Anne Bradstreet was born in 1612 in Northampton, England and died in 1672 in Massachusetts, U.S. She is one of the first poets to write English verse in the American colonies. Long considered primarily of historical interest, she won critical acceptance in the twentieth century as a writer of enduring verse, particularly for her sequence of religious poems Contemplations written for her family and not published until the mid-19th century.

Born Anne Dudley, she was the daughter of Thomas Dudley, manager of the country estate of the Puritan earl of Lincoln Theophilus Clinton. He took great care to see that his daughter received an education superior to that of most women of the time.  Anne married Simon Bradstreet, another protégé of the earl's and a graduate of Cambridge University, when she was 16, and two years later she, her husband, and her parents sailed with other Puritans to settle on Massachusetts Bay.

Her experience in the new land was harsh, and we know little about her daily life.  She was not a strong woman, having had rheumatic fever as a child and suffering from recurrent periods of severe fatigue.  She gave birth to eight children; her husband was governor of the Bay Colony and was always involved in diplomatic missions, thereby increasing Anne’s tasks at home. The Bradstreets moved frequently in the Massachusetts colony, first to Cambridge, then to Ipswich, and then to Andover, which became their permanent home.  Despite these difficulties, Anne managed to find time to write poetry.  Her brother-in-law, without her knowledge, took her poems to England, where they were published as The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650).  It was the first published volume of poems written by a resident in the New Worlds and was widely read.  The first American edition of The Tenth Muse was published in revised and expanded form as Several Poems Compiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning (1678).

Most of the poems in the first edition are long and rather dully imitative works based on the standard poetic conventions of the time, but the last two poems, “Of the Vanity of All Worldly Creatures” and “David's Lamentation for Saul and Jonathan,” portray an original voice.

Her later poems, written for her family, show her spiritual growth as she came fully to accept the Puritan creed. She also wrote personal poems on such subjects as her thoughts before childbirth and her response to the death of a grandchild. These shorter poems benefit from their lack of imitation and didacticism.  Although she herself probably took greatest pride in her long meditative poems on the ages of humankind and on the seasons, the poems that have attracted present-day readers are the more intimate ones, which reflect her concern for her family and home and the pleasures she took in everyday life rather than in the life to come.   Her work was firmly grounded in English religious, political and cultural history, and her “Dialogue between Old England and New” shows her firm commitment in the Puritan experiment in America.