Anne Bradstreet: Passionate Femininity

“Douglas Wilson has accomplished with this book what every biographer ought to accomplish: He has enlightened for us an entire age and not just a single representation of that age.” ~George Grant

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America’s first poet, Anne Bradstreet, wrote poems regularly for her family’s private enjoyment. But in 1647, unbeknownst to Anne, her brother-in-law set sail for England with a manuscript of her poetry. Upon his return, he presented her book to her: The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America. Anne was thoroughly embarrassed but also pleased. Subsequent generations have valued her gifts as a poet as well, and her poetry remains in print to this day.

However, to the modern mind, Anne herself remains something of an enigmatic figure—a dedicated Puritan, housewife, and gifted poet. How these attributes can co-exist, feminists have yet to understand. This biography provides a deeper look at Anne Bradstreet’s personal qualities, the vibrant poetry she created, and her contributions to the way of life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

This book is a reprint of Beyond Stateliest Marble: The Passionate Femininity of Anne Bradstreet.

From the Book:

"So we have, on the one hand, conservative (but simultaneously modern) believers who have no soul, or at least souls with no room for poetry. On the other hand, we have gushy souls into which the contents of every Mother’s Day card ever written have been poured. We must do better than this.

Christians who believe the Bible must recover an understanding of the importance of poetry—good poetry. The Word of God, which God gave to us, contains vast stretches of glorious poetry. But we tend to treat it as a grab bag for doctrinal prooftexts or inspirational quotes. But in reading the Word of God rightly, we rediscover what might be called the romance of orthodoxy.

In other eras, when Christians read their Bibles as they ought to have, and when they approached God in worship the way He requires, the result has consistently been an outbreak of poetic thinking, poetic knowledge, and poetic worship.

It is our era, compromised as it has been with the forces of modernity, which is so poverty-stricken in this respect. Few Christians today realize that the history of poetry in English is overwhelmingly the history of Christian poetry.

This is our legacy, our treasure house, which we have grossly neglected. Anne Bradstreet’s work is very much part of this stream, but we in the modern era of faith have sought in our ignorance to dam the stream."