Anne Dudley Bradstreet: An American Poet

Anne Dudley Bradstreet: An American Poet
(Born: c. 1612; Died: September 16, 1672)

Painting of Anne Dudley Bradstreet by LaDonna Gulley Warrick.
The first important American poet, Anne Dudley Bradstreet was born in England of prosperous parents who had embraced the Puritan faith. She was married at 16 to Simon Bradstreet. With her parents and husband, she sailed to North America in 1630 as a member of the Puritan group that founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Unlike most women at that time, Anne Bradstreet grew up with a love of books and received an excellent education in literature, history, and the classics. She wrote poems while she raised eight children, kept a home, and served as a hostess for her husband, a governor of the colony.
Anne Bradstreet, stained glass in St. Botolph's Church, Boston, Lincolnshire, England. (By kind permission of the Vicar and Churchwarde
Her brother-in-law took her poems to England without her knowledge. They were published there in 1650 as The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America. Ironically, these – the only poems published during her lifetime – are today considered her least interesting. Inspired by English metaphysical poets, they are long and often dull, dealing with conventional subjects such as religion as seen through the seasons. Contemporary critics and defenders of her work prefer her witty poems on daily life and her warm and loving verses to her husband and children, including one on her feelings upon the death of a month-old grandchild.
Her writings and the few records that remain about Anne Bradstreet reveal her to be a woman of high intelligence and courage. She was painfully aware of her society's disapproval of women who ventured beyond their domestic duties. In one of her poems, she proclaimed, "I am obnoxious to each carping tongue,/That says my hand a needle better fits!" And she dared to remain a friend of Anne Hutchinson, even as the men in the colony, including her husband and father, worked to banish the dissenter from their ranks.
Anne Bradstreet's literary gifts; her exploration of the universal themes of devotion to family, love, and loss; and her courage in standing by controversial friends make her an attractive model for women – and men – everywhere.
"To my Dear and Loving Husband" from Several Poems.Anne Bradstreet. Boston: John Foster, 1678
If ever two were one, then surely we.If ever man were lov'd by wife, then thee.If ever wife was happy in a man,Compare with me, ye women, if you can.I prize thy love more than whole Mines of gold,Or all the riches that the East doth hold.My love is such that Rivers cannot quench,Nor ought but love from thee give recompetence.Thy love is such I can no way repay.The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.Then while we live, in love let's so persever,That when we live no more, we may live ever.

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Anne Marbury Hutchinson
Courageous Exponent of Civil Liberty, Religious Toleration

Anne Hutchinson (© 1999-2002 The Illustrator Archive and New World Sciences Corporation)
(Born: 1591; Died: August/September 1643)
Woodcut depicting Anne Hutchinson's sentencing to be banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. (North Wind Picture Archives)
The core American concepts of freedom of religion and freedom of speech had one of their earliest advocates in Anne Marbury Hutchinson. Born in England to a dissenting Anglican clergyman and his wife, she married the merchant William Hutchinson in 1612 and bore him 15 children, according to most sources. Yearning for greater freedom to practice her religious beliefs, in 1634 she persuaded her husband to follow her beloved minister, John Cotton, to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, today's Boston.
Then her troubles began. Well-educated and not afraid to speak her mind, Anne Hutchinson began inviting devout women to her home to reflect on Cotton's sermons. As her reputation grew, the gatherings attracted men, too, including the governor, Henry Vane. In addition to stepping outside the bounds of conventional women's behavior, her denunciation of the colony's ministers and her belief that "he who has God's grace in his heart cannot go astray" set her at odds with the religious establishment. They moved to prosecute the woman Massachusetts's new governor, John Winthrop, criticized for having "a very voluble tongue, more bold than a man." According to Harvard professor Rev. Peter J. Gomes, at her trial "she bested the best of the Colony's male preachers, theologians, and magistrates." Despite her vigorous defense of her beliefs, she was excommunicated and banished in 1638, and moved with her family and other followers to Rhode Island. She is considered one of the founders of that colony, the first to establish complete separation of church and state and freedom of religion in what would become the United States. After her husband's death in 1642, Anne Hutchinson moved to Long Island, in New York. Tragically, she and all of her children save one were killed there in an Indian raid.
"Courageous Exponent of Civil Liberty and Religious Toleration" says the inscription at the bottom of a statue raised in her honor in Boston. But the most fitting tribute to Anne Hutchinson's influence – proof that her ideals ultimately prevailed over her opponents' – is the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
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