Bradstreet, Wigglesworth and Taylor: Private Voices vs. Public Voices in Puritan Poetry
Everyone comes from different ethnic backgrounds, religions, and life experience. These experiences often help a person develop his or her own thoughts and opinions. The way they choose to express these experiences will differ from person to person. Some will lash out in anger while others will show a humble attitude and accept what has been thrown their way. Anne Bradstreet, Michael Wigglesworth and Edward Taylor all used their voices in a humble way and to show thanks to their creator. Most of their works illuminate the difference between a private voice and a public one. Anne Bradstreet was a renowned poet who chose to document her life with words. She did this both for herself and the world. She lived in an age in which the Puritan way of life was most prevalent. This meant that religion was a constant in her life and often dictated how she handled things that happened to her. Most poets of her time wrote in a way that either terrified you into believing that God was going to strike you down or in the way that Bradstreet wrote, to explain why God had done the things he had done. She wrote about her daily experiences, her family, loss, worries and many, many other subjects. In the poem “To My Dear Loving Husband” she talks about how deep and strong
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In the poems “Upon the Burning of Our House” and “In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet, Who Deceased August, 1665, Being a Year and Half Old”, which was a poem about a grandchild that had passed away, she expresses multiple emotions she may not have been able to articulate publicly. In “Upon the Burning of Our House” she expresses the sadness and fear she had initially for the things she had lost and the situation as a whole. She then turns her attitude toward that of how a Puritan was supposed to respond and