Anne Bradstreet’s “dear remains”: Children and the Creation of Poetic Legacy

Abstract

Two prevailing tendencies mark the scholarship on the colonial writer Anne Bradstreet: first, one that deems the poet the founder of a nascent American literary tradition; and second, one that claims her as part of a feminist tradition in writing, whether American or British. These tendencies have resulted in obscuring the continuities between Bradstreet’s early “public” British writing and her later “private” American writing, while emphasizing the latter and giving short shrift to Bradstreet’s place in British literary history. The work of Adrienne Rich and other second-wave feminists, which advanced this influential reading of Bradstreet’s work, crucially considered the seventeenth-century poet worthy of study. I build upon their work as well as that of recent critics who have sought to question the influential binaries that Rich established, by examining