SOURCE: "Why Our First Poet Was a Woman: Bradstreet and the Birth of an American Poetic Voice," in Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies, Vol. 13, 1988, pp. 1–35.

In the following excerpt, Caldwell discusses Bradstreet's struggle with traditional male images symbolizing poetic creation, and concludes that Bradstreet became the founder of American poetry precisely because of her marginal position.

It takes a worried man—or woman—to sing a worried song, and it is not surprising that Bradstreet's earliest poetry is more worried, in a more obviously "feminine" way, than anything she wrote later. Self-consciously erudite, duly apologetic, and above all, written "to please [her] wintry father," these "public" poems are marked by frequent, nervous recurrences to two conventions that Bradstreet certainly would have encountered in her wide reading. One is the well-known modesty topos, a long-established posture of authorial self-effacement and disparagement. Critics have differed about the degree...