Anne Bradstreet’s family migrated to America along with the original founders in 1630, and she was, by all accounts, a fairly consistent Puritan. Her husband, Simon Bradstreet, was one of the magistrates who oversaw the trial of Anne Hutchinson; he also voted to banish her from the colony.

Anne Bradstreet is notable for a few reasons, not least because her first volume of poetry, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650), was the first poetry published by someone in the New World. It was also published without her knowledge, an issue she addresses in a later poem (that she did intend to be published), “The Author to Her Book” (1659).

For students who are relatively new to Early American literature, however, it’s important to recognize the gulf between modern assumptions about poetry and the poetic practices of someone like Bradstreet. Many of our modern expectations emerge from the Romantics, especially Wordsworth’s idea of an isolated individual rhapsodizing about a “spontaneous overflow of emotion.”

Bradstreet was not a Romantic and not a proto-Romantic. Instead, much of her poetry belongs to the meditative poetic tradition, and in some cases the more specific genre of emblem poetry. This chapter offers some background and tips for recognizing those traditions, especially emblem poetry.

Meditative Poetry

Nearly all religious traditions rely heavily on some form of meditation to practice spirituality. In some cases spirituality is cultivated primarily through certain forms of meditation. Meditative poetry simply combines these techniques with verse forms. We can find these examples of meditative poetry in Judeo-Christian traditions, such as the Psalms, but also in Buddhist and Hindu writings.

In the 21st-century, as introspection and self-care become emphasized and people purposely unplug to center themselves, meditative poetry has made a massive comeback. Here’s a meditation by Deepak Chopra, “Meditation in the Rainforest (with Rumi poetry)”:

There are of course important differences between the different meditative traditions. Some rely heavily on sacred texts, others on images, others on short mantras or even just the breath. There’s a vast range. Puritan meditative poetry belongs to the medieval tradition of intermixing sacred verse, personal introspection, and certain visualization techniques to achieve heightened spirituality.

Much of Bradstreet’s poetry is meditative. The most obvious example is “The Flesh and the Spirit,” a poem that portrays the drama of soul, in verse form. It serves as an admonition to Bradstreet to remain steadfastly dedicated to spiritual, invisible things. After the sister “Flesh” points out that it’s impossible to live by meditation and contemplation alone, the sister “Spirit” replies:

Thy sinful pleasures I do hate,
Thy riches are to me no bait.
Thine honours do, nor will I love,
For my ambition lies above.
My greatest honour it shall be
When I am victor over thee,
And Triumph shall, with laurel head,
When thou my Captive shalt be led.
How I do live, thou need'st not scoff,
For I have meat thou know'st not of.
The hidden Manna I do eat;
The word of life, it is my meat.
My thoughts do yield me more content
Than can thy hours in pleasure spent.
Nor are they shadows which I catch,
Nor fancies vain at which I snatch
But reach at things that are so high,
Beyond thy dull Capacity.
Eternal substance I do see
With which inriched I would be.
Mine eye doth pierce the heav'ns and see
What is Invisible to thee.

The tension between the flesh and the spirit are part of a cosmic hierarchy, a chain of being within which lesser things are below and higher things are above. The most important things, Spirit suggests, remain invisible.

Emblem Poetry

One of Bradstreet’s most famous meditative poems, “Contemplations,” is also one of the first quasi-nature poems in American literature. To make sense of what’s going on, however, it’s important to understand the role of emblems in early modern poetry. 

Poetic emblems often appear in meditative poetry, but they can also appear in book form. Emblem books became extremely popular during the early modern period. Aesop’s Fables, a medieval bestiary, was heavily republished during this time, and it served as the ancient precedent. Like Aesop, 16th-century emblem books often paired pithy texts with images to educate readers how to live. 

What does this have to do with Bradstreet? In “Bliss Lost, Wisdom Gained: Contemplating Emblems and Enigmas in Anne Bradstreet’s ‘Contemplations,'” Michael G. Ditmore explains how Bradstreet’s “Contemplations” is informed by the early Modern emblem tradition:

As you read “Contemplations,” one way to approach it is as a series of emblems intended to convey a deeper lesson. What do each of the emblems mean? And what does the poem as a whole mean?

The virtue, or benefit, of viewing nature emblematically is that it provides a sense of coherence and meaning in the face of newness and complexity. The fancy critical language of deconstruction might be something like: viewing physical surroundings emblematically creates meaning by tying them to “transcendental signifiers.” For a Puritan, the ultimate transcendental signifier is the Judeo-Christian God. Related signifiers might be: eternity, timelessness, holiness, purity, etc.

One of the most common emblems you’re probably familiar with is the sun. In religious meditative traditions, the physical sun often becomes a type or image of the invisible Being that is the source of all things (there are variations of this in indigenous thinking, not just Judeo-Christian thought).

When settling in the New World, Puritans often relied on emblematic thinking to ground themselves, especially when faced with so much physical nature and such a dearth of “civilization.” It provided stability.

However, the cost of emblematic thinking, and Puritan meditation more generally, is that it sometimes is in tension with embracing the particularity of the physical object. If God becomes the transcendental signified, how important is it to labor over the details of humble signifiers? Is nature important only insofar as it reminds the spiritual meditator of certain eternal truths? These are questions later poets would tackle directly.

Bradstreet’s “Contemplations” is a great example of this tension (between things as emblems and things as highly particular) in Puritan meditative poetry. On the one hand, it begins to include details of the New World (such as the “stately oak” from stanza 3); but, on the other hand, it’s hard to classify this poem as a “nature” poem in the normal sense precisely because Nature is presented as merely a means of transport.