SOURCE: "Gender, Genre, and Subjectivity in Anne Bradstreet's Early Elegies," in Early American Literature, Vol. 23, No. 2, 1988, pp. 152–74.

In the following excerpt, Sweet considers the ways in which Bradstreet created a feminine poetic persona for herself in the context of the male poetic tradition.

Bradstreet and "the kinship between spirit and flesh."

[While] she hoped for salvation from the sufferings of flesh, Bradstreet was no annihilist. Indeed, her depictions of God and heaven often reveal her belief in their kinship to human and earthly life. Her poem, "In my Solitary houres in my dear husband his Absence," depicts God as an eternally present version of Simon: "Tho: husband dear bee from me gone / Whom I doe loue so well / I have a more beloued one / whose comforts far excell." And in her poem on the burning of her house, she reminds herself, "Thou hast an house on high erect...