Anne Bradstreet: Poems Lesson Plan

Anne Bradstreet is frequently referred to as America's first female poet. Writing from the time she arrived on American soil at the age of eighteen, Bradstreet's poems provide a fascinating glimpse into the life of a seventeenth century wife, mother, and Puritan. Adrienne Rich states that Bradstreet was "the first non-didactic American poet, the first to give an embodiment to American nature, the first in whom personal intention seems to preclude Puritan dogma." Bradstreet's Quaternion poems, which gave her the most notoriety in her own life, were not the ones that have given her lasting power in literary study. These poems are highly impersonal, and while displaying Bradstreet's...