In 1630, Anne Bradstreet (1612/13–1678) and her husband Simon, the son of a nonconformist minister, sailed to Massachusetts with Anne’s parents on the Arabella, the flagship of the Massachusetts Bay Company. With The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650)—published in England, possibly without her knowledge—she became the first female poet in America. Because the Puritan community disdained female intellectual ambition, it was thought advisable to append the words “By a Gentle Woman in Those Parts,” to reassure readers that Bradstreet was a diligent Puritan mother. Bradstreet’s remarkable poetry consists of thirty-five short reflective poems, explicit in their description of familial and marital love. Some of these appeared in the 1678 edition of The Tenth Muse; others remained hidden in her notebook until they were published in 1867. The twentieth century saw a resurgence of interest in Bradstreet, with new editions of her work in 1967 and 1981 and a 2005 scholarly biography by Charlotte Gordon, entitled Mistress Bradstreet: The Untold Life of America’s First Poet. Both of the following poems, published in The Tenth Muse, address the problematic role of a female poet in seventeenth-century America.
The Prologue
1
To sing of wars, of captains, and of kings,
Of cities founded, commonwealths begun,
For my mean pen are too superior things:
Or how they all, or each their dates have run
5
Let poets and historians set these forth,
My obscure lines shall not so dim their worth.
2
But when my wond’ring eyes and envious heart
Great Bartas’ sugared lines1 do but read o’er,
Fool I do grudge the Muses did not part
10
’Twixt him and me that overfluent store;
A Bartas can do what a Bartas will
But simple I according to my skill.
3
From schoolboy’s tongue no rhet’ric we expect,
Nor yet a sweet consort from broken strings,
15
Nor perfect beauty where’s a main defect:
My foolish, broken, blemished Muse so sings,
And this to mend, alas, no art is able,
’Cause nature made it so irreparable.
4
Nor can I, like that fluent sweet tongued Greek,2
20
Who lisped at first, in future times speak plain.
By art he gladly found what he did seek,
A full requital of his striving pain.
Art can do much, but this maxim’s most sure:
A weak or wounded brain admits no cure.
5
25
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,
30
They’ll say it’s stol’n, or else it was by chance.
6
But sure the antique Greeks were far more mild
Else of our sex, why feigned they those nine
And poesy made Calliope’s own child;3
So ’mongst the rest they placed the arts divine:
35
But this weak knot they will full soon untie,
The Greeks did nought, but play the fools and lie.
7
Let Greeks be Greeks, and women what they are
Men have precedency and still excel,
It is but vain unjustly to wage war;
40
Men can do best, and women know it well.
Preeminence in all and each is yours;
Yet grant some small acknowledgement of ours.
8
And oh ye high flown quills that soar the skies,
And ever with your prey still catch your praise,
45
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.
(1650)