Anne Bradstreet

Anne Broadstreet was very passionate in her protesting efforts against the “new world and new manners” she experienced during her Puritan journey to Salem Massachusetts. She discussed these issues through her poetry. Anne seems to have written poetry primarily for herself, her family, and her friends, many of whom were very well educated. Although she may have seemed to some a strange aberration of womanhood at the time, she evidently took herself very seriously as an intellectual and a poet. She read widely in history, science, and literature thanks to her father who taught her in her younger years. Her "apologies" were very ironic rather than sincere, responding to those Puritans who felt women should be silent, modest and living in private rather than in public. Her love of nature and the physical world, as well as the spiritual, often caused creative conflict in her poetry. Though she finds great hope in the future promises of religion, she also finds great pleasures in the realities of the present.