Verses upon the Burning of our House

It would certainly surprise Anne Bradstreet to be known as America’s first poet. After all, the name “America” appeared only on navigation maps and in the ledgers of an assortment of European shipping companies interested in the premise of the potential economic bonanza from the natural resources of an unclaimed continent. “American” poetry would wait another two centuries before Walter Elias Whitman, Jr., a failed housepainter with a sixth-grade education and an ear for opera, would publish a cycle of 12 poems he dubbed Leaves of Grass (1855) that would dazzle into literature a voice never heard before. An educated woman and an autodidact who read widely in the bountiful library of her father, Bradstreet regarded her relocation to the bleak Massachusetts coast as a break with the Anglican Church of England, not with English literature.

In her poetry—both the public poetry published in 1650 and in her more private poems that were not published until decades after her death—she constructed her poetic lines using the defining and most respected poets of the Elizabethan Age as models, two of whom are all but lost to a contemporary audience.

She poured over the careful prosody and sculpted lines of the sonnets of Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586), seeing in his work a model for expressing passion within the strict metrics of rhythm and rhyme. She studied the argument Sidney made for the importance of poetry in his essay A Defense of Poetry (1583), particularly his argument that poetry should teach important lessons on moral and ethical living, but in lines whose delicate architecture, careful meter, and sonic effects delighted the ear.

And Bradstreet studied as well the monumental work of French poet/historian Guillaume du Bartas (1544-1590), who attempted to reconceive the entire history of humanity since Genesis in a single grand poetic work. That scale and ambition impressed Bradstreet, who attempted a similar epic, but du Bartas also revealed to Bradstreet how the unfolding events of history—humanity’s triumphs and tragedies—were all manifestations of God’s divine (and inscrutable) plan.