Anne Bradstreet Research Paper

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Anne Bradstreet is contemplated by many to not only be a wonderful female poet, but one of the greatest American poets. Though she experienced many unfortunate events during her lifetime, they are what motivated some of her greatest works. Through her poems, The Prologue, Contemplations, and In Memory of My Dear Grandchild, Bradstreet reveals her feminism, her admiration of nature, and the trials she went through with the sickness and death of loved ones. Many of Anne Bradstreet’s poems were inspired by her own real life events. She lived during a time where there was an up rising in American Literature. She was the daughter of Thomas Dudley who, “was the manager of the country estate of the Puritan Earl of Lincoln,” (Baym 207). She was…show more content…
She was an advocate for women’s rights, and in her poem, The Prologue, she expresses her beliefs towards the approval of not just her writings, but in addition to female writers in general. In the first stanza, she speaks of how her writings differ from male poets. During this time, most of the poems written were about wars, politics, and religion. Bradstreet writes, “Let poets and historians set these forth, / My obscure lines shall not so dim their worth” (5-6). Meaning that her writings are much more than cultural issues, they are something more personal, which made her work more interesting, because it was so different from other poets. She goes on to write about a Great French male writer that she admired, Bartas, and compares her work with his. In stanza two she writes, “ A Bartas can do what a Bartas will / But simple I according to my skill” (11-12). Meaning that this popular poet, Bartas, can write such great things about their religion, however she chooses to stick to her ways of writing. Later in stanza five is when she expresses her feminist views. She…show more content…
(Bradstreet 208). Anne Bradstreet writes these lines to inform the readers that she scorns those who say that women need to be stay at home wives. It is wrong of the public to classify females, and say that if she does well in her occupation it is only by chance. There was a time in Bradstreet’s life where she questioned the existence of her god. Baym writes that, “What proved to her finally that God exists was not her reading but the evidence of her own eyes… she took her consolation not from theology but form the “wondrous works,”” (207). Wondrous works meaning the unexplainable creations from God. Bradstreet wrote, “that I see, the vast frame of the heaven and the earth, the order of all things, night and day, summer and winter, spring and autumn, the daily providing for this great household upon the earth, the preserving and directing of all to its proper end,” (Baym 207). In her poem, Contemplations, she writes of the time that she first witnessed the workings of God. She talks about how magnificent the Earth is that God has created, and wonders how there can be so much more in Heaven. She uses nature to intertwine with how great thy creator can be. For example, in lines 43-47, she

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