The first two great American poets were both women. Neither of them was named Emily Dickinson, who came later. And one of them was a black slave born in Africa. Intriguing?
We look first at Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672) who was born in Northampton, England where her father was an estate manager for the Earl of Lincoln. She was well-read and well-educated and not a natural candidate for the rough life in the new Massachusetts Bay Colony. (Her best friend, Anne Hutchinson, was later killed in an Indian massacre.)
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Bradstreet was married at sixteen and two years later sailed with her family and settled in the Boston area. Writing in the Elizabethan literary tradition, she composed enough poems that a number were published in England as “The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America.” And early on she confronted men who believed that women shouldn.t write books or poems at all. Her response was this:
I am obnoxious to each carping tongue
Who says my hand a needle better fits.
A Poet’s Pen all scorn I should thus wrong,
For such despite they cast on female wits.
If what I do prove well, it won’t advance,
They’ll say it’s stolen, or else it was by chance.
One of Bradstreet’s specialties was writing epic quaternions, a style where a theme is divided in four parts. Thus: Four Seasons, Four Elements, and the Four Ages of Man. Here are excerpts from Four Seasons.
AUTUMN
Of Autumn months September is the prime,
Now day and night are equal in each clime,
The twelfth of this Sol riseth in the line,
And doth in poising Libra this month shine.
The vintage now is ripe, the grapes are pressed,
Whose lively liquor oft is cursed and blest:
For naught so good, but it may be abused,
But it’s a precious juice when well it’s used.
WINTER
Cold, moist, young phlegmy winter now doth lye
In swaddling clouts, like new born Infancy
Bound up with frosts, and furred with hail & snows,
And like an Infant, still it taller grows;
December is my first, and now the Sun
To th’ southward tropic, his swift race doth run;
This month he’s housed in hornèd Capricorn,
From thence he ‘gins to length the shortened morn.
At the end and typical of the period, Bradstreet added a charming bit of apology.
My subjects bare, my Brain is bad,
Or better lines you should have had:
The first fell in so naturally,
I knew not how to pass it by;
The last, though bad I could not mend,
Accept therefore of what is penned,
And all the faults that you shall spy
Shall at your feet for pardon cry.
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With passage of time in the New World, Bradstreet’s poetry became less traditional and carefully honed and more open to a spirited depiction of everyday feelings and experiences, what we might today characterize as American.
Of feelings for her husband she writes lovingly and somewhat suggestively.
O strange effect! now thou art Southward gone,
I weary grow, the tedious day so long;
But when thou Northward to me shalt return,
I wish my Sun may never set, but burn
Within the Cancer of my glowing breast,
The welcome house of him my dearest guest.
Where ever, ever stay, and go not thence,
Till natures sad decree shall call thee hence;
Flesh of thy flesh, bone of thy bone,
I here, thou there, yet both but one.
And of experiences, she witnesses a momentous edge-of-wilderness event.
In silent night when rest I took,
For sorrow near I did not look,
I wakened was with thund’ring noise
And piteous shrieks of dreadful voice.
That fearful sound of “Fire!” and “Fire!”
Let no man know is my desire.
I, starting up, the light did spy,
And to my God my heart did cry
To straighten me in my distress
And not to leave me succourless.
Then, coming out, behold a space
The flame consume my dwelling place.
When by the ruins oft I past
My sorrowing eyes aside did cast
And here and there the places spy
Where oft I sat and long did lie.
Here stood that trunk, and there that chest,
There lay that store I counted best.
My pleasant things in ashes lie
And them behold no more shall I.
Under thy roof no guest shall sit,
Nor at thy Table eat a bit.
No pleasant talk shall ‘ere be told
Nor things recounted done of old.
No Candle e’er shall shine in Thee,
Nor bridegroom‘s voice e’er heard shall be.
In silence ever shalt thou lie,
Adieu, Adieu, all’s vanity.
Bradstreet’s health was often precarious, but over the years she managed to produce eight children.
I had eight birds hatched in one nest,
Four cocks were there, and hens the rest.
I nursed them up with pain and care,
Not cost nor labour did I spare,
Till at the last they felt their wing,
Mounted the trees, and learned to sing.
Bradstreet held feminist views, and wrote this humorous piece about Queen Elizabeth.
Now say, have women worth, or have they none?
Or had they some, but with our Queen is’t gone?
Nay Masculines, you have thus tax’d us long,
But she, though dead, will vindicate our wrong.
Let such as say our sex is void of reason
Know ‘tis a slander now, but once was treason.
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In the years after Bradstreet, the only American poets of interest were two pastors who wrote poems: Edward Taylor and Michael Wigglesworth. Their verse was competent and sometimes more than, but their writings, largely religious, couldn’t hold a candle to our second great poet, Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784).
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Wheatley was a black slave from present-day Senegal who at the age of seven or eight was kidnapped and transported to Boston on a ship named the Phillis (thus her assigned first name), and purchased by a family named Wheatley. They recognized her natural intellectual gifts and undertook her education. Within a few years she was reading the Bible, English literature and classics in original Greek and Latin. And writing poetry.
An early poem was titled “On Being Brought from Africa to America.”
‘Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
“Their colour is a diabolic die.”
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,
May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.
At the age of fourteen she wrote a sophisticated piece addressed to the students at Harvard, reading in part:
While an intrinsic ardor prompts to write,
The muses promise to assist my pen;
‘Twas not long since I left my native shore
The land of errors, and Egyptian gloom:
Father of mercy, ’twas thy gracious hand
Brought me in safety from those dark abodes.
Students, to you ’tis giv’n to scan the heights
Above, to traverse the ethereal space,
And mark the systems of revolving worlds.
Wheatley was influenced by the poetry of Alexander Pope and admired his poetic exactness and neo-classical verse. These lines from Wheatley could very well be Pope’s.
Calm and serene thy moments glide along,
And may the muse inspire each future song!
Still, with the sweets of contemplation bless’d,
May peace with balmy wings your soul invest!
But when these shades of time are chased away,
And darkness ends in everlasting day,
On what seraphic pinions shall we move,
And view the landscapes in the realms above?
There shall thy tongue in heav’nly murmurs flow,
And there my muse with heav’nly transport glow.
In 1773 Phillis Wheatley became the first published poet of African descent, and she won her freedom.
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Sidebar: If a poem could be called timely today, it would be Phillis Wheatley writing this in the 18th century: “To a Lady on her remarkable Preservation in a Hurricane in North-Carolina.”
Though thou did’st hear the tempest from afar,
And felt’st the horrors of the wat’ry war,
To me unknown, yet on this peaceful shore
Methinks I hear the storm tumultuous roar,
And how stern Boreas with impetuous hand
Compelled the Nereids to usurp the land.
Reluctant rose the daughters of the main,
And slow ascending glided o’er the plain,
Till Aeolus in his rapid chariot drove
In gloomy grandeur from the vault above:
Furious he comes. His winged sons obey
Their frantic sire, and madden all the sea.
The billows rave, the wind’s fierce tyrant roars,
And with his thund’ring terrors shakes the shores:
Broken by waves the vessel’s frame is rent,
And strows with planks the wat’ry element.
In 1775, Wheatley sent a letter and poem to General George Washington, then confronting the Revolutionary War. In part it said:
Wheatley To His Excellency General Washington:
“Your being appointed by the Grand Continental Congress to be Generalissimo of the armies of North America, together with the fame of your virtues, excite sensations not easy to suppress. “
Celestial choir! enthron’d in realms of light,
Columbia’s scenes of glorious toils I write.
While freedom’s cause her anxious breast alarms,
She flashes dreadful in refulgent arms.
See mother earth her offspring’s fate bemoan,
And nations gaze at scenes before unknown!
See the bright beams of heaven’s revolving light
Involved in sorrows and the veil of night!
Proceed, great chief, with virtue on thy side,
Thy ev’ry action let the Goddess guide.
A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine,
With gold unfading, WASHINGTON! Be thine.
Washington responded to Wheatley:
I thank you most sincerely for your polite notice of me, in the elegant Lines you enclosed; and however undeserving I may be of such encomium and panegyrick, the style and manner exhibit a striking proof of your great poetical Talents. In honour of which, and as a tribute justly due to you, I would have published the Poem, had I not been apprehensive, that, while I only meant to give the World this new instance of your genius, I might have incurred the imputation of Vanity.G.
If you should ever come to Cambridge, or near Head Quarters, I shall be happy to see a person so favourd by the Muses, and to whom nature has been so liberal and beneficent in her dispensations. I am, with great Respect, Your obedt humble servant,
G. Washington
This to a wisp of a recent slave girl.
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VIDEO. We hear first Anne Bradstreet’s best known poem: “To My Dear and Loving Husband.” And then Phillis Wheatley’s tribute “To His Excellency General Washington.”
CLICK ON THIS LINK FOR VIDEO: FIRST GREAT AMERICAN POETS
