Old England and New in Anne Bradstreet's Poetry

This chapter observes that tightly historicised readings of Anne Bradstreet’s poetry are most possible for when it emerged in the London publishing industry and the English political landscape in July 1650, because seventeenth-century archives are biased towards male actors in metropolitan centres of power. It then looks back at how Bradstreet’s settler poetics addressed a ‘narrowly transatlantic’ relation between Old and New England when she wrote, especially in the ‘Dialogue between Old England and New’ (1642). Next it examines how the print editions repurposed her poetry, first for readers in the newly formed Commonwealth in 1650 and later for New England readers in 1678. This chapter concludes with a reading of ‘David’s Lamentation for Saul and Jonathan’ which shows that the more we historicise Bradstreet’s poetry to its reception in 1650, the further her authorial agency recedes from view, in this case even calling into question whether she wrote the poem.