Anne Bradstreet

Anne Bradstreet

Anne Bradstreet

Bradstreet benefited from an education unusually thorough for a woman of her time. Knowledgeable about history, theology, and science, she also demonstrates a familiarity with numerous earlier poets. She wrote an elegy on the famed soldier, diplomat, and poet Sir Philip Sidney that displays a keen interest in his sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella (1591). She also appears to have been influenced by the English meditative poets of her own century. The poet she honors most highly, however, is the French religious poet Guillaume de Salluste (Seigneur du Bartas), whose epic La Semaine (1578; The Divine Weeks, 1608) was a favorite among Puritans.

In her early writing, Bradstreet favored quaternions, poems with subject groups of four. For centuries, the material world was believed to be composed of four elements: fire, air, earth, and water. Thus, human temperaments and physiological types were explained as various mixtures of these elements and were called “humours.” Two of Bradstreet's quaternions consist of successive speeches by the respective elements and humours in which they boast of their own importance. “The Ages of Man” follows a similar pattern, with Childhood, Youth, Middle Age, and Old Age speaking in turn. While rather stiff and uninspired, these poems show that Bradstreet had accumulated considerable astronomical, geographical, historical, theological, medical, and psychological information. “The Four Seasons of the Year,” though occasionally betraying a love of nature, is similarly conventional and bookish.

Her longest poem, “The Four Monarchies,” versifies in 3,432 lines a portion of ancient history for which her chief source was Sir Walter Ralegh's History of the World (1614). The last and shortest history is of the Roman monarchy, and it culminates in “An Apology” for being unable to carry it out to its projected length. The loss is not great, for “The Four Monarchies,” which labors ...