— A valuable resource on Anne Bradstreet from the Poetry Foundation. She’d been born in England, but was among a group of early English settlers in Massachusetts in the 1630s. A reading of a poem by America’s first poet Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672) was the first person in America, male or female, to have a volume of poems published. The poem expresses doubt and disappointment about her work from start to finish. — A poetic tribute to Anne Bradstreet by John Berryman.

Is she pulling our leg here?

Struggling with distance learning? Bradstreet says she wanted to dress her child in nicer clothes – i.e., she wanted further editions of her book to be more presentable. It came across as an introspective poem about constant revision of one’s own creation and how close it remains to the creator throughout.

18But nought save home-spun Cloth, i’ th’ house I find. — Read the full text of Anne Bradstreet's collection of poetry (the book referred to in this poem), "The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America.
The poem “The Author To Her Book” opens with an imagery of a child being born, which portrays the infant nature of authorship. I washed thy face, but more defects I saw, 15I stretched thy joynts to make thee even feet.

But as we’ve already seen, every attempt to improve the state of her book has only made things worse. My rambling brat (in print) should mother call,

This is achieved through an extended metaphor that characterizes the book as the "ill-form'd offspring" of the author's "feeble brain.". From the creators of SparkNotes, something better. She says she will mould her writing and provide it with new ‘clothes’ to make her anew and better. I cast thee by as one unfit for light, Female modesty? Thy Visage was so irksome in my sight; Yet being mine own, at length affection would “I cast thee by” – an attempt to disown the book Symbolism – the book as a ‘child’, with a ‘mother’, without a ‘father’ At thy return my blushing was not small,

Her poetry later invited critical appraisal for being deeply emotional, and poet John Berryman also dedicated his piece “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet” to her. Which caused her thus to send thee out of door. “say thou hadst none” – the book, or the ‘child’ being the poet’s, or the ‘mother’’s independent creation Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. 19In this array ’mongst Vulgars mayst thou roam. Yet Bradstreet overdoes such modesty (false modesty?) Sadly, in trying to correct these faults, she only succeeded in making it worse. “poor” – the poet’s financial condition and her perception of her writing abilities This is the theme of the poem that narrates the procedure of a writer dealing with different perceptions and reception of her creativity and her attempt to protect and preserve it for herself, no matter how imperfect it might be.

Post marriage at 16, she and her entire family moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts, where she raised eight children with her husband. The poem was received as a deeply personal account of what goes on in a writer’s mind when it was published.
The book was in rags and acutely imperfect, as she realises on the rejection of the book by a publisher and a lot of flaws now mentioned publicly, coming back to the author. I cast thee by as one unfit for light, If we read ‘hobbling’ as trisyllabic, we also get a nice hobbling effect in the line, as the iambic ‘feet’ are disrupted by the awkwardness of the word.

Though she attempts a lot of revised versions of her writing, she maintains its imperfection and her apparent lack of creativity, ultimately surrendering to strangers receiving and reviewing her work, but not without using her financial and creative poverty as an excuse. The Author to Her Book Summary & Analysis. 8My rambling brat (in print) should mother call, 11Yet being mine own, at length affection would. 1Thou ill-form’d offspring of my feeble brain.

"The Author to Her Book" was written in the mid-1600s by the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet, after she and her family had emigrated from England to America. Where errors were not lessened (all may judg). In Criticks hands, beware thou dost not come; The poem has an underlying negative tone throughout the verses as the poet is constantly critical of whatever her creation has gone through. Due to her poverty, the author decides to let her book go out in the world to benefit from it both in terms of money and ideas and hereby goes against her own judgement of creative publicity. After her friends​ (referring to her brother-in-law who took her work to get it published without her notice) take her book away from her and she faces rejection from the publishers, her previous claims about her mind being a weak creator and her book having a lot of flaws in dire need of correction are carried forward as she feels her writing is entirely imperfect and fears the world perceiving it in an improper manner. She is reminding us that she’s a woman, true, but she’s also slotting herself into an established tradition of male writers who had likened poetic creation to siring (or, occasionally, bearing) a child: Sir Philip Sidney (from whom, incidentally, Bradstreet could claim descent) talks of himself as ‘great with child’ in the opening sonnet of his sequence Astrophil and Stella, while Elizabethan sonneteers often referred elsewhere to ‘begetting’ their poems (a usage which strengthens the theory that the ‘onlie begetter’ to whom the first edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets was dedicated, ‘Mr. “critic’s hands” – open to critical receipt The poem “The Author To Her Book” is a complex poem revealing the psychology of a female writer in a 17th century Elizabethan literary era. Due to the time in which the poem was written, the mid-1600s, there are a number of instances in which common words are spelled alternatively. Who after birth didst by my side remain,


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