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An original resident of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Anne Bradstreet was a remarkable woman much admired by her family and community. She must indeed have been a remarkable person to maintain the balance between being so well thought of and performing the unwomanlike and typically un-Puritan act of writing creative literature.
Nevertheless, in her poetry she always cleverly got around these two objections.
Bradstreet is not a great poet of the English language, but her verse was the best that was being written in America at that time. The reason we consider her remarkable today is that she managed to transcend being a 17th-century woman in a patriarchal society, a Puritan, a wilderness settler, -- and was the mother of eight children!
If she had written nothing but her early poems, we probably would not be reading her today. They are imitative in style and subject mattter of English Renaissance poets and the French poet DuBartas. Imitations usually at best are competent but boring when one has the originals available. These poems of hers may be considered as sort of training exercises. These early poems were contained in The Tenth Muse...
...the volume which was taken, unknown to her, to England by her brother-in-law for publication. When she found out -- when she was presented with a printed copy -- she was very surprised and not a little embarrassed (and perhaps anxious), for such an unheard of thing as publication could damage her reputation. Also, she had not had a chance to correct them. She may, however, have been secretly pleased.
Her later poems are in a more sincere and personal voice. Here we can really make contact with this woman and hear her speaking -- and learn something of her life. These are really American some examples (if not the first examples) of what we can call truly American literature in English.
A few thoughts about what Anne Bradstreet's life must have been like... Clearly, she and other women like her who arrived in the New World must have experienced a great deal of emotional stress. She came from a civilized land where she had been comfortably brought up. Imagine her feelings upon encountering the frontier conditions of 1630 New England and knowing that she probably would never, ever be able to return to England. Later she wrote how distressed she was when she saw New England. (Some women couldn't take it -- indeed, William Bradford's wife Dorothy took her own life.) And then there were the hardships to be faced -- lack of furniture (her father didn't even have a table in his house for a while), fire, sickness, childbirth, loneliness. Nevertheless, Bradstreet managed to produce some fine poetry.
Elizabeth Wade White points out that there were no women Puritan poets of comparable ability who had stayed in England. She suggests that Anne Bradstreet's achievement might have been made possible by "a subtle but profound chang...in the attitude of pioneering men toward the women who accompanied them into the forests of New England" that accounted for the encouragement she received from the menfolk (or at least the permission) to do what she was doing.
Ann Stanford cites a couple of examples (including one from Winthrop's diary) of men who become quite upset because a woman is reading, and writing, and thinking -- men's stuff like that! So, Anne Bradstreet probably encountered her share of criticism and hostility. Stanford goes on to suggest that Bradstreet probably got away with what she did because she did not neglect her "women's work" -- "her conduct [was in] an exact conformity to the mores of her community."
Let's look at some individual poems...
"The Prologue" (pp. 247-8):
While this is an incredibly balanced statement about being a woman artist, we should be careful about reading too much feminism into it. Yet, Anne Bradstreet was not a stupid woman -- she had to know that she was at least as well-educated as most men in her place and time, and better educated than many of them. The last stanza can be read either as sincere or slyly tongue-in-cheek. At any rate, it kept her out of trouble.
"Contemplations" (pp. 262-8):
The first seven stanzas manifest an incredible tension between Puritanism and un-Puritan enjoyment in the natural world, but each time she stops herself safely short of expressing a natural religion.
"The Flesh and the Spirit" (pp. 268-70): The debate is a very ancient and traditional form. Note that Flesh's case is weak -- the deck is stacked against her because she is not allowed to to speak as long as Spirit, nor is she allowed to answer Spirit.
"The Author to Her Book" (pp. 270-1):
"To My Dear and Loving Husband" (p. 272);
"A Letter to Her Husband Absent Upon Public Employment (pp. 272);
"Another..." (p. 273):
These poems are very private and very sincere -- they need no footnotes.
"Some Verses Upon the Burning of Our House" (pp. 278-9):
A very human situation is described here.