Several Poems.
The First Book Of American Poetry
—
From the Library of Her Biographer
[Bradstreet, Anne]. Several Poems Compiled with great Variety of Wit and Learning, full of Delight; wherein especially is contained, a compleat discourse and description of the Four Elements, Constitutions, Ages of Man, Seasons of the Year. Together with an exact epitome of the three first monarchies, viz. the Assyrian, Persian, Grecian, and Roman commonwealth, from its beginning, to the end of their last king. With divers other pleasant and serious poems. By a gentlewoman in New England. Third edition, corrected by the author, and enlarged by an addition of several other poems found among her papers after her death. Reprinted from the second edition. [Boston]: 1758.
12mo.; contemporary calf rebacked in the first half of the 20th century with new endpapers. In a specially made quarter-morocco slipcase.
First American edition, second printing of Bradstreet’s scarce, groundbreaking work (dubbed on the title page the “Third Edition”). First published under the title The Tenth Muse in 1650, in Bradstreet’s native England by her brother, it received “considerable favorable attention”: in 1658 William London listed it in his Catalogue of the Most Vendible Books in England, and George III reportedly owned a copy. In 1678 a new edition was brought out posthumously in Boston as Several Poems—with many additions from her papers and some corrections, though the authorial attribution of these corrections, stated on the title page, has never been verified. Evans 8091; Sabin 7298; Wegelin 30. Among the additions to this edition are Bradstreet’s epitaphs to her parents, “Contemplations,” “The Flesh and the Spirit,” the address by “The Author to her Book,” poems about her illnesses, love poems to her husband, and elegies of her deceased grandchildren and daughter-in-law.
Far superior to her early work, the poems in the 1678 edition [and subsequent editions] demonstrate a command over subject matter and a mastery of poetic craft. These later poems are considerably more candid about her spiritual crises and her strong attachment to her family than her earlier work….Because they are centered in the poet’s actual experience as a Puritan and as a woman, the poems are less figurative and contain fewer analogies to well-known male poets…it is the tension between her desire for earthly happiness and her effort to accept God’s will that makes these poems especially powerful. (“Anne Bradstreet,” by Wendy Martin in DLB 24: American Colonial Writers, 1606-1734, edited by Emory Elliott, The Gale Group, 1984, pp. 29-36)
This copy originally belonged to an 18th century female reader—Elizabeth Bannard—whose signature dated 1778 is on the front pastedown. Elizabeth Wade White, Bradstreet’s biographer (The Tenth Muse, Oxford University Press, 1971), acquired it in 1945; the fact that this serious collector of means was unable to locate a truly fine copy during forty years of active collecting is a testament to the scarcity of this edition.
Scarce; no copy of this edition has appeared at auction in at least 25 years, and anecdotal evidence from a half dozen people in the trade suggests that no copy has been seen in commerce through any venue during that time. A copy of the 1678 edition, lacking the title page and several other leaves, sold in 1979. The present copy has two leaves in photostatic facsimile (221-222 and 227-228).
Anne Bradstreet (1612?-1672) received an education that would have been considered rigorous for her male peers, despite her lack of formal schooling. Wendy Martin notes that her father, Thomas Dudley—to whom she dedicated this volume—nurtured her on Vergil, Plutarch, Livy, Pliny, Seutonius, Homer, Hesiod, Ovid, Seneca, and Thucydides, as well as Spenser, Sidney, Milton, Raligh, Hobbes, Joshua Sylvester’s 1605 translation of Guillaume du Bartas’s Divine Weeks and Workes, and the Geneva version of the Bible. “In general, she benefited fr
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