ABSTRACT

In his commendatory poem included at the beginning of Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse Lately sprung up in America (1650), Nathaniel Ward1 praises Bradstreet as “a right du Bartas Girle,” but ends with a warning: “And chode buy Chaucers Boots, and Homers Furrs,/Let men look to’t, least women weare the Spurs” (n. pag.).2 Ward does not say Bradstreet’s poetry was “stolne, or else, it was by chance,” as Bradstreet fears in “The Prologue,” but he does mock the female poet for cross-dressing in the male trappings of the poetic tradition. Bradstreet’s “The Prologue” may easily be read as responding to or anticipating Ward’s gibe. In a particularly pointed stanza, she writes,

I am obnoxious to each carping tongue, Who sayes, my hand a needle better fits, A Poets Pen, all scorne, I should thus wrong; For such despight they cast on female wits: If what I doe prove well, it wo’nt advance, They’l say its stolne, or else, it was by chance. (4)

The Pen and the activity of writing poetry, like Chaucer’s boots, Homer’s furs, and a rider’s spurs, are understood to be naturally male while “each carping tongue” finds “a needle better fits” a woman’s hand, and any transgression of these expectations

1 Nathaniel Ward (1578-1652) was both a lawyer and minister who emigrated to New England in 1634. His is among several commendatory poems at the beginning of The Tenth Muse that have been ably treated in Zabelle Derounian-Stodola, “‘The Excellency of the Inferior Sex’: The Commendatory Writings on Anne Bradstreet,” and Ivy Schweitzer, Self-Representation 127-80. Elizabeth Wade White identifies most of the writers of these commendatory poems in her useful chapter on The Tenth Muse (251-92).