The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America

by Anne Bradstreet

The tenth muse lately sprung up in America, or, Severall poems compiled with great variety of wit and learning, full of delight : wherein especially is contained a compleat discourse and description of the four elements, constitutions, ages of man, seasons of the year : together with an exact epitomie of the four monarchies, viz., the Assyrian, Persian, Grecian, Roman : also a dialogue between Old England and New concerning the late troubles : with divers other pleasant and serious poems. Anne Bradstreet, Gale, Sabin Americana. Based on Joseph Sabin's famed bibliography, Bibliotheca Americana, Sabin Americana, 1500--1926 contains a collection of books, pamphlets, serials and other works about the Americas, from the time of their discovery to the early 1900s. Sabin Americana is rich in original accounts of discovery and exploration, pioneering and westward expansion, the U.S. Civil War and other military actions, Native Americans, slavery and abolition, religious history and more. Sabin Americana offers an up-close perspective on life in the western hemisphere, encompassing the arrival of the Europeans on the shores of North America in the late 15th century to the first decades of the 20th century. Covering a span of over 400 years in North, Central and South America as well as the Caribbean, this collection highlights the society, politics, religious beliefs, culture, contemporary opinions and momentous events of the time. It provides access to documents from an assortment of genres, sermons, political tracts, newspapers, books, pamphlets, maps, legislation, literature and more. Now for the first time, these high-quality digital scans of original works are available via print-on-demand, making them readily accessible to libraries, students, independent scholars, and readers of all ages. The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition Huntington Library, SABCP04044700, CTRG02-B676, 16500101, Selected Americana from Sabin's Dictionary of books relating to America, 207 p. ; 15 cm

Genres: Poetry, The United States Of America, Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1650

About the author

English poet Anne Dudley Bradstreet, wife of Simon Bradstreet, wrote several collections of verse, including The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650).

People first published this first notable colonial woman. Her work much influenced Puritans in her time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Br...

Reviews

[Apple]

“I have said less, then did my sisters three / But what’s their worth, or force, but more’s in me / To add to all I’ve said, was my intent, / But done not go, beyond my Element.”

[Delanie Dooms · Rating 5 out of 5]

is a poem which claims to show the four states of men--Childhood, Youth, Middle Age (Manly), and Old Age. Common themes throughout the poem are the ubiquitous presence of death, the vainness of all human life, and the failures of human beings writ large. (Hence, innocent childhood is "cold" and is subject to sin, youth's best elements [like study] are dissolved by pleasure-seeking, middle age is vexatious and self-aggrandizing, and old age is subject to pains.) The culminating point of the poem--rather, one must say, an obvious one--is the insistence on God's redeeming plan that shall bring a better world after Christ comes again.

Triumph I shall, o’re Sin, o’re Death, o’re Hell,
And in that hope, I bid you all farewell.

[Freya Abbas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bradstreet is not known for the tenth muse but rather for the poems she wrote later in life about her husband and children, which I don’t really understand because I think these poems are better (although “contemplations” is also really good and that is one of her later poems). Reading this shows how much literary tastes have changed since the seventeenth century. Her idol was Du Bartas who no one reads any more either even though he was big in his time. I actually loved the rhyming couplets in here, especially in the quaternions (very theatrical poems personifying the four elements, four seasons, four humours, and four ages of man). I liked learning about her worldview and her interpretation of history and I believe her work deserves to be read more.

[Molly Cooper Willis · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

I feel like Anne and Lorde would get along idk

“Then while we live, in love let’s so persever, / That when we live no more, we may live ever.”

“Was ever stable joy yet found below, / Or perfect bliss without mixture of woe?”

[Emily Jennings · Rating 5 out of 5]

I tend to agree with most critics: Anne's first poems are good, her Four Monarchyes is an epic, and it's her last poems that are her best.

[Amy]

big fat love

[Joe]

The first book of poems by an English settler of America. One of the first books of poems published by a woman in the English language. In its own right, a compelling sequence of poems anchored by AB's "Quaternions"--the four elements, humors, and monarchies--which put forward a relational vision of the elements and body that speak back, wittily, to masculanist visions of the working of the body, the prioritization of choler and heat (thanks Tamara Harvey). The victory of phlegm--cool, terse ligament, jelly--is stunning. The monarchies will read to many as tedious, representing the succession of Assyrian, Persian, Greek, and Roman kings as an Ovidian tantrum spiral with all the fun gore informatized out of it. But maybe that's the point, a flattening of the epic, a deglam-ing of war in which Bradstreet pays particular attention to the fates of women, children, and the innocent.

See also here compelling links to other American poets interested in history and its silences--Howe, particularly.

Reception of Bradstreet has passed over this book in favor of her handful of more autobiographical, short lyric poems and that makes sense. TTM is operating in a renaissance poetics at ease with natural philosophy/science whose value has only been recently re-evaluated, particularly when it intersects with lucretian materialism. Particles, clinamen and shit.

[Nguyen Thanh · Rating 4 out of 5]

thank you

[Jennylou Masugod]

i want to read this book