars like Timothy Sweet, Carrie Galloway, and Ivy Schweitzer have commented on how Bradstreet has successfully utilized conventions available during her time to signal the gender difference by the use of topoi and natural figures. Her position still remains unclear because she intersects between resistance to Theology and supporting it or through the use of subversive practices in poetry. Through her works, we get the sense that Broadsheet is solely struggling in misogynistic literary traditions.
5. Anne Bradstreet wrestles with the renaissance written by ivy Schweitzer
Ann Bradstreet in the new colonial England was the first woman to raise her voice in success in poetry. Her poetry is classified as domestic poetry with mediation and lyrics. Later in her life, she wrote about her religious struggles, her children and her husband. Her earliest formal poetry is always dismissed to be an Elizabethan model with male as the style and subject matter. Bradstreet is credited to have discovered her own gender voice and authentic art. Her later poems made a major shift in tone, theme and voice which was no longer those of self –deprecation and apologies.
Eileen Maseru notes that the apologies which Bradstreet gave demonstrated her awareness of the prescribed tradition of the 17th century of the humility of a woman. Poems successes in the classical poetic traditions greatly depended on the sentiment in the poem and successful use of prescribed formulae. Bradstreet learned both of the Puritan narrative tradition and the classical tradition in public poetry. He learned of the classical public poems through earlier poets who were her predecessors and the Puritan narrative with the formula of humility. Writers were to oblige to these rules with no regard to their own personal feelings (152). The use of topoi by Bradstreet’s shows her own conventions according to Mragerum. This convention demonstrates the assurance she had towards herself more than the doubt she had on classical traditions.
Conclusion
The body of the work of Anne Bradstreet is has extensively varied themes. She wrote of nature and culture, of theology and spirituality, of the tensions between doubt and faith, of death family and history. Her poem The Contemplations has the traces of poetic technique and thematic threads. Bradstreet remarkable nature is seen in the historical condition she was in. As poet and woman in struggle with societal expectations and Puritan religion which dictated gender roles.
Reference
Almost a Golden World: Sidney, Spenser, and Puritan Conflict In Bradstreet’s ‘Contemplations’ By: Oser, Lee, Renascence, 00344346, Spring2000, Vol. 52, Issue 3.
Anne Bradstreet wrestles with the renaissance written by ivy SchweitzerSisters. Impart Your Usefulness, and Force.’. By: Harvey, Tamara, Early American Literature, 00128163, Mar2000, Vol. 35, and Issue 1
Bliss lost, wisdom gained by Michael Ditmore
Anne Bradstreet and performativity. By: Blackstock, Carrie Galloway, Early American Literature, 00128163, Dec97, Vol. 32, and Issue 3
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