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General ways to approach Anne
Bradstreet's poems:
- Check out her meter (iambic pentameter) and look for key variations
in rhythm and in syntax. Ordinarily any variation from the norm set
up points to special rhetorical effect or emphasis.
- Check annotated meanings of words to clarify meanings at time, how
different meanings may be working together to create complex feelings
and ideas.
- Find imagery, follow sustained parallels. She often writes with
metaphysical conceits; find and explore them.
- Be aware of irony and her male Puritan cultural context, and suspect
conventionally religious additions and final retractions
Other characteristics of her poems are also found in later poets: [from
Alicia Ostriker]
- Self-effacing "apology" (art claiming artlessness) gradually becomes
more authoritative poetic persona (bold assertion followed by retraction)
- Pride in ability to instruct and experience life
- Distaste for dualism and hierarchy; preferance for balance
- Attachment to nature and the body (even questioning God)
- Humor and irony which allow her to say the unsayable
- Self-exploration through historic and mythic heroines
- Dwelling on the domestic as authoritative
- Language and imagery often direct, relatively simple
