The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America

The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America

The Puritan emigre Anne Bradstreet was America’s earliest English-language poet. Well-educated as a child, she married at sixteen and migrated to the colonies with her husband in 1630. Bradstreet owned a significant library of approximately eight hundred books that were lost to fire when her Andover house burned in 1666. Fortunately, the manuscript notebooks of her poetry survived the fire. This copy of the Tenth Muse is from the first edition of her first book, the only compilation of her poetry to appear during her lifetime.

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 was stolen, or else it was by chance.

Bradstreet, Anne

For Stephen Bowtell

1650

London

1650

Anne Bradstreet — poet

P

18

1600s