Anne Bradstreet accepted the tenets of Puritanism and was a very religious person. Anti-Puritan themes are, however, to be found in her poetry in terms of her religious doubts, and her expression of personal emotions and thoughts. She did not write to preach or teach, as Puritan writers were instructed to, but to express herself. It is this personal expression that forms the basis of the heretical elements in her poetry.

To understand why personal expression may be considered heretical, the society in which Bradstreet lived and wrote must be examined in order to comprehend what kinds of human activities and behaviors were acceptable and how Bradstreet deviated from these behaviors.

Bradstreet was not truly unorthodox in that she did not dissent from accepted beliefs and doctrine. She was a woman of the 17th Century and lived in a male dominated, intensely religious society. She lived within the limitations not only of the beliefs and standards of her society, but of her sex. A woman’s place was definitely in the home in Colonial America. The experiences of women were considered narrow and trivial in comparison with men’s.

Puritanism was more than a religious belief; it was a way of life. Aside from a literal belief in the Bible, Puritans wholly accepted the doctrines of
John Calvin and his stern legalistic theology. The Puritans held that religion should permeate every phase of living. The purpose of life was to do God’s will; everything else was subordinate to this basic doctrine. New England was founded at a time when almost everyone who could read at all, read poetry, and many attempted to write it. Poetry in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, like other manifestations of intellectual life in the 17^th Century, was dominated by religion.

Unlike most young women, Anne Bradstreet was well educated. At age 16 she married Simon Bradstreet, a graduate of Emmanuel College. Two years later, the Bradstreets and Dudleys came to Massachusetts with John Winthrop and other prominent settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Anne’s husband became a magistrate, and later a Governor as did her father.

Soon after arriving in Massachusetts, Anne wrote: "I changed my condition ad was married, and came into this Country, where I found a new world and new manners, at which my heart rose. But after I was convinced it was the way of God".

The Bradstreets had eight children, and Anne was a devoted wife and mother as well as a busy one. From the start, however, she made the time to write poetry. Typically, Anne Bradstreet did not seek to have her poetry published as a male poet would have. Her early poems were published, however, when her brother-in-law, John Woordbridge, took a manuscript of her poems to London and had them printed in 1650. The edition contained many errors, and was the inspiration for a poem on the subject by Bradstreet.

Bradstreet’s poems reveal that she valued herself as a woman, as a wife and mother. She wrote of daily experiences, her love for her children and husband, the beautiful New England landscape, the small pleasures of life and domesticity. Religion was a dominant theme in her work, including her religious doubts. A feminine consciousness can also be found in her work. As she wrote in The Prologue:

I am obnoxious to each carping tongue
Who says my hand a needle better fits,
A poet’s pen all scorn I should thus wrong,
For such despite they cast on female wits:
If what I do prove well, it won’t advance,
They’ll say it’s stol’n, or else it was by chance.

The heretical themes in Bradstreet’s poetry, however, spring from her domestic poems which reveal passionate love for her husband, Simon, maternal devotion and pleasure in worldly goods, and from her religious poems, which reveal her conflicts and doubts.

Many of Bradstreet’s poems reveal that she could not accept in entire submissiveness the sterner aspects of New England Puritanism. The last stanza of her poem on the death of Elizabeth Bradstreet, her grandchild, illustrates this:

By nature trees do rot when they are grown,
And plums and apples thoroughly ripe do fall,
And corn and grass are in their season mown,
And time brings down what is both strong and tall.
But plants new set to be eradicate,
And buds new blown, to have so short a date,
Is by His hand alone that guides nature and fate.

Bradstreet writes with apparent emotion using imagery as an explanation of the situation at hand until it seems that suddenly she realizes that she is perilously close to writing rebelliously against God’s decrees and then pulls herself up at the very end. This seems to not be her true feeling but rather deference to the orthodox doctrine of the day.

For the pioneer Colonists, home was a refuge from the often harsh, new environment. For Anne Bradstreet, the burning of her home (in "Verses upon the Burning of Our House") and belongings in July, 1666 was a great loss for someone so devoted to her family and domestic pleasures. The poem, however, contains no self-pitying elements. Instead, Bradstreet uses the personal loss to reconcile it with her belief in the wisdom of God’s will.

There are two homes referred to in this poem, "my dwelling place," and the "house on high erect, Framed by that mighty Architect." In the poem, Bradstreet states that both homes are God’s.

The first five stanzas of the poem relate the pleasant things – a trunk, a chest, and a table – that the poet enjoyed in her home. The pleasure is evident. In the sixth stanza, the tone changes as the poet accepts the fire as the will of God, acknowledging that earthly objects are vanity, that her wealth on earth had no real meaning, and that real wealth lies with God. The poem ends:

Farewell, my pelf, farewell my store.
The world no longer let me love,
My hope and treasure lies above.

The poem can easily be read in two lights, what the poet should feel, she does feel. Yet, upon re-reading the poem there is a sense of conflict; the expression of domestic pleasures are rooted in genuine feeling. It is these private feelings, and enjoyment of domestic details that give the poem its heretical tone. The doctrine seems to be accepted more intellectually than emotionally.

Anne Bradstreet felt that her love of the pleasant things of life was unchristian. This conflict is clearly presented in "The Flesh and The Spirit". The Spirit is the victor, but the Flesh even though vanquished, reasserted again and again its claims.

Flesh is the unsettled, questioning heart, while Spirit is the settled heart. Flesh and Spirit are personified by two sisters:

One Flesh was called, who had her eye
On worldly wealth and vanity;
The other Spirit, who did rear
Her thoughts unto a higher sphere:

Although Bradstreet presents the correct dogma in her poem, its purpose is not to instruct but, again, to express her personal feelings. It is the personal feelings that provides the heretical aspects.

"To My Dear and Loving Husband" is a passionate love poem that is lovely, human, and simple. It is also free of any religious dogma. For this reason, it may be considered to have the most heretical elements of any of her poems. The poem is universal as it can be read as a modern one, as well as one from early America. It is openly passionate:

If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me, ye women, if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold,
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
… My love is such that Rivers cannot quench.

The only reference to religion is to pray the heavens reward her husband, hardly a Puritan prayer.

Anne Bradstreet loved her husband and her children and God with a troubled realization that she fell short of God’s, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart". Anne Bradstreet’s poetry shows a merging of the private life with the religious life, but also a rebellious, inquiring spirit. The heretical themes in her poetry stem from this spirit and her need for self-expression.

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Relativity is the premier guiding force in twentieth century thought and art. It is the idea that no independent absolute value exists but rather every moral decision or truth that one believes, is true only from their frame of reference and particular time. Truth becomes what is meaningful or significant within a given context. In order to understand the many different styles of literature, art and music that came about in the early twentieth century one must understand relativity and how that idea alone has had a profound impact upon how artists, authors and musicians create and convey their works of art.

The impact of relativity is evident in works such as Wassily Kandinsky’s essay Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Igor Stravinsky’s article entitled Poetry of Music, Friedrich Nietzsche’s book Beyond Good and Evil, T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, and Pablo Picasso’s painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

To illustrate the influence that the idea of relativity has had on modern works of art and to show how it has vastly transformed the styles that many artists have used to create their art, we will first examine Wassily Kandinsky’s work.

In his essay Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky refers to relativity when he argues that absolute freedom must be given to the artist. Artists before Kandinsky only tried to express themselves by imitating nature to convey their message. However, Kandinsky says that the artist should be free from being forced to fit his expression into the mold of nature. He should be free to paint what he is really trying to express. In other words the objects and colors of the picture are relative. In Concerning the Spiritual in Art Kandinsky discusses what is good painting and drawing and he tells us that good drawing cannot be altered without destroying its inner value, irrespective of its correctness as anatomical or natural structure. He then has the reader question not the violation of natural form, but the need of the artist for such a form. He says the artist is not only justified in using, but is actually obligated to use only those things that are absolutely necessary to his painting. Specifically, Kandinsky says, “colors are not to be used because they are true to nature but because they are necessary to the particular picture” (Kandinsky, 535). The entire purpose of the picture is to convey a message that the artist is trying to communicate by use of an image. To mottle both the picture and the message by adding unnecessary form or structure, or needless color, defeats the very purpose of the picture in the first place. The communication is lost to convention. Everything that the artist puts into his painting must be for a purpose and be a part of the complete conveyance. The colors in a work of art are only relative to the message, not to the form of nature itself. Kandinsky was one of the first artists to argue that there was no need to copy nature or physical form but rather only the shapes and colors necessary to the art should be used.

Igor Stravinsky’s article Poetics of Music is another example of relativity greatly influencing a 20^th century artist. Stravinsky produced a vastly different style of music by applying the principles of relativity to music. Relativity in music is not abandoning all rules and form, but rather imposing rules that may be different than what others in a different frame of reference may be used to. In his article he explains that the more constraints one imposes on themselves, the more free they will become from the chains that shackle their spirit. He is telling us that one must have some sort of rules and guidelines that govern that individual’s creation of art. Earlier in the article Poetics of Music Stravinsky says, “My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles” (Stravinsky, 547). Here he explains to us that one may only reach the furthest points of creativity by building upon a foundation and taking the art further than it has previously been. This kind of progress and structure cannot be attained by randomly throwing pieces together but rather it must be the product of a purposeful work carefully constructed together to enable the artist to fully express his intentions. Art must be bound by rules, though those rules are not always the same rules that are accepted as common practice. To create art that is random and chaotic is to limit one’s creativity to mere chance. The rules that Stravinsky used were actually much stricter that the common musical rules of the day. However, in imposing on himself a more rigorous set of rules, relative to his own ideas, he was able to actually create more.

Another example of relativity in literature is Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche demonstrates the idea of relativity in his description of how the master moralist determines value. From part nine of Nietzsche’s work, subtitled “What is Noble?” he describes for us the vast difference between the noble, or master, moralist and the slave moralist. The slave, he says desires only comfort and will conform to the morals and values of those around him. He simply seeks safety from the hardships in life. The master however has a completely different viewpoint. The master is willing to take risks and suffer hardship, so that he may learn from them and overcome. He does not just ignorantly accept the values of those around him, but rather he seeks to create his own values from his experiences and judgment. Unlike the slave who seeks only comfort, the master desires more, he desires true self-satisfaction. Nietzsche tells us, “The noble kind of man experiences himself as a person who determines value and does not need to have other people’s approval. He makes the judgment ‘What is harmful to me is harmful in itself.’ He understands himself as something which in general first confers honor on things, as someone who creates values” (Nietzsche, 5). In this text Nietzsche explains how the values of the master are not determined by other people. The noble man creates his values from the lessons he has learned in overcoming the hardship that he has faced. He understands that the values he holds are not objective truths that are always true. They are relative only to the time and place which he is currently in. The values, though still important, are not eternal and not the same for all men all the time.

In T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, he demonstrates relativity in the way in which throughout the poem he abruptly switches both the character speaking and time frame. In this poem Eliot talks about the decline and desperate times of people. It breaks from many poems of an earlier time, which are commonly fluid and story-like, by unexpectedly changing speaker, location and even time frame.

In the first part of T.S. Eliot poem, subtitled “The Burial of the Dead” he writes,

"Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter."(Eliot, 1)

In this excerpt he takes on the persona of a girl, presumably Marie, and talks first about sitting around a lake, drinking coffee. The speaker then fades into her childhood, remembering with fondness how her cousin took her out sledding. She remembers being scared and then going down anyway. Then abruptly the speaker changes topics again and goes off on a different tangent. This is a prime example of how relativity has influenced T.S. Eliot in the way in which he is able to frame and write this poem. It departs from the common fluid, single event poetry and changes speakers and topics almost as if remembering a flash of a life, catching only pieces of each memory along the way.

Finally, Pablo Picasso is the archetype of relativity demonstrated in art. Relativity in Picasso is related to visual perspectives and the meaning of objects, deeper than just their physical structure. He painted many different styles, one of the most notable of which is Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, painted in 1907 during the African-influenced period of his life. In Les Demoiselles d’Avignon Picasso paints a picture of five prostitutes, one sitting and four standing. The two women on the right are wearing African-style masks. The woman sitting has her head turned toward us while her body is seated the opposite way and the woman on the far left has a face much darker than the rest of her painted skin tone. The spaces between the women also jut out in sharp pointed pieces rather than fade back behind the women as one would expect them to. Also the prostitutes themselves, though naked, are not depicted with sensuous curves and depth, but as flat plains. Each section or plain of this picture is in a different perspective than those that surround it. Some have shadows darkening the opposite sides and the faces of the women are asymmetrical. Picasso seems to have been trying to show the relativity of each perspective is different and paint all different viewpoints on one single image. And the fact that prostitutes are wearing tribal spiritual masks certainly conveys more of who the women are rather than just what they look like. This Picasso painting is the visual representation of what relativity is.

In Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, relativity was seen in his argument that colors and shapes were only necessary when they were essential to the art, not simply to reproduce nature. Similarly, Stravinsky said in Poetics of Music that art is defined by its rules and no art can be void or structure, however the rules one artist uses may be completely different than that of another. In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche explains that the values the master moralist holds are not objective truths that are always true. They are relative only to the time and place which the master is in and those values, though still important, are not eternal and not the same for all men all the time. T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land showed relativity by abruptly changing speakers, locations and times. And Picasso applied the idea of relativity to his painting in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon showing several perspectives and viewpoints all in a single image.

It has been necessary to understand the Theory of Relativity and how it has been applied to the many different styles of literature, art and music that came about in the early twentieth century. That idea alone has completely reshaped art, music and literature and had a profound impact upon how artists, authors and musicians create and convey their works of art.

Works Cited

Elliot, T. S. “The Waste Land.” Wikipedia. 10 June 2007. <http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Waste_Land>.

Kandinsky, Wassily. “Concerning the Spiritual in Art.” Classics of Western Thought, The Twentieth Century, Volume IV. Ed. Donald S. Gochberg. Belmont: Thomson Learning, 2003. 533-37.
Read the Full Text of Concerning the Spiritual in Art

Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Beyond Good and Evil.” Malaspina University-College. 10 June 2007. <http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/Nietzsche/beyondgoodandevil1.htm>.

Picasso, Pablo. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. 1907. Museum of Modern Art, New York. 10 June 2007. <http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=79766&>

Stravinsky, Igor. “Poetics of Music.” Classics of Western Thought, The Twentieth Century, Volume IV. Ed. Donald S. Gochberg. Belmont: Thomson Learning, 2003. 538-47.

Has this info been a help to you? Please consider donating to help me pay for hosting costs. I hate ads as much as you do, which is why I will never have them here. But that means I have to pay for all costs related to this website out of my student loans or from money I find laying on the street. I make no profit from this content or this website and all donations go strictly to pay for hosting and bandwidth costs. Even a small donation really does help. Thanks!

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Most men begin in the closest of all relationships with women – the strong mother and son bond. However, with Edgar Allan Poe such is not the case. His mother was the first of many women who had a profound impact on Edgar’s poems and short stories. Her impact however, was not of what she did, but rather what she did not do.

In order to properly address the subject matter at hand, one must delve into the intriguing life of Mr. Poe. Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809 of David Poe and Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins. David Poe drank heavily (a trait which we later see in both Edgar and his older brother William Henry) and eventually abandoned his wife. With the demands of her acting career and the stress of trying to support three young children (the oldest of which was three) she had little time to be a proper mother. Then in October of 1811 she became very sick with tuberculosis and by December 10^th she had died at only the age of only 24.

The effect on Edgar of never having known the affection of his parents is described in an 1835 letter to Beverley Tucker, who mentioned to him in a previous letter that she had known Poe’s mother. Poe replied, “In speaking of my mother you have touched a string to which my heart fully responds. To have known her is to be the object of great interest in my eyes. I myself never knew her — and never knew the affection of a father. Both died . . . within a few weeks of each other. I have many occasional dealings with adversity — but the want of parental affection has been the heaviest of my trials”. (Ostrom, 78-79) Here Poe clearly expresses the pain in his soul for his persistent need of female attention and love. It is a theme we see recurring not only in his life but also in many of his literary works.p>

Edgar was taken in, but not adopted by, John and Francis Allan who spoiled him terribly. Francis, the second major woman in Poe’s life, provided for all his material needs but was seldom available to him, partly because Poe was off at various boarding schools, and partly due to the fact that, like his natural mother, Francis too was sick with various ailments. Her absence and diminishing health only added to the grimness of young Edgar’s demeanor.

During this period Edgar is known to have been attracted to Elmira Royster. She became engaged to him, but her father had intercepted Edgar’s letters to her while he attended the university. Not knowing of Edgar’s letters until later, she married another man. (Quinn, 91). She became yet another “lost love” on Edgar’s growing list.

The first important female friend that Poe had (except for his foster-mother, Frances Allan) was Mrs. Jane Stith Stanard (whom he called Helen), the mother of his friend and classmate, Robert Stanard. Mrs. Stanard, who was in her thirties, always lent a kind and sympathetic ear to the 14 year old Edgar. He visited her home frequently and several years later Mrs. Maria Clemm told Mrs. Helen Whitman, in a letter in March 1859, that “when Eddie was unhappy at home” — as she said was often the case — “he went to [Mrs. Stanard] for sympathy, and she always consoled and comforted him . . .” (Quinn, 86).

However, Mrs. Stanard, in keeping with the building trend of the women in his life, was neither in good physical nor mental health, and in the spring of 1824 she suddenly became very sick. On April 28^th, with her mind totally deranged, she died. Her death only added to Poe’s already mounting hardship and grief. It was because of the beauty of Mrs. Stanard and his boyhood love for her that her wrote the poem, To Helen, as he explained in a letter to Mrs. Helen Whitman, in October of 1848. Poe said that he wrote this poem in his “passionate boyhood, to the first, purely ideal love of my soul — to the Helen Stanard of whom I told you” (Mabbott, 164).

In 1831 Poe moved to New York and while there lived with his widowed aunt, Maria Clumm, along with her old paralyzed mother and her two children. Then by 1836 he had married his cousin, the daughter of Maria Clumm, Virginia. She was only a few days shy of being 14 years old. Poe most likely had a more spiritual connection to Virginia rather than a physical one at this stage of their relationship. He dearly loved Virginia, and she too "lived with no other thought than to love and be loved by [him]". (Poe in Annabel Lee, 1524)

It was on January 30^th, 1847, when Virginia was only 25 that,

"A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsman came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulcher.
In this kingdom by the sea." (Poe in Annabel Lee, 1524)

Edgar fell apart; for it was she, like Roderick Usher’s Madeline, which represented his only reason for living. It was in lament of her death that he surely penned Annabel Lee. This poem told of their love, in which nothing could “dissever [his] soul from the soul, Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.” (Poe in Annabel Lee, 1524). Poe never recovered from her young and untimely death, a seemingly recurring macabre event in his life. However, this would not be that last time.

In Poe’s Eleonora, Maria Clumm, Virginia and Edgar are all no doubt the inspiration for the main characters of this allegorical story. In it the narrator, Pryos, tells of “she whom I loved in my youth, . . . the sole daughter of the only sister of my mother long departed. Eleonora was the name of my cousin. We had always dwelled together beneath a tropical sun, in the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass”. (Mabbott, 636) Here again we see Poe using the women dear to him in his life to mold his stories.

In the three years after Virginia’s death, Poe had several other romantic involvements, most notably one with Sarah Helen Whitman. She was also a poet, and after developing a fascination with his work she wrote a poem about him entitled, To Edgar Allan Poe. As a response to this, Poe wrote his second To Helen poem which focused on the divine light of Helen’s eyes. Shortly thereafter in September of 1848 he asked her to marry him. Before that marriage could take place however, several drunken bouts, and Poe’s poor reputation changed her mind.

One cannot help being struck by the self-destructive tendencies of Poe. Contradictions are everywhere. For example, he attempted suicide by ingesting opium while courting the lady he claimed to love. He accused his enemies of slandering him, and then confirmed their stories by continuing to drink heavily. Finally, he had become so paranoid that on a stopover in Philadelphia, he told a friend that two men on the train were trying to kill him. (Quinn, 616)

Poe likely could have married Elmira Royster – as he could have also married Ms. Whitman – but instead, in his traditional self destructive pattern, (and evidenced by almost every event of his life) he set a course that would take him back – back to the sorrow and the lost love that he started with. Without a doubt many critics would agree that Poe’s inspiration (or necessity) to write came from his life’s grim experiences. However, I contend that his many poems and short stories were a direct response to, and result of, the many women, and their complementary sorrows, that dominated his life.

The poem To One In Paradise was addressed to Poe’s favorite topic, that of lost love. In it he seems to prophetically sum up his now famous life,

"Thou wast that all to me, love,
For which my soul did pine—
A green isle in the sea, love,
A fountain and a shrine, …"

However, for Poe it became a "dream too bright to last" …

"For alas! alas! with me
The light of Life is o’er!"

Works Cited

Baym, Nina. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2003.

Mabbott, Thomas Oliver. Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978.

Ostrom, John Ward. The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, 2 vols, New York: Gordian Press Inc., 1966.

Quinn, A. Hobson. Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.