New England Becoming Old: Anne Bradstreet and the Coterie of Ghosts

Anne Bradstreet was a New England poet who wrote her first major poem in 1638, during a period of some crisis in the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s self-definition. In 1637, New Englanders consolidated their prominence in trade in part by massacring Pequot Indians, setting light to their villages and routing out survivors who were subsequently enslaved or put to death. In 1638, the Puritan Fathers secured the boundaries of orthodoxy in the new colony by banishing the Antinomian Anne Hutchinson and her followers, putting an end to a heated theological discussion and two trials that had lasted at least two years.¹ Yet Bradstreet’s poem, composed the same year as the Hutchinson trial and only a year after the war against the Pequots, steadfastly ignored both these formative events punctuating early American history. Instead of celebrating Massachusetts Bay victories or meditating on the New England mission, Bradstreet chose to write an elegy to Sir Philip Sidney, that consummate Elizabethan courtier, poet, and neo-chivalric hero—who, by the time of Bradstreet’s composition, had been dead for over half a century.