Anne Bradstreet: An American Rorschach Test

And why I believe she should be a household name

From The Imaginative Conservative

While living in Prague last summer, I had many conversations with native Czechs, and nearly all of them turned in some way toward history. Czechs have survived many foreign occupations, which may be why history is a Czech birthright. I was often struck by the contrast with American life, where history has been relegated to the margins with other supposedly impractical disciplines like literature, philosophy, and religion. It would not be unusual for an international traveler to know more about American history than an American scientist or businessperson might. Not so in Prague.

I’m contemplating a new series for The Recovering Academic on what we lose in national identity and civic engagement when we push the humanities aside. I’m calling this series “American literary history,” but maybe you can help me imagine a punchier title. Think of today’s thought experiment on Anne Bradstreet as a test case. Every American ought to know who she is, but in twenty years of teaching not one of my own students had ever heard of her before taking a survey course.

Bradstreet was the first published American poet, and her work defies the ideological blinders that plague us now. She wasn’t really a feminist in a conventional sense, compared to her more famous contemporary, Anne Hutchinson. But Bradstreet was no doctrinaire Christian, either. She was both ambitious and uneasy about ambition, simultaneously confident and self-doubting, a person of faith who wrote to her children that Satan troubled her with atheistic thoughts throughout her youth. Bradstreet requires readers to acknowledge exceptions to whatever ideological interest they bring to her work. It’s a good exercise in open-mindedness. 

Today I’ll focus on three poems that capture Bradstreet’s enduring relevance to American life. But I am confident that you’ll find many more to admire if you explore her oeuvre more widely. 

The Author to Her Book

Bradstreet became a minor celebrity in England when her book, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, was published in London in 1650. In fact, King George III — that great American nemesis — reportedly kept a copy in his personal library more than a century later. But the shocker is that Bradstreet never asked to be published. Her brother-in-law, John Woodbridge, brought the manuscript to London and saw to its distribution without Bradstreet’s knowledge. 

I’m not sure how this happened exactly — why Woodbridge would have known of the poems to begin with if Bradstreet intended to keep them private, and how he might have just walked off with a sheaf of handwritten poems that presumably had no copies. I’m not sure I trust his note to the reader in The Tenth Muse. Wouldn’t Bradstreet have wondered what happened to her poems if she’d spent years writing and collecting them? Wouldn’t she have quizzed her husband, Simon, about where that precious bundle might be? By today’s standards what Woodbridge did was an outrage, despite his obvious admiration for his sister-in-law. And Anne Bradstreet never saw a penny from all those book sales. But, once her work was out in the world, she seems to have participated willingly enough in releasing a second edition in 1678 that included some new poems, such as “The Author to Her Book.”

Bradstreet addresses her book in the second person as if it is an illegitimate child. Her “rambling brat in print” has no father as the “ill-form’d offspring” of her “feeble brain.” The poem is a master class in double voicing, a rhetorical technique by which a speaker disarms a potentially hostile audience without yielding power. In this case, Bradstreet’s speaker seems to doubt herself all through the poem, while ironically (subversively?) narrating an exquisite poem. The effect is something like watching a batter joke with the catcher and umpire about how terrible he is before crushing a home run.  

What writer has not felt that their books (or smaller works) are like their children? And that whatever flaws we bring to our craft are magnified in the public result? I still feel this way about my own writing: 

I cast thee by as one unfit for light,

Thy Visage was so irksome in my sight;

Yet being mine own, at length affection would

Thy blemishes amend, if so I could:

I wash’d thy face, but more defects I saw…

Nathaniel Hawthorne felt that way about his first novel, Fanshawe. He regretted publishing it almost immediately after its release, tried to destroy as many copies as he could, and even tried to deny ever having written it. Bob Dylan was embarrassed by his first album, or so he claimed. One of my students joked during a presentation that the only people who hated her writing more than she did, herself, were her professors. She was joking — the presentation was first-rate — but the roar of laughter from her audience suggested that she had touched upon a universal truth about the risks of creativity, as Bradstreet does in her poem. 

Prologue

Bradstreet’s “Prologue” appeared in the first edition of The Tenth Muse, which suggests that she wrote with a public audience in mind whether she admitted it or not. If she were truly writing only for herself — devotional poems, love poems, and other private indulgences — why would she write a prologue to begin with? The self-deprecation in “The Author to Her Book” is understandably strategic, since The Tenth Muse was already well-known and Bradstreet likely didn’t want to seem too prideful in issuing a second edition. But she was an undiscovered poet when she wrote her prologue. And the poem makes no sense except as an imagined conversation with her contemporaries. 

The first stanza reads like an apology:

To sing of Wars, of Captains, and of Kings,

Of Cities founded, Common-wealths begun,

For my mean Pen are too superior things;

Or how they all, or each their dates have run,

Let Poets and Historians set these forth.

My obscure lines shall not so dim their worth.

The next three stanzas continue in this vein. Bradstreet’s speaker takes pains to distance herself from “Great Bartas” and other male writers whom the Muses have apparently favored. “A Bartas can do what a Bartas will,” Bradstreet writes, “But simple I according to my skill.” The effect is similar to “The Author to Her Book.” The command of rhyme, meter, and theme contradicts the author’s deferential tone. But that is the point. By the time you reach the fifth stanza, Bradstreet has sufficiently lowered your guard with the left jab that she is ready to unleash the uppercut. 

No sooner has she said that “a weak and wounded brain admits no cure” than she shifts tone completely:

I am obnoxious to each carping tongue

Who says my hand a needle better fits.

A Poet’s Pen all scorn I should thus wrong,

For such despite they cast on female wits.

If what I do prove well, it won’t advance,

They’ll say it’s stol’n, or else it was by chance.

Bradstreet goes on to ask why, if the female imagination were so inferior, the Greeks would have made all of the nine Muses women, including Calliope, the mother of epic poetry and eloquence, whom Homer credited for the Iliad and the Odyssey? This is a bold rhetorical question, because Puritan ministers regarded Greek mythology as idolatrous (this was a significant part of the feud between William Bradford and Thomas Morton over the maypole at Merrymount). But there is no mistaking Bradstreet’s suggestion in the sixth stanza that anyone who claims that women have no business writing poetry is either culturally ignorant or shockingly dismissive of Western civilization. 

Bradstreet returns, in the final two stanzas, to the tone she used for the opening. On the surface it seems deferential (men are the best — my poems pose no threat). But isn’t there more than a hint of hyperbole in the closing? I’m trying to imagine the man who could read the entire poem, including the final stanza, without detecting its irony. 

And oh ye high flown quills that soar the skies,

And ever with your prey still catch your praise,

If e’er you deign these lowly lines your eyes,

Give thyme or Parsley wreath, I ask no Bays.

This mean and unrefined ore of mine

Will make your glist’ring gold but more to shine.

Given the popularity of Anne Bradstreet’s verse during her lifetime, plenty of men read her work at face value. And though there is no evidence that Bradstreet sought to humiliate such readers, the joke — if they interpreted her poems literally — was on them. 

The Flesh and the Spirit

When I was coming of age in the late 80s and early 90s, imagining myself a conservative culture warrior, I was steeped in the lore of the American Puritans. A popular book at the time was Peter Marshall’s and David Manuel’s The Light and the Glory, a selective history written to bolster the myth of a Christian nation. As a bookish teenager who wanted to please the adults in my life, I drank it all up. But now I’m mystified by how much is deliberately left out of histories like this.

For instance, Marshall and Manuel make no mention of Anne Bradstreet. But they devote pages to excoriating Anne Hutchinson for her defiance of John Winthrop, the governor of Massachusetts Bay. One of Hutchinson’s alleged crimes was holding meetings in her home, where she was thought to be “seducing” simple-minded people with false doctrine. The only record of Hutchinson’s voice is the transcript of her trial, where she holds her own before multiple interrogators. In one memorable exchange, she tells Winthrop that there is a biblical mandate in the book of Titus for her to teach other women. While Winthrop struggles a bit with his response, she turns the cross-examination back around on him. “If any come to my house to be instructed in the ways of God,” she asks, “what rule have I to put them away?.... Do you think it not lawful for me to teach women and why do you call me to teach the court?”

Hutchinson was ultimately banished for her refusal to yield, but I take some pains to explain her predicament because I see Bradstreet, in “The Flesh and the Spirit,” providing an even more public form of spiritual instruction through her poetry. Perhaps this is why Marshall and Manuel omit her entirely from their history. 

“The Flesh and the Spirit” dramatizes an internal conflict within the speaker of the poem, who only identifies herself as “I” in lines 1 and 3. We are asked to picture the speaker standing “Close by the Banks of Lacrim flood,” an artful way of saying that she is nearly weeping. She overhears two sisters named Flesh and Spirit “reasoning” together, but really they are arguing. Bradstreet confesses her own spiritual doubts through Flesh’s character and counters with the answers she knows that Spirit ought to give.  

Flesh asks some tough questions. Does Spirit live on meditation alone, so lost in her fantasies of heaven that she is as useless as a drunkard? “Art fancy-sick or turn’d a Sot,” Flesh asks, “To catch at Shadows which are not?” Rather than postponing her reward, Flesh reasons, Spirit ought to take her fill of earthly pleasure. Instead of gambling on what might come, Spirit ought to focus on realities close at hand. 

There is a good deal of Bradstreet in Flesh’s words. She loved her children, grieved when her house burned down, and confessed in one poem that if she didn’t know any better she would worship the Sun. To a Calvinist like Bradstreet, the evidence of salvation lay not in good deeds or persuasive sermons, but in the motion of her heart away from evil and toward goodness. That was how she would know if she had been claimed by irresistible grace. And so there is no doubt that Spirit must win this argument. Bradstreet imitates metaphysical poets like John Donne here — posing an existential problem and then trying to resolve it within the poem. 

Spirit’s reply is textbook Puritanism. “Sisters we are, yea twins we be,” she says, “Yet deadly feud ‘twixt thee and me.” Flesh is the daughter of Adam, the first sinner, whereas Spirit claims God as her father. “I’ll stop my ears at these thy charms,” Spirit says, “And count them for my deadly harms.”

There is a haughtiness to Spirit that I confess I don’t like much. She feeds on “hidden Manna” that Flesh cannot see and claims that her heavenly meditations far outstrip Flesh’s “dull Capacity.” It’s impossible to argue with someone who claims that they can “pierce the heav’ns” and see things that remain invisible on earth, such as the heavenly city made of gold, pearl, and jasper stone — a place too pure for someone as unclean as Flesh. (Never mind that Spirit imagines her eternal reward as indistinguishable from earthly wealth.)

Spirit gets the last word in the poem, as she must, and thereby resolves the inner turmoil that Bradstreet sought to ease. Whether I find Spirit’s argument convincing is not really the point. The poem is lovely — every bit as memorable, in my opinion, as Donne’s more famous sonnet, “Death be not proud.” The conceit (a fancy word for imaginative poetic device) of Bradstreet eavesdropping on this conversation within herself while fighting back tears is fantastic. And even if the poem feels a little high and mighty near the end, I admire Bradstreet’s honesty through Flesh’s character. 

The upshot

Every American should know Anne Bradstreet’s name and at least a few of her poems because she was the first published poet — man or woman — in New England. I should say that the notion of “firsts” is fraught. There already was a literary tradition in North America before European settlement — many indigenous poets whose names we will never know because their verse was spoken rather than written down and because they practiced their craft in private ceremonies which the U.S. government tried to stamp out. Black writers like Toni Morrison trace their literary roots to African songs and stories, some of which were kept alive during enslavement. And so defining American literary history strictly by the textual tradition is inaccurate at best and racist at worst. But I don’t think we need to ignore Bradstreet to acknowledge these points. It matters that she be remembered as the intellectual equal of John Winthrop, William Bradford, and other Puritan leaders. She would never have claimed the mantle of authority, but I suspect that many of her readers loved her verse because she made theology accessible, the way Anne Hutchinson was rumored to have done in her home meetings. That is, while enjoying her verse, homespun people could also feel that they were feeding on hidden manna, and that is without doubt a form of leadership.

But you won’t hear someone like Christopher Rufo mention Anne Bradstreet any more than Marshall and Manuel did in the 1980s. Maybe it’s that she doesn’t fit the patriarchal mold, or that citing women doesn’t seem like a very manly thing to do? It could also be that the earthiness she sought to conquer — the doubts and human failings that creep into her verse, her fascination with Greek mythology, her enjoyment of intellectual flourishes, her pleasure in poetry for it’s own sake — simply don’t burnish the myth of the Christian nation brightly enough.

At the same time, you won’t find Bradstreet in the latest volume of Rebel Girls. While feminist scholarship on her work highlights patterns like double voicing or her flat rejection, in “Prologue,” of the implication that she ought to be holding a needle rather than a pen, it’s hard to imagine her as an activist in the way that Hutchinson was. What does one do with “To My Dear and Loving Husband” or “A Letter to her Husband, absent upon Publick employment”? There isn’t much political cachet in those poems. 

Bradstreet is like a Rorschach test: she can sustain multiple and even contradictory readings. I appreciate her work for its mastery and for its universality. She seems a lot like me, capable of viewing her writing as finished one moment and as irreparably flawed the next. She prized her roles as mother and wife more than her commitment to art — priorities I’m always trying to keep front of mind as a father and husband. I first became aware of Bradstreet during my doctoral program, when I also worked as a wilderness ranger in Idaho. I often jotted down thoughts in the evening that I could fashion into poems during my days off. It struck me one night after my crew mates had retired that I was doing something much like what Bradstreet was rumored to have done: writing poetry while her husband was away on business and after her children had been tucked into bed. 

And so one night I wrote this poem in thanks for what Bradstreet’s poetry had given to me. 

Letter to Anne Bradstreet

My crewmates

snore in their tents,

two young men

full of lentils and rice.

The day’s work

echoes in my legs.

Soon I, too, will sleep. 

A breeze washes down

the bare back of the ridgeline

like a memory

of the one I love

beside a lifeless fire,

where all is at rest but one hand

on the page, the whisper of paper

and skin, the faint hiss of heat.