Anne Bradstreet's Puritan Influences In American Literature

Anne Bradstreet, American prose writer, which writings often reflected on Christian beliefs played an important role in teaching mannerisms and daily dutiful life. Her poetry, first published in London was “widely read in England and the colonies” (Levine, 217). Bradstreet like Smith and Samuel Sewall kept diaries and journals which focused on the writer's spiritual journey. She the loyal, domesticated wife, the true example and blueprint for Puritan living in the New World, who obtained her strength and resolve in her faith. Her spirituality helped her to face and make sense of the calamities she experienced and her writing became the pinnacle of Puritan obedience. The colonists, like herself, found special religious meaning or significance

Crimes to the indigenous people, slave ownership along with over three hundred cases, mainly innocent women who were burned to death fueled by superstitions and accusations of heresy. This is in direct opposition to past scholarly literary commentators, i.e., Emory Elliott’s Introduction from Puritan Influences in American Literature, “For the reader who could read the Puritan books as Edwards [Jonathan] read them, there awaited the rich and rewarding experience of an imaginative and aesthetic vision which was Puritanism’s most important legacy for American literature. Only when that high level of Puritan scholarship had been attained” (xii). But, later admits, “…[you] discover in the works of the great writers of the American Renaissance the complicated ways in which those masters had captured, exploited, and sometimes parodied what they received from the full imaginative wealth of the Puritan tradition” (xii) Elliott cleverly buries their exploitive and manipulated writings in his description. He continues, “… The most exciting body of ideas to emerge from a deeper understanding of the Puritans has resulted from a careful analysis of how the New England colonists conceived of what we have come to call the ‘American dream. The other key subject in Puritan studies which has begun to inform readings of later American literature is an appreciated of the allegorical or more accurately, typological habit of mind of the Puritan writers” (xii). The Puritan’s concept that everyone is born a sinner and their subsequent criminal acts were amazingly only enforced against individuals that proved obstacles to their religion and their way of life. The fact that they believed life was predestined at the start gave them the upper hand in all matters. Michael Wigglesworth publication of The Day of Doom which preached final judgement day, hid his own