There comes a time when two lovers are forced to spend some time apart. John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” and Anne Bradstreet’s “A Letter to Her Husband: Absent upon Public Employment” both deal with the subject of couple separation. Although Donne’s poem argues that spending some time apart strengthens a relationship, Bradstreet’s poem debates that man and woman must be together in order to function properly. The validity of this statement is presented through both form and style
The Environment of the Tenth Muse Anne Bradstreet was the first poet to be published from the New World. This new, alien environment influenced her work. Externally, Bradstreet was cast into an unfamiliar territory in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and internally, she was bound by the strict beliefs of the Puritan church. In the New World, she had to cope without her husband around and raise her family, and her religion dictated that she was a sinner who had to be humble, believe in the scriptures
Anne Bradstreet In this paper I will discuss Anne Bradstreet and the many challenges she faced being a Puritan female poet of the 17th century. I will discuss the following what it means for her to be a female poet in her Puritan society, what personal problems and anxieties she must work through during this time, and was her work sincere or did she have a shrewd strategy to her behind her writings. What does it mean for her to be a female poet in her Puritan society? The best way to answer the
Well educated by her father, she began writing aged 25, after her husband died, earning enough to support three children, a niece, and her own mother. Her most famous work, The City of Ladies (1404), criticizes learned books that spread ‘so many wicked insults about women and their behaviour’; three allegorical women – Reason, Rectitude