summary

1. Significance:
● 1st
colonial to write out of conscious desire to be a poet
● Works for public and private consumption
● Private shows active concern with affairs of the inner life
Works reflect and contain basic tensions of
American experience and American literature:
➔ Civilized European facing the wilderness - frontier
experience
➔ Colonial gradually gaining roots in the new land
and casting off the old world - new versus old
➔ Represents the right of women to shape their
potential beyond the narrow confines of society -
rights of women
➔ Represents the spirit of the self over the dogma
of her religion - individualism versus conformity
Anne Bradstreet

2. Works:
● Cover broad range of political, domestic, social, religious and intellectual subjects
● Range of topics her knowledge and experience creates tension in her works – strong metaphysical wit that
anticipates Dickinson
● Strongest subjects come from stuff of daily life – some strongly intimate in nature
● Reveal struggle between dissent and acceptance of a strong woman in a society that required women to submit
doubly – to domestic and to divine duty
● Link to traditions of English and Continental literature
● Traditions adapt to circumstances of life in new world - pioneer existence
● Is the beginning of the divergence of American literature from British literature
Works are Meditative: the process of meditation involves the "vivid picturing in the imagination of a scene called the
'composition of place.' The scene may be drawn from the Old or New Testaments, the details of the life of Christ, the terrors
of hell, or a more present situation. . . . . After imagining a scene, or seeing the subject of meditation before one in the
fields, the mediator draws arguments from it regarding eternal truths or his own relation to God. The last step is a colloquy
with God or with the creature, theoretically involving the will, in which the mediator determines to have more faith, to cease
from sin, to abide by God's law, or comes to some moral discernment.