“The Author to Her Book” by Anne Bradstreet - Critical and Cruel
“The Author to Her Book,” Critical and Cruel
Ann Bradstreet (1612-1672) was an American woman poet who found her voice despite the odds stacked against her. She left England behind to live in the colony of Massachusetts where she somehow found her unique poetic voice—unexpected, somewhat acidic and yet compelling—despite the echo of England’s influence, which was strong, as Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare were two of the poets contemporary to the England in which Bradstreet grew up. A Puritan woman by choice, Bradstreet dressed and lived as piously as one, but her conservative nature was hardly reflected on the page.
Though she wrote poetry continuously while raising a family, she never published until her brother brought a manuscript of her work—which he titled Tenth Muse—to England and arranged to publish it, all without her knowledge. This would be the only collection of Bradstreet’s work to appear in her lifetime, and yet the first American edition of Tenth Muse was published posthumously in 1678. This edition begins with the poem “The Author to her Book,” written by Bradstreet years later, and never published while she was alive. Unlike many poems of the era, “The Author to her Book” isn’t exactly an allegory, and it doesn’t have a big subject like love or death or God. It’s written somewhat plainly, without the ornamental language of romantic poetry.
“The Author to her Book” is an ars poetica, or a poem about the writing of poetry. These poems tend to be ambitious or luxurious, praising of the art or the muse. However, Bradstreet’s version of an ars poetica differs. Here’s where we see her voice, that dirtiness and openness we’re so fond of in contemporary poetry. Bradstreet connects motherhood and creativity by expressing the creation of a poem as the creation of a child, a physical being. However, unlike a child with its aliveness and faults and beauty, the speaker of the poem sees only the faults of her work. She shows creativity as a singular act of violence and criticism.
In the opening line, she describes her book as the “ill-formed offspring of [her] feeble brain,” a description which faults both the creation and its maker. This is so interesting because often the sentiment of motherhood is that the child is more beautiful than anything, including its mother. Bradstreet takes that parallel and turns it on its head, especially in the second line, by shifting into an odd tone. She bitterly describes the book as remaining by her side after birth, as if she expected it to die or falter or leave. That reaction is exactly opposite the intimate and loving connection we expect to see between a mother and child.
Instead, our speaker is cruel and violent towards her creation. She notes that she "washed [its] face, but more defects [she] saw,/ And rubbing off a spot still made a flaw.” The first of those two lines conjures up an image of a mother lovingly rubbing a smudge off a child’s cheek with her thumb, but again Bradstreet distorts that image into one of violence. It’s as if she’s scrubbing the skin off the face of her work, an act of inflicting pain as well as embarrassment. These lines precede the most violent image in the poem in which the speaker “stretched [the book’s] joints to make [them] even feet.” Here, the action goes beyond typical mothering. As readers, we’ve become implicated in the violence by listening but not acting in defense as our speaker takes her criticism and pushes it past the point of comfort. Even after this violent action, she is still unhappy with the result, since still the book “run’st more hobbling than is meet.” It is still lame; still unsatisfactory.
Perhaps the biggest difference between motherhood and creativity, according to this poem, is the singularity with which our speaker makes her work. In the final three lines, our speaker bids the book, “If for thy father asked, say thou hadst none.” If read as a parallel between creation and birth, then this line signifies a big difference, for to be conceived at all, a child must have a father. A poem or book, however, can be created singularly. And in this startling comparison, we are forced to realize the power and authority speaker-as-writer holds versus speaker-as-mother.
As readers, we know that there must be moments of beauty and strength in our speaker’s book. However, the speaker of the poem focuses only on the faults of her work. She writes of creation as a singular act of violence and criticism in a tone that is startlingly unlike that which we expect to find in the voice of a mother speaking to her child.
The complete text of the poem can be found at the Poetry Foundation by following this link: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172953
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Anne Bradstreet was born Anne Dudley in 1612 in Northamptonshire, England. She married Simon Bradstreet, a graduate of Cambridge University, at the age of 16. Two years later, Bradstreet, along with her husband and parents, emigrated to America with the Winthrop Puritan group, and the family settled in Ipswich, Massachusetts. There, Bradstreet and her husband raised eight children, and she became one of the first poets to write English verse in the American colonies. It was during this time that Bradstreet penned many of the poems that would be taken to England by her brother-in-law, purportedly without her knowledge, and published in 1650 under the title The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America.
Tenth Muse was the only collection of Bradstreet’s poetry to appear during her lifetime. In 1644, the family moved to Andover, Massachusetts, where Bradstreet lived until her death in 1672. In 1678, the first American edition of Tenth Muse was published posthumously and expanded as Several Poems Compiled with Great Wit and Learning. Bradstreet’s most highly regarded work, a sequence of religious poems entitled Contemplations, was not published until the middle of the nineteenth century. (From The Poetry Foundation, www.poets.org)
