Anne Bradstreet

“M any speak well, but few can do well.” Thus wrote Anne Bradstreet, America’s first poet and a witness to Puritan thought. In her “Meditations Divine and Moral,” she makes a statement that speaks to both the importance of personal morality to Puritans and a certain degree of ambiguity as to how...

W ithout a doubt, the political event that had the greatest impact on the life of Anne Bradstreet was the English Civil War that began in 1642 and effectively ended with the execution of King Charles I in 1649. In her poem “Of the Four Ages of Man”, an elderly man laments, “I’ve seen, and so have...

T he persecution faced by many English Puritans caused some of them to seek out the New World, where they would be able to operate according to their own religious principles and theology. The Pilgrims were famously the first such Separatists to arrive in the land that would be known as...