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8. Finding Anne Bradstreet

EAVAN BOLAND

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THIS IS A PIECE ABOUT ANNE BRADSTREET. But there is another subjecthere as well. Its nature? For want of an exact definition, it is subject matteritself: that bridge of whispers and sighs over which one poet has to travelto reach another, out of which is formed the text and context of a predecessor. That journey into the past—not just Anne Bradstreet's but myown—is the substance of this essay.

I have always been fascinated by the way poets of one time constructthe poets of a previous one. It can be an invisible act, arranged so that none of the awkwardly placed struts are visible. But the discussion ofinvisibility is not my intention. I am interested in the actual process ofreconstruction, in the clear and unclear motives with which a poet fromthe present goes to find one from the past. I am interested, therefore, inthe actions and choices that have the power to turn a canon into something less authoritarian and more enduring: from a set text into a livingtradition. The sometimes elusive, yet utterly crucial, difference betweena canon and a tradition is also part of this piece. So in that sense I wantthe plaster work to show and the background noise to be heard.

All of this seems worth saying at the beginning because I found Anne Bradstreet first in a revealing context. Not in her own words: not in thequick, fluent, and eventually radical cadences that mark her style. My

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first discovery of her had an ominous irony about it, so I will begin with that.

American poetry was hard to find in Dublin when I was a young poet. It was the mid-sixties. The names of American poets and their poemswere not just unavailable in the bookshops: they were unavailable in theair. Part of that was simply enclosure. In the previous decades Ireland hadcome through an intense, inward adventure of its own. Its own poetry, its own poets, its domestic sense of having beaten the odds in both ahistoric and aesthetic sense were the dominant tropes of its literary selfperception. In that sense the Irish poetry world stood on what Arnoldeloquently called “burning ground.” Everyone shared in it. Everyonestood on it. It was an exciting literary culture, precisely because it was soenclosed. In a newspaper article Patrick Kavanagh made a vivid distinctionbetween literary provincialism and parochialism. Parochialism, he wrote, was that blind conviction of being at the center of things, of knowing noother place: it was the summer crossroads where he first made up balladson football. It was the city that talked about itself endlessly: Joyce' city, with its draped curtains, glittering coastline, and malicious jokes. Provincialism, however, was the hankering for an elsewhere, an anxious measuring of the local against some other, distant standard. In that sense Dublin was—in the best sense—parochial.

A few things got through: a random sampling of the excitements ofelsewhere. One of these was Homage to Mistress Bradstreet by John Berryman. Published in 1953 in the Partisan Review—and then as a volumein 1956—it was a tour de force, a cunning mixture of eulogy and elegy. Its language and syntax, its odd and vehement music had packed its energies in Yeats' proverbial ice and salt and readied them to cross the Atlantic. Over the next decade the poem made its way into the conversations of young Irish poets. Some of this was because of Berryman himself. He came to Dublin in the mid-sixties, made friends, made enemies, caused a certain amount of mayhem, and briefly entered a poetic way oflife that thrived on all three.

I remember struggling with Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. It was noteasy to read for any student or young poet who was used to the Irishpoem. It bore no resemblance to anything else. It was a rough, sinuousevocation of a snowy New England I had never seen, a Puritan rubric Ihad never heard of, a historical reinvention I knew next to nothing about. As a piece of information it was a lot less clear than Lycidas and a lot lesstransparent than Adonais. It was also stubbornly mannered, hard to follow, given to cross-jumps of tone and point of view. I was twenty years old

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and a bad-tempered parochial in Kavanagh' definition, and I was not atall sure I wanted to persevere with it.

Yet my first information about Anne Bradstreet came from that poem.“Born 1612 Anne Dudley, married at 16 Simon Bradstreet, a Cambridgeman, steward to the Countess of Warwick & proteégeé of her father Thomas Dudley, secretary to the Earl of Lincoln. Crossed in the Arbella, 1630, under Governor Winthrop.”^[1] But none of those practical details arrestedme. The woman, the poet, was not yet visible. What disturbed and struckme were those fifty-seven stanzas. I didn't give them up. I continued toread. I floundered around in the richly divided identities of the piece. Part ode. Part dialogue. Part harangue. Part seéance. And then the poet'voice, usurping the very identity he is seeking out.

(2)

	Outside the New World winters in grand dark
	white air lashing high thro' the virgin stands
	foxes down foxholes sigh,
	surely the English heart quails, stunned.
	I doubt if Simon than this blast, that sea,
	spares from his rigour for your poetry
	more. We are on each other' hands
	who care. Both of our worlds unhanded us. Lie stark,

(3)

	thy eyes look to me mild. Out of maize & air
	your body' made, and moves. I summon, see,
	from the centuries it.
	I think you won't stay. How do we
	linger, diminished, in our lovers' air,
	implausibly visible, to whom, a year,
	years, over interims; or not;
	to a long stranger; or not; shimmer and disappear.[2]

These stanzas by Berryman prove the point: using the materials of adifferent moment, he boldly and obstinately constructs a poet and a past. By the time the poem concludes, he has forced his way into the presenceof Anne Bradstreet: that young woman who sailed from England at theage of eighteen, who found the Massachusetts winters harsher than thosein Lincolnshire, who bore American children, who wrote love poems toher husband, who resolved her quest for style in a radical, domestic polemic. The problem is that by the time the poem is over, we know how

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the Massachusetts winter drifts down through a broken syntax, how ascalding faith may once have sounded, how musical those names andsalutations were. We can even guess about John Berryman' need for apast, a place, a source. But what do we know about her?

2

Anne Dudley was born in 1612, in Northamptonshire, in an England that had been nine years without its imperious queen and would, in anotherfour, lose William Shakespeare and the raffish ethos of the Tudor world. Post-Elizabethan England. Already sewing the wind of the Civil War that was less than thirty years away. Already feeling the pinch and reproach of real-life Malvolios.

Her father was Thomas Dudley, at first clerk to Judge Nicolls in Northamptonshire and then steward of the earl of Lincoln' estate in Sempringham. These were not great people, but they lived in the shadow andpeace of greatness. Her father would have known about fine wines andtreasured books and the weighty ermines of the court. He would havetalked to the ambitious builders and covetous architects of the period. Although he himself had never been to university he had been tutored bya graduate, so he was able to give his daughter some knowledge of Greekand Latin and French.

It is hardly possible to imagine that England. It was a paradox, a contradiction, a place marching toward regicide and fratricide yet still in sightof the glories and upheavals of the Elizabethan Age. Although Anne Dudley must have heard reminiscences, within the shelter of the earl of Lincoln' estates, of the Armada, of the queen, of ships returning with silksand spices and new tastes and stolen riches, her reality was darker. Whenthe Massachusetts Bay Company was formed in 1628, she was sixteen years old. Her father and her new husband, Simon Bradstreet, werefounding members. The nonconformist protest was intensifying, and rageat the taxes and restrictions of Charles I was suddenly the text for action. The old England, with its grace, pride, and remembrance, was now a lifethreatening fiction.

In 1630 these founding members began their “errand into the wilderness,” as Samuel Danforth called it.^[3] The Arbella set sail from Southampton. Three months later John Winthrop wrote that “there came a smelloff the shore like the smell of a garden.”^[4] They were safe. They landed at Massachusetts. For Puritanism it was a new context. For America a new

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history. For Anne Bradstreet a new story. Or half of one. As she stepsonto the shore of New England, she disappears. The young woman wholoved England is lost in America. “I… came into this country, where Ifound a new world and new manners, at which my heart rose.”^[5]

Anne Bradstreet is that rare thing: a poet who is inseparable from history. The proportions are not usually so equal and compelling. She canbe located in the same way as a place name on a map, and we can judgethe distance more accurately because of that. After all, it was history that swept her up, out of the graceful houses and prospects of Lincolnshireand into a three-month sea voyage. History that brought her to the shoresof Massachusetts. History that included her in the rigorous self-definitionof the Puritans. History that almost demoted her to a figure in the background of a turbulent time.

But when she encountered the New World, she was met not so muchby history as by daily routine and hardship. The first winter was crueland hungry. Food was scarce. “Clams, and muscles [sic], and ground-nuts and acorns”^[6] must have seemed a poor diet after the feasts of Lincolnshire. Even her father wrote the bleak truth back to England: “There is not ahouse where is not one dead, and some houses many.”^[7] But her life atthat moment was set in a mold of survival and compliance, both. Firstthe hard winters, the forced adaptation. Then it was swift and relentlessshifting: from Salem to Charlestown, to Cambridge, to Ipswich, and finally to Andover. With each move, each unquestioning pursuit of herhusband and father, each trekking after Dudley and Simon Bradstreet, she wrote herself deeper into that difficult history.

The mid-thirties found the Dudleys and Bradstreets living in Ipswich, with a parcel of land, some more prosperity, a gradual easing of conditions. Now twenty-four years old, with two children, Anne Bradstreet had partially recovered from the lameness she had suffered during her eighteenth year. She was raising her children, absorbing her landscape, writing inearnest. And there I leave her for the moment so as to widen the story ofwhich she is a part.

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The mysterious life and achievement of Anne Bradstreet—her occasionally surprising and quick-moving poems, her fresh and intense outlook—is a story I will keep circling around here. No one approach is completelysatisfactory. History, culture, political change are all part of it. But not all

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of it. Some of her truth may have less to do with history than with socialanachronism. Because Anne Bradstreet is a founding American poet, it iseasy to forget that she was also a dying star in the context of Europeanpoetry: a poet writing against a background of adamant faith from acountry deeply troubled by the usurpation of religion by politics. A poetof the coteries, when the wider community was becoming fashionable. Apoet whose inner and outer life remained powerfully undivided, whenthe subtle divisions between them—from which romanticism wouldeventually emerge—was beginning to evolve in England.

It is ironic that had Anne Bradstreet stayed in England, her ecosystemwould have been radically different. In a country with an incipient Civil War, a poisoned and politicized religious system, and, after that, an approaching Restoration, where women would be considered bait forprinces rather than poets in their own right, how would she have fared? Any consideration of Anne Bradstreet' work has to take this into account: she left a poetic tradition in which she would almost certainly have remained anonymous and founded another in which she is visible, anomalous, and crucial.

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How do I see Anne Bradstreet? The answer is not simple. To start with, there is no figure in Irish poetry like her. To read of her travels and herpieties, to consider the male power that surrounded her and to which shedeferred, and finally to hear her plain-spoken and resistant voice convinceme of some out-of-the-way poetic truths. Here is one of them:

When we speak of the way a poet constructs the poets of another age—which is a good deal of my subject—certain things get missed. When Iwas a young poet, it was an article of faith that modernism was thewatershed, the event that changed every poet' view of the recent anddistant past. If I wasn't persuaded then, I am even less convinced now.

No, the real watershed—the place where poets divide—is in the versionof those centuries—the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth—whichare talismanic possessions for the young poet. Not just in poetry. Afterall, in those centuries galaxies were found and poetic forms rediscovered;faiths were changed and diseases named. Those are the centuries that divide or attach poets.

Those are the last continents of time where the hinterland of poetrylay as a gleaming, shining distance, still to be named and changed. Just

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to see that hinterland, just to lay claim to those possessions, is for theyoung poet often the first unforgettable sensing of the freedom and thegrandeur of the art.

But my version of those centuries is the Irish, not the British or American one. There is a world of difference. As Anne Bradstreet was seekingthe New World, Ireland was losing the old one. As the Massachusetts Bay Colony was testing its ideas of grace, Ireland was sinking deeper into itsknowledge of abandonment. As Simon Bradstreet was touching the lightof manifest destiny, the Gaelic order, the bards and the unlucky princesof Ireland were preparing to learn the opposite. And what Anne Bradstreettook with her into her poetry, into the New World—that upward roll of Elizabethan music—is the very cadence that poisoned the wells for the Irish poets.

So when I picture her, this figure from the time and language that dispossessed my own, how can I see her clearly? I am not John Berryman, imagining her on the deck of the Arbella, founding his tradition, guaranteeing his music, fearing her elusiveness—“I think you won't stay.”^[8] Unlike Berryman, my syntax was guaranteed by another group of poets.

But the truth is, I do see her. And somehow the fact that I do, despitenot counting her century into my inheritance, seems to prove my point: that the reconstruction of the past, the reconstruction of poet by poet, iswillful, inventive, compulsive. The truth is, I cannot afford not to see Anne Bradstreet. She lays her claim across every boundary, in spite ofevery distance. What' more, she tests my own powers of reconstruction. Pock-marked, slightly lame, outspoken and astonishing in her ability tosurvive the odds, she comes before me.

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Anne Bradstreet was thirty-eight when her poetry was published. Not inher native Massachusetts, not even in America, but in an England shewould never see again. Her brother-in-law arranged it. He returned to England in 1650, bringing a manuscript of her poems with him and arranging for its publication as The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America. It would appear to be a strange route to publication but only if seenthrough modern eyes. Publication for contemporary poets has been asingle and sometimes superstitious act: the first book, then the second. But I suspect that in Puritan Massachusetts, as once in eighteenth-century Ireland, the line between what was broadcast and published and locallyknown and communally written was not at all as clear as it became

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later: that there was a rich, blurred run of colors at the edge of privateauthorship and public faith.

The Tenth Muse was published through the efforts of her brother-in-law, the Reverend John Woodbridge, who wrote a winning and eloquent“Epistle to the Reader” at the start of the book. It is Anne Bradstreet'only publication in her lifetime. Not until she had been dead six yearsdid a second, amended edition of The Tenth Muse come out. A thirdfollowed in 1758. This is a leisurely publication schedule by any standards, and not until 1867 did John Harvard Ellis produce a scholarly and complete text of this book, with more authoritative inclusions.

In his “Epistle to the Reader” Woodbridge is quick to disclaim anypoetic vanity on the part of his sister-in-law. He remarks that he has“presumed to bring to publick view what she [Bradstreet] resolved shouldin such manner never see the sun.”^[9] Despite this, the poems are onlypartially successful. A heavy Spenserian shadow hangs over them, as if hergirlhood ghost were haunting the paneled rooms of Sempringham. Theypay elaborate and conventional tribute to the old heroes and graces of herpast: Philip Sidney; her father, Thomas Dudley. The public tone oftenfalters; the language rarely shines. Only In Honour of That High and Mighty Princess Queen Elizabeth of Happy Memory cracks open to suggeststrength and craft. Despite a clumsy percussion, despite the rhymes swerving and chasing the sentiments around the page, there is a vigor of nostalgia, something haunting and striking about this memory of a powerfulwoman, written by a woman just learning her own power:

	Who was so good, so just, so learn'd, so wise,
	From all the kings on earth she won the prize.
	Nor say I more than duly is her due,
	Millions will testify that this is true.
	She hath wiped off th' aspersion of her sex,
	That women wisdom lack to play the rex.
	Spain' monarch, says not so, nor yet his host;
	She taught them better manners, to their cost.[10]

There is no mystery about The Tenth Muse. It is the oddly confident, sometimes accomplished work of a well-born woman. The mystery comeslater. After 1653, in the years following the death of her father, Anne Bradstreet' poems changed. The subjects closed in. Her feelings, her children, the life of her home, the spirit of her marriage—these, rather thanelegies for lost courtiers, became her themes. The music shifted: the

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volume was turned down; the voice became at once more private andmore intense. A quick-walking cadence accompanied the neighborly, definite voice in which she now told her story. These were cadences that came from the New England moment in which she lived. At last thecomplicated England of her youth was receding.

To My Dear and Loving Husband

	If ever two were one, then surely we
	If ever man were loved 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 recompense.
	Thy love is such I can no way repay,
	The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
	Then while we live, in love let' so persevere
	That when we live no more, we may live ever.
	(225)

Or this, from the last year of her life:

In Reference to Her Children, 23 June 1659

	I had eight birds hatched in one nest,
	Four cocks there were, and hens the rest.
	I nursed them up with pain and care,
	Nor cost, nor labour did I spare,
	Till at the last they felt their wing,
	Mounted the trees, and learned to sing;
	Chief of the brood then took his flight
	To regions far and left me quite.
	My mournful chirps I after send,
	Till he return, or I do end:
	Leave not thy nest, thy dam and sire,
	Fly back and sing amidst this choir.
	(232–34)

Where does this voice come from? On the surface, it seems to beearned and made by a woman caught in an unusually rich and powerfuldialogue with an authoritarian tradition. Whatever name is given to that

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authority—maleness, Puritanism, doctrine—the dialogue is sweetenedby a strange irony. It appears that the Puritan world can offer a womanpoet more permission for domestic and ordinary detail than the Elizabethan one ever did. This is not to diminish the authorship. It is Anne Bradstreet' unique achievement that she could burrow into the cracks, discover the air of history, and find a breathing space to be Puritan, poet, and woman:

	I washed thy face, but more defects I saw,
	And rubbing off a spot still made a flaw.
	I stretched thy joints to make thee even feet,
	Yet still thou run't more hobbling than is meet;
	In better dress to trim thee was my mind,
	But nought save homespun cloth i' th' house I find.
	(“The Author to Her Book,” 221)

As Adrienne Rich wrote of her: “The web of her sensibility stretchesalmost invisibly within the framework of Puritan literary convention; itstexture is essentially both Puritan and feminine.”^[11] And the Puritan spiritis more easily reconciled, it seems, within the domestic parameter, withthe willful, personal intention of the earthly artist, envious of being remembered. “You once desired me,” she writes to her son in 1664, “to leavesomething for you in writing that you might look upon, when you shouldsee me no more.”^[12]

In the final years of the 1660s, when a lavish court has been reinstatedin the country of her birth, Anne Bradstreet—only a few years from herdeath in 1672—is a world away from power and costume. She has becomethe author of a bold, personal narrative, mourning her grandchildren, stripping out the rhythms she once learned as ornament, making themserve true feeling:

	I knew she was but as a withering flower,
	That' here today, perhaps gone in an hour;
	Like as a bubble, or the brittle glass,
	Or like a shadow turning as it was.
	(“In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Anne Bradstreet,” 236)

But where did she get the permission for this? Did she really find thesustenance in a Puritan world for what looks remarkably like private andwillful expression? The answer (or answers) to that question puts the most

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strain on the second subject of this piece: the relation between the pastand present of poetry. Between the dead and living poet.

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Anne Bradstreet not only lived in another time; she continues to dwell ina past that I could never hope to find. Strong-willed, displaced, she appears and disappears in front of me. The pock-marked young English girl, scarred by a mystery illness, becomes an American woman poet in themidst of a drama of fervor and faith, becomes the wife and daughter ofpowerful men, becomes mother of a powerful son to whom she confidedher language and purpose.

I wish I could see her clearly. I wish I could see the pen she wrote with. I wish I could reach back to those first hurt conversations in the Massachusetts colony, to her struggles with grace and her conflict with obedience. I wish I could see her in the house in Ipswich, with her childrenaround her. “Nor cost, nor labour did I spare.”^[13]

The fact is, I can't. And to overlook this simple realization may wellcorrupt that contact between poet and poet that I began by considering. Poets of the present may invent the poets of the past all too easily, maywrench them from the disciplines and decisions of the world they livedin with such care and pain and disfigure them in a more convenientpresent.

The example of Anne Bradstreet is a sobering, chastening warning tosuch canon making. I cannot, as I've said, reconstruct her. If the youngwoman is unavailable, the older one is elusive. But even the poet that sheis resists, in some strange way, any easy reevaluation by the present. Inthis may lie one of the enduring fascinations of her work. So in summary I will try to outline some of that resistance here.

The challenge offered by Anne Bradstreet' work is partly to do withits time and location: its origins in one world and its outcome in another. But there is more to the issue than that. In a real way her work lays barethe possible corruptions of the invention of one poet by another, of thepast by the present.

If one poet returned to another with simply the prejudices of a time, it would be awkward but understandable: there might be a risk of simplification but not erasure. But this is never the case. We return as poetsto the past lugging the huge wing-beams and magical engines and turbinesof our age. We drag them across subtleties and differences and demand

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that our predecessors learn to fly as we have. Providing, of course, theyuse our machines to do so.

Consider Anne Bradstreet. She lived in a community and adventure offaith, at a real and figurative distance from a continent where both werefading. She struggled with the very concepts of grace, unreason, and compliance that Europe was preparing to throw over. Her first poems—thosein The Tenth Muse—were structured, formal, and derivative. Her finalones were sharp and musical and impossible to overlook. She waits to bereconsidered. But how can it be done?

In one sense she is a compelling figure precisely because she standsoutside the categories we have prepared for the dialogue between past andpresent. Our concepts of what constitutes the public and private poemwill not do when we approach her. Above all, our postromantic definitionof what is the inner life and what the outer in poetry, and who patrolsthe borders, will not serve in her case. If we use these categories, we willblur the astringent angles of what she achieved. But how to do otherwise?

A quick look shows how. If we return to Anne Bradstreet with ourdefinitions of the public and private poem and notions of nineteenth-century inner life, we will be drawn to a single and deceptive conclusion: the poems in The Tenth Muse are more wooden and fixed than Bradstreet'later poems. The later poems are fresh, warm, particular. How temptingit is to use our everyday categories of criticism to argue that her innermind was freed by the death of her father; that this new freedom compelled her to negotiate the inner world of love and domesticity into aprivate poetry rather than an official one; that she found a private voicewithin the public ethos of Puritanism; that, if the truth were told, she isa subversive within the larger structures of the early American experience. These are certainly appealing propositions. But are they true?

It would be convenient if they were. It would make Anne Bradstreetimmediately available to the poetic wisdoms of our own time. But I amnot sure. As an Irish poet I see a flaw in those divisions between privateand public. As a woman poet I see a founding inaccuracy in this blueprintof the inner life. No, to understand her at all requires a break with the norms of psychobiography—far too often employed on poets and especially women poets—and an attempt to track her in the broader contextwhere her works belong.

It is tempting to see the girl who left England in 1628 as young andsingular, almost a child bride about to travel from ease to hardship, andto read back from her poetry to catalogue her adjustments and realizations. But this view is incomplete. No individual journey can explain the

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woman who suddenly, in 1662, could write with spirit, with a compellingcontemporary eloquence, about desire in marriage, the death of children, the burning of her house. Another explanation is necessary.

The tense and elaborate world of poetry she left behind must haveseemed a faraway dream in the mid-seventeenth century on the salty coastsof New England. But her shedding of that world is not easily measurabletoday. It would be a mistake to look for it in one act of style or onesuppression of rhetoric. It has to be judged, like a quark or quasar, byabsences, negations, negative energies, suppositions of space and distance.

The England that Anne Bradstreet left behind had already assigned aplace to the poet. And it is clearly identified in those poems in The Tenth Muse in which she herself echoes the place-making energies of that canon. The place is not to be found in style. It is a series of angles and distances, a series of inferences by which poets reveal the ground they stand on bythe words they choose.

By the time Anne Bradstreet sailed for America, the English poet hadin these angles and relations an inner and outer world. Like a child, that poetic world had dissociated itself out of self-protection: it had split apartthe better to handle the raw, intimate relation to power that history andsociety had ordained for the English poet of that time. The outer worldwas often coded into decorums, ornaments, pieces of rhetoric. The innerworld was dark, raw, nihilistic. And this dichotomy reflected the fact that the poet of Elizabethan England, and before that Tudor England, was often an artist of grace and gifts who had learned the hard way—Surreyis an obvious example—that power offered no exemption, that poets mustwrite in the shadow of the gallows, as well as in the light of favor. Aboveall, they had learned how to arm themselves with the gorgeous pastoralof prothalamion—the rivers, the nymphs, the musical harmonies—thebetter to infer a world of exclusion and pain.

What happened to Anne Bradstreet? To put it another way, What didnot happen to her? She did not learn from the young Milton, the young Marvell. She did not see how ornament might imply disorder. She didnot learn that the poet' place is in a split-apart world. In fact, the opposite. She came to enact in her life and her work a world of action, faith, expression, family, and ordinary adventure. And in the process the fissurehealed. And suddenly—of course not suddenly—we have a woman inmiddle life whose children are gone, whose house has burned down, whomakes no angles, distances, or perspective among faith, event, and feeling. They are all one. They have all happened. So she generates a poem in

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which they are indivisible, from a sensibility that is not divided. And shechanges the history of poetry.

By this interpretation Anne Bradstreet wrote—in her best and laterwork—in a community so scalded by change and history that the publicand private were fused into one and the same. This is a rare circumstancefor poetry. Nevertheless, I suspect her poems were indeed written in thecrucible of that fusion: they document a privacy that was public and apublic faith that was privately realized. They also presume the most intimate and exacting audience: one anxious to hear and see its own newadventures. If all this is true, then the later shift into the intimacy ofpoems about her husband, her children, her domestic life is not trulydisruptive. The poems are merely continuations of this powerful intimacybetween poet and community caught in the same dialogue of faith, duty, reflection. Anne Bradstreet' poems shift and reassemble and shimmerwith the hard-won confidence of that complex historical self. They areexcitingly innocent of the sense that this is, by some definition of her ownpast, a smaller life. Most important, by being innocent of these definitions, she questions our own.

It would be wrong to make extravagant claims for Anne Bradstreet. Herwork is memorable and strange and moving but also uneven and unrealized in certain parts. Yet it would also be wrong to deny how strongly shechallenges our rights over the past. However powerful the relation between poet and poet, it must always yield to a poet like Anne Bradstreet, a poet whose work comes from a world both made and suffered and notat all ready to be erased by our easy assumptions, a poet who makes itclear that any relation with her must be on her terms also.

NOTES

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