Bradstreet and Taylor

Bradstreet and Taylor

by Ms. Nazzal

​Anne Bradstreet: Anne Bradstreet

1612–1672

​Anne Bradstreet was born Anne Dudley in 1612 in Northamptonshire, England. She married Simon Bradstreet, a graduate of Cambridge University, at the age of 16. Two years later, Bradstreet, along with her husband and parents, immigrated to America with the Winthrop Puritan group, and the family settled in Ipswich, Massachusetts. There Bradstreet and her husband raised eight children, and she became one of the

​first poets to write English verse in the American colonies. It was during this time that Bradstreet penned many of the poems that would be taken to England by her brother-in-law, purportedly without her knowledge, and published in 1650 under the title The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America.

​Tenth Muse was the only collection of Bradstreet's poetry to appear during her lifetime. In 1644, the family moved to Andover, Massachusetts, where Bradstreet lived until her death in 1672. In 1678, the first American edition of Tenth Muse was published posthumously and expanded as Several Poems Compiled with Great Wit and Learning. Bradstreet's most highly regarded work, a sequence of religious poems entitled Contemplations, was not published until the middle of the nineteenth century.

​Bradstreet's poetics belong to the Elizabethan literary tradition that includes Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney; she was also strongly influenced by the sixteenth century French poet Guillaume du Bartas. Her early work, which is imitative and conventional in both form and content, is largely unremarkable, and her work was long considered primarily of historical interest. She has, however, won critical acceptance in the twentieth century for her later poetry, which is less derivative and often deeply personal. In 1956 the poet John Berryman paid tribute to her in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, a long poem that incorporates many phrases from her writings.

​Edward Taylor

1642–1729

​Edward Taylor was an American Puritan poet and minister of the Congregational church at Westfield, Massachusetts for over 50 years. Considered one of the more significant poets to appear in America in the 17th and 18th centuries, his fame is the result of two works, the Preparatory Meditations ... (written 1682–1725) and Gods Determinations touching his Elect ... (written 1682?). But he also wrote many other poems during his long life, and he was an indefatigable preacher. Over 60 of his sermons are extant as well as a long treatise, The Harmony of the Gospels. With the exception of two stanzas of verse, his works were unpublished in his lifetime.

​Taylor’s birth year and place are still unknown, but the most convincing evidence indicates that he was born in 1642 in the hamlet of Sketchley, Leicestershire, England. His mother, Margaret, died in 1657, and his father, William, a yeoman farmer, in 1658. The civil war was raging in Leicestershire during his infancy, but by 1650 the future poet was enjoying the peace and stability of a prosperous midland farm.

​His poetry is replete with imagery drawn from the farm and from the countryside of both Old and New England. The Leicestershire dialect occasionally appears in his colloquial verses, as do words drawn from the weaver’s trade (in which he may have been employed at nearby Hinckley).

​Educated by a nonconformist schoolmaster, Taylor taught school for a short time at Bagworth. His firm religious convictions as a Protestant dissenter, formed in childhood and strengthened in the favorable atmosphere of Cromwell’s regime, were severely tested during the first years of the Restoration. He refused to sign the Act of Uniformity of 1662 and was therefore prevented from teaching school and from worshiping in peace. On April 26, 1668, he sailed from Execution Dock, Wapping, bound for the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

​His earliest verses, written in England, exhibit his lifelong love of the Protestant cause and his anti-Anglican and anti-Roman position. In “A Dialogue between the writer and a Maypole Dresser” the young poet berates the maypole dancers for worshiping the Roman harlot Flora when they “sacrificed a slaughtered tree to her.” He attacked the Church of Rome with the same kind of invective in the long poem written toward the end of his life, The Metrical History of Christianity. The most eloquent of his early poems, “The Lay-mans Lamentation,” praises the zeal of the dissenting preachers silenced by the Act of Uniformity, which finally drove Taylor himself to the Bay Colony. In “A Letter sent to his Brother Joseph Taylor and his wife after a visit” Taylor exhibited his early interest in acrostic verse, a form in which he continued to write in Massachusetts. The names of himself, his brother, and his brother’s wife appear in the initial and final letters of each line.

​The hardships of Taylor’s crossing of the Atlantic during the 70 days in which his ship was slowed by calms and buffeted by contrary winds are described in his diary, which also includes perceptive observations of natural phenomena, and of birds and fish, anticipating the imagery of his later poetry. On July 5, 1668, Taylor disembarked at Boston, and, after a visit with Charles Chauncy, president of Harvard College, he entered Harvard on July 23 as an upperclassman. He was the college butler in charge of kitchen utensils and responsible for collecting payment for food and drink consumed from the buttery—a position usually given a mature upperclassman. Taylor’s life at Harvard for the next three years was busy and rigorous with recitations, disputations, and lectures carried on in Latin; with studies in Greek, Hebrew, logic, metaphysics, rhetoric, and astronomy; and with daily morning and evening prayers.

​Taylor died on June 24, 1729 and was interred in the old burying ground at Westfield, Massachusetts. His interesting tombstone, engraved with the face of a primitive angel, fell into disrepair but has now been reconstructed.