A Garland of Parsley

“The best defense is a good offense,” an axiom of war and the gridiron, was also the tactic that Bradstreet as a female poet in a male world employed in “The Tenth Muse.” In the Prologue, anticipating critics, she began by disparaging her efforts in general.

To sing of Wars, of Captains, and of Kings, Of Cities founded, Common-wealths begun, For my mean Pen are too superior things….

Soon she wrote with some resentment about the prevailing opinion of female competency in literature:

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’s stol’n, or else it was by chance.

Bradstreet ended her prologue with what strikes me less as anger or frustration than as tongue-in-cheek amusement:

If e’er you deign these lowly lines your eyes, Give thyme or Parsley wreath, I ask no Bays. This mean and unrefined ore of mine Will make your glist’ring gold but more to shine.

In his introductory remarks to the book, Bradstreet’s brother-in-law added some reassurances for readers as well as reinforcements for her cause by writing that the author was “honored and esteemed where she lives” and that she devoted herself to her wifely duties.

Home-Grown Talent

“The Tenth Muse” was the only book of Bradstreet’s published in her lifetime, but she continued writing poetry. As seems only natural, her later poems became less ornate and more easily decipherable, influenced as they were by her days as a mother, wife, and grandmother rather than by the books and literary models of her younger years.

Wife, Mother, and New World Poet: The Remarkable Anne Bradstreet

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Dolly Parton: ‘The Star of My Life Story’

Adolph Sutro: The King of San Francisco