Anne Bradstreet 25
own mortality. It is quite possible that her deepened understanding of the body allowed her to differ in the thinking from the predominant feelings of shame associated with the body that one would expect in Puritan culture. Bradstreet’s discussion of the body and its functions is characterized by Rosenmeier as “frank and positive” (4). As her great-nephew COTTON M ATHER will echo years later, she sees the activity of the bowels as vital and, in some ways, miraculous: “‘transmutation . . . but not excretion’” (Rosenmeier 4). This differs sharply from the Puritan ideology of the intestinal process as the filthy and horrendous “‘loathsomeness of the inner man’” (Rosenmeier 4) or EDWARD TAYLOR’s view of the body as a “dunghill.” Physicality, according to Puritan doctrine, was the antithesis of the soul’s flight, yet for Anne Bradstreet, it is a source of fascination, despair, and passion—ultimately, a route to God. Consequently, the physical world—bodies, death, fire, nature, love—is also a wellspring for her poetry. The Bradstreets and Dudleys packed up house and moved to new outposts many times. Critics speculate that Bradstreet began writing in earnest after her family’s move to Ipswich in the mid-1630s. The poems she was writing during this period were celebrated by many at the time, but the majority of them have lost their luster, or at least pale in comparison to her later poems. The poet Adrienne Rich surmises that had Bradstreet stopped with these early poems or simply carried on with similar work, she would have possibly become “at best a literary fossil” (xiii). When her brother-in-law the Reverend John Woodbridge traveled back to England in 1647 to negotiate with King Charles, he took a manuscript of Anne Bradstreet’s collected poems with him, without Bradstreet’s knowledge. He arranged for the book to be published in London. No other manuscript by a resident of the New World had yet been published. Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, or Several Poems Compiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning, Full of Delight was the fi rst. When the book was published in 1650, Bradstreet was 38 years old. The book was prefaced by a variety of introductory comments written by men endorsing the
poet and the work, followed by three anagrams of Anne Bradstreet’s name. Nathaniel Ward wrote the simultaneously condescending and celebratory verse introduction, honoring the remarkable nature of her accomplishment in a man’s arena while also suggesting that she is merely putting on the trappings of a poet. John Woodbridge, the man who took the book to London, wrote an epistle to the reader that declared Bradstreet’s piety and discipline as a wife and mother, and her remarkable achievement in the creation of these poems: It is the work of a woman, honored, and esteemed where she lives, for her gracious demeanor, her eminent parts, her pious conversation, her courteous disposition, her exact diligence in her place, and discreet managing of her family occasions, and more than so, these poems are the fruit but of some few hours, curtailed from her sleep, and other refreshments. (A3)
He is sure to protect her dignity in what most Puritans would consider her primary occupations, those of wife and mother. Hence, she has stolen only from herself in the creation of these poems. This move makes her seem all the more disciplined as both mother and poet. In case her piety is not already clear, he adds that he has decided to publish these poems without the author’s knowledge, “to bring to public view what she resolved should never in such a manner see the sun” (A3). In actuality, when Woodbridge returned to Massachusetts and placed the book in her lap, Bradstreet’s feelings were mixed. Certainly the thrill of seeing one’s work in print was great, but she would have preferred to have had the opportunity to revise the poems, clean up the rhyme structures, and correct any errors. This is clear in her later poem, “The Author to Her Book,” which, through a clever figurative conceit of motherhood and child rearing, narrates the story of the publication of this book, her “rambling brat.” Despite Bradstreet’s reservations, the book did quite well on both sides of the Atlantic, listed in the Catalogue of the Most Vendible Books in England in 1658 (Martin 29). The book contained