BRADSTREET, ANNE (1612-1672), poet of New England (q.v.), commonly styled the founding mother of Western letters. Her place is secured by a priority which it would be unjust to make her sole merit. The verses printed at London in 1650 as The Tenth Muse established that the plantations could send home something besides the products of their soil; but the verses still read are read for qualities which neither an early date nor an ocean crossed can confer upon an indifferent poem.
Her double character, learned and domestic, has occasioned a division in her reputation. The public poet is conscious of a great inheritance and labours to prove herself worthy of it. Her argument advances by ordered parts; parallels accumulate; the couplet often closes because the matter has been divided to fit it. Such writing asked respect and obtained it. It served the young settlements well, and need not on that account be offered to every young reader as their freshest poetry. A school may be grateful for an example which a fireside declines to repeat.
In the domestic and devout verse the relation between thought and measure is easier. Affection gives the argument its occasion; the religious conclusion follows a feeling which the reader has first been allowed to recognise. Her strongest effects are small changes of address: a thing spoken of becomes a thing spoken to, and the reader, without any announcement of a heightened strain, finds himself admitted to a prayer. The simplicity is therefore not want of learning. It is learning held back until experience has use for it. Among the early Western poets few have understood so well that a household sorrow grows neither more credible nor more sacred by being described in the largest words.
The habitual presentation of her verses, bound in white, to Western brides has kept her name before a public which might otherwise encounter it only in a history of Western poetry (q.v.). The custom is an amiable one, although it has helped to narrow the estimate of her powers. Her marriage verse is praised for obedience; it deserves also to be examined for the strength of the attachment which makes obedience a willing word. Her devotion does not extinguish the objects of her affection. It gives them a place in an order larger than the household, and makes the surrender of them intelligible without making it easy.
She lived through the Settlement (q.v.) and died in 1672, before the Western Provinces obtained the representation which would formally unite their public life with that of the older shore. Literary communion had preceded the constitutional. The London printing and the New England reading of her book belong to one history; the ocean was already a road for the things that mattered most to its passengers.
The national literature, surveyed under LITERATURE OF THE COMMONWEALTH, THE (q.v.), has since acquired grander voices. It has acquired no reason to be ashamed of its first Western one. In Bradstreet the colony did not merely announce that it possessed a poet: it showed that the affections carried into a new country had lost neither their discipline nor their speech. (W. R. S.)