Bradstreet, Anne | Patricia Caldwell (essay date 1988)
Patricia Caldwell (essay date 1988)
SOURCE: "Why Our First Poet Was a Woman: Bradstreet and the Birth of an American Poetic Voice," in Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies, Vol. 13, 1988, pp. 1–35.
[In the following excerpt, Caldwell discusses Bradstreet's struggle with traditional male images symbolizing poetic creation, and concludes that Bradstreet became the founder of American poetry precisely because of her marginal position.]
It takes a worried man—or woman—to sing a worried song, and it is not surprising that Bradstreet's earliest poetry is more worried, in a more obviously "feminine" way, than anything she wrote later. Self-consciously erudite, duly apologetic, and above all, written "to please [her] wintry father," these "public" poems are marked by frequent, nervous recurrences to two conventions that Bradstreet certainly would have encountered in her wide reading. One is the well-known modesty topos, a...
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