Anne Bradstreet’s Application of Modern Feminist Theory

Abstract

In The Continuity of American Poetry, Roy Harvey Pearce reminds us that Puritan verse presents “little or no problem of a specifically artistic purpose” and that “the doctrine, the event, the occasion guarantee purpose, so that the poet becomes merely a reporter, such eloquence as he can command being put to a higher than poetic use” (22). Developing his argument, Pearce states that Anne Bradstreet “is like her [Puritan] fellows in being essentially the poet of the event, and a not very imaginative one at that,” that she is “worth reading principally in poems like [”Contemplations“] and in those ‘personal’ poems published after her death” (23). Like many critics before and after him, Pearce seems to adhere to Adrienne Rich’s 1967 famous “Foreword” to The Works of Anne Bradstreet, which drew an unjust dividing line between Bradstreet’s early public poems and the more personal, posthumously published works. However, Pearce appears also more cautious in his judgment of Bradstreet than some of the early feminist critics were, he does not fail to include a propitiatory statement that Anne Bradstreet, while being “the poet of the event,” is primarily
The only poet of this order whom we have good cause to remember for what she did, not what she meant to do … Perhaps we remember her too well, because the publication of her poetry in England in 1650 … caused such a stir and because she seems so relaxed when compared to other Puritan poets. In all ways, she is the “easiest” of Puritan poets, the ease marking her civilized triumph over pioneering conditions which made life terribly hard for a gentlewoman born. (22–23)