Anne Bradstreet’s “Marriage” Poems and the Condition of the Puritan Woman in Seventeenth-century America.

This paper analyzes some of Anne Bradstreet’s “marriage” poems, in an attempt to show that the shift in her poetic voice, namely the turn to a more secular approach to poetry, makes her relevant today as the first published poet in America and the first American writer who struggled to establish a new literary paradigm in the New World. The poems “Before the Birth of One of Her Children,” “To My Dear and Loving Husband,” “A Letter to Her Husband, Absent Upon Public Employment”, “Another” I and "Another" II represent a shift from the “nostalgia” of English literature and the establishment of a new, feminine poetic voice, preoccupied with the condition of the woman writer and the fate of poetry in the patriarchal seventeenth-century American society [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]