Poems and Meditations

This volume presents all the surviving writings of the poet Anne Bradstreet (ca. 1612–1672): the poems published during her lifetime in The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America; or, Several Poems (London, 1650), poems added to the posthumous edition of Bradstreet’s Several Poems (Boston, 1678), and the material in her hand and that of her son preserved in a manuscript volume known as the Andover manuscript. Extensive footnotes illuminate Bradstreet’s broad reading in the medical, scientific, and historical literature of her day, as well as her interest in recent and current English history and politics.

"This new collection of Anne Bradstreet’s writings brings fresh attention to the social networks of Bradstreet’s published and private poetry and prose, highlighting her cerebral temperament and her challenging lyric responses to her Protestant faith. In so doing, it allows Bradstreet not only to claim the title of first American woman poet, but also to take her rightful place among the most accomplished women writing in English in the seventeenth century — women such as Lucy Hutchinson, the Countess of Pembroke, and Amelia Lanyer."

- Phillip Round, John C. Gerber Chair in English, University of Iowa

MARGARET OLOFSON THICKSTUN, author of Fictions of the Feminine: Puritan Doctrine and the Representation of Women (1988) and Milton’s Paradise Lost: Moral Education (2007), holds the Jane Watson Irwin Chair in Literature at Hamilton College. She is also co-editor with Teresa Feroli of Witness, Warning, and Prophecy: Quaker Women’s Writing, 1655– 1700 (published in the Other Voice Series, 2018).

REVIEWS
Renaissance and Reformation 44.1 (2021): 215–17. Reviewed by Jonathan Locke Hart.
Renaissance Quarterly 75.2 (2022): 740–741. Reviewed by Angela Balla.