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 Hi,
Here's some that I'm going to type verbatim from _The Works of Anne 
Bradstreet_, edited by Jeannine Hensley, Foreword by Adrienne Rich (which is 
what I'm quoting from), Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge 
MA, 1967 
Please forgive any spelling typos - I'm typing what I can before I have to go pick 
up my kids from school... then if you need more, I can give you more later 
tonight.
She came to Boston at 18, two years married, out of a civilized and humane 
background. Her father, Thomas Dudley, a man of education and worldy 
experience, had been steward to an earl; her mother, by Cotton Mather's 
account, "a gentlewoman whose extraction and estates were considerable." Her 
own education had been that of the clever girl in the cultivated seventeenth 
century house: an excellent library, worldly talk, the encouragement of a literate 
father who loved history. Her husband was a Cambridge man, a Nonconformist 
minister's son. her father, her husband, each was to serve as Governor of 
Massachusetts; she came to the wilderness as a woman of rank.
...
Her father wrote back to England a year after their arrival:  If there be any endued 
with grace ... let them come over ... For others, I conceive they are not yet fitted 
for this business. ... There is not a house where is not one dead, and some houses 
many ... the natural causes seem to be in the want of warm lodging and good diet, 
to which Englishmen ware habituated at home, and the sudden increase of heat 
which they endure that are landed here in summer ... for those only these two last 
years died of fevers who landed in June or July, as those of Plymouth, who 
landed in winter, died of the scurvy.  (Augustine Jones. _Thomas Dudley, Second 
Governor of Massachusetts_ (Boston, 1899) p.449)   ... To read and accept 
God's will not only in the deaths of friends but in one's own frequent illness, 
chronic lameness, political tension between one's father and Governor Winthrop, 
four changes of house in eight years, difficulty in conceiving a child, private and 
public anxiety and hardship, placed a peculiar burden of belief and introspection 
on an intellectually active, sensually quick spirit.
Seventeenth-century Puritan life was perhaps the most self-conscious ever lived in 
its requirement of the individual understanding: no event so trivial that it could not 
speak a divine message, no disappointment so heavy that it could not serve as a 
"correction," a disguised blessing. Faith underwent its hourly testing, the domestic 
mundanities were episodes in the drama; the piecemeal thoughts of a woman 
stirring a pot, clues to her "justification" in Christ. A modern consciousness looks 
almsot enviously upon the intense light of significance under which those lives 
were lived out: "Everything had a meaning then," we say, as if that had ever held 
alert and curious minds back from perverse journeys:  "When I have got over this 
Block, then have I another put in my way, That admit this be the true God whom 
we worship, and that be his word, yet why may not the Popish religion be the 
right? They have the same God, the same Christ, the same word: they only 
interpret it one way, we another."  Thus Anne Bradstreet described in her old 
age, for her children, what the substance of doubt had been. And if Archbishop 
Laud and the Hierarchists back in England were right, what was one doing, after 
all, on that stretch of intermperate coast, hoarding fuel, hoarding corn, dragging 
one's half-sick self to the bedisdes of the dying? What was the meaning of it all? 
One's heart rose in rebellion.
...
Versifying was not an exceptional pursuit in that society; poetry, if edifying in 
theme, was highly recommended to the puritan reader. (A century later Cotton 
Mather was finding it necessary to caution the orthodox against "a Boundless and 
Sickly Appetite, for the Reading of Poems, which now the Rickety Nation 
swarms withal." (_Manductio ad Ministerium_, 1726))  Unpublished verse 
manuscripts circulated in New England before the first printing press began 
operation. 
...
The seventeenth-century Puritan reader was not, however, in search of "new 
voices" in poetry. If its theme was the individual in his experience of God, the final 
value of a poem lay in its revelation of God and not the individual. Least of all in a 
woman poet would radical powers be encouraged. Intellectual intensity among 
women gave cause for uneasiness: the unnerving performance of Anne Hutchinson 
had disordered the colony in 1636, and John Winthrop wrote feelingly in 1645 of 
"a godly young woman, and of special parts, who was fallen into a sad infermity, 
the loss of her understanding, and reason, which had been growing upon her 
divers years, by occasion of her giving herself wholly to reading and writing, and 
written many books."
...
She appears to have written by way of escaping from the conditions of her 
experience, rather than as an expression of what she felt and knew ... Theology, a 
subject with which her prose memoir tells us she was painfully grappling, is 
touched on in passing. Personal history -- marriage, childbearing, death, -- is 
similarly excluded from the book which gave her her contemporary reputation. 
These long, rather listless pieces seem to have been composed in a last 
compulsive effort to stay in contact with the history, traditions and values of her 
former world; nostaltia for English culture, surely, kept her scribbling at those 
academic pages, long after her conviction had run out. Present experience was 
still too raw, one sought relief from its daily impact in turning Raleigh and Camden 
into rhymed couplets, recalling a scenery and a culture denied by the wilderness. 
yet it is arguable that the verse which gained her serious acceptance in her own 
time was a psychological stepping stone to the later poems which have kept her 
alive for us.
...
Woodbridge, the brother-in-law who published her first book (without her 
knowledge or consent), explained that the book  "is the Work of a Woman, 
honoured, and esteemed where she lives, for her gracious demeanour, 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 but the fruit of some few houres, curtailed from her 
sleepe and other refreshments."
...
She was a spirited woman with a strong grasp on reality and temperament, 
experience, and the fact of having reached a wider audience converged at this 
point to give Anne Bradstreet a new assurance. Her poems were being read 
seriously by strangers, though not in the form she would have chosen to send 
them out. Her intellectual delight was no longer vulnerable to carping ("They'll say 
my hand a needle better fits"); it was a sympton neither of vanity nor infirmity, she 
had carried on her woman's life conscientiously while composing her book.  It is 
probable that some tension of self-distrust was relaxed, some inner vocation 
confirmed, by the publication and praise of _The Tenth Muse_. But the word 
"vocation" must be read in a special sense. Not once in her prose memoir does 
she allude to her poems or to the publication of her book; her story, as written out 
for her children, is the familiar puritan drama of temptation by Satan and 
correction by God. She would not have defined herself, even by aspiration, as an 
artist. But she had crossed the line between the amateur and the artist, where 
private dissatisfaction begins and public approval, though gratifying, is no longer 
of the essence. For the poet of her time and place, poetry might be merely a 
means to a greater end; but the spirit in which she wrote was not that of a 
dilettante.
...
Upon the grounds of a Puritan aesthetic either kind of poem won its merit solely 
through doctrinal effectiveness ; and it was within a Puritan aesthetic that Anne 
Bradstreet aspired and wrote. What is remarkable is that so many of her verses 
satisfy a larger aesthetic, to the estent of being genuine, delicate minor poems.
Anne Bradstreet was the first non-didactic American poet, the first to give an 
embodiment to American nature, the first in whom personal intention appears to  
precede Puritan dogma as an impulse to verse. Not that she could be construed 
as a Romantic writing out of her time. The web of her sensibility stretches almost 
invisibly within the framework of Puritan literary convention; its texture is 
essentially both Puritan and feminine. Compared with her great successor, 
Edward Taylor, her voice is direct and touching, rather than electrifying in its 
tensions or highly colored in its values. Her verses have at every point a 
transparency which precludes the metaphysical image; her eye is on the realities 
before her, or on images from the Bible. Her individualism lies in her choice of 
material rather than in her style.
The difficulty displaced, the heroic energy diffused in merely living a life, is an 
incaclulable quantity. It is pointless, finally, to say that Poe or Hart Crane might 
have survived longer or written differently had either been born under a better star 
or lived in more encouraging circumstances. America has from the first levied 
peculiarly harsh taxes on its poets -- physical, social, moral, through absorption as 
much as through rejection. John Berryman admits that in coming to write his long 
poem, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, "I did not choose her - somehow she 
chose me - one point of connection being the almsot insuperable difficulty of 
writing high verse at all in a land that cared and cares so little for it..  Still, with all 
stoic recognition of the common problem in each succeeding century including the 
last half hour, it is worth observing that Anne Bradstreet happened to be one of 
the first American women, inhabiting a time and place in which heroism was a 
necessity of life, and men and women were fighting for survival both as individuals 
and as a community. To find room in that life  for any mental activity which did not 
directly serve certain spiritual ends, was an act of great self-assertion and vitality. 
To have written poems, the first good poems in America, while rearing eight 
children, lying frequently sick, keeping house at the edge of wilderness, was to 
have managed a poet's range and extension within confines as severe as any 
Amercian poet has confronted. If the severity of these confines left its mark on the 
poetry of Anne Bradstreet, it also forced into concentration and permanence a 
gifted energy that might, in another context, have spent itself in other, less enduring 
directions.
...
More from Adrienne Rich: What did it really mean for women to come to a "new 
world"; in what sense and to what extent -was- it "new" for them? Do the lives of 
the women of a community change simply because that community migrates to 
another continent? (The question would have to be asked differently for the poet 
Phyllis Wheatley, brought to the "new world" as a slave.) What has been the 
woman poet's relationship to nature, in a land where both women and nature 
have, from the first, been raped and exploited? Much has been written, by white 
American male writers, of the difficulties of creating "great literature" at the edge 
of wilderness, in a society without customs and traditions. Were the difficulties the 
same for women? Could women attempt the same solutions? To what strategies 
have women poets resorted in order to handle dangerous and denigrated female 
themes and experiences? What did the warning of the midwife heretic Anne 
Hutchinson's fate mean for Anne Bradstreet? To what extent is Bradstreet's 
marriage poetry an expression of individual feeling, and where does it echo the 
Puritan ideology of marriage, including married love as the "duty" of every 
god-fearing couple? Where are the stress-marks of anger, the strains of 
self-division, in her work? ...


OK.  So there you go.  A chunk of text to do with as you will......
If you need more, or clarification, or other hints/comments, just drop me a line.