SOURCE: '"Enrapted Senses': Anne Bradstreet's 'Contemplations,' " in American Sublime: The Genealogy of a Poetic Genre, University of Wisconsin Press, 1991, pp. 67–93.

Here, Wilson argues that the sublime first emerges in American poetry in Bradstreet's verse.

 That there is a God my Reason would soon tell me
by the wondrous workes that I see, the vast frame
of the Heaven and the Earth, the order of all things,
night and day, summer and winter, spring and autumne
…
The consideration of these things would with amazement
certainly resolve me that there is an Eternal Being.
["To My Dear Children"] 

Anne Bradstreet (c. 1612–1672) was surely there first, but we still don't know how, poetically, to situate or claim her. The strange country of the Indian wilderness which her courtly/Christian poetry helped to domesticate and to legitimate conveys traces of a tone and tradition which later signaled, no less explicitly...