Eavan Boland

Abstract This chapter examines the effort to reconstruct Anne Bradstreet and investigates how poets reimagine their predecessors to shape a living literary tradition. It traces Bradstreet’s movement from England to New England and highlights how displacement, Puritan discipline, and daily hardship form the historical and cultural pressures that influence her poetic development. The chapter analyzes the shift from the derivative public conventions of The Tenth Muse to the intimate, stylistically confident voice of Bradstreet’s later domestic poems, arguing that her work emerges from a fused public–private world rather than modern categories of inner and outer experiences. It also shows how Boland’s Irish perspective complicates her approach to Bradstreet, exposing the risks of simplifying the past and emphasizing the ethical challenges inherent in constructing a usable literary ancestry. Finally, the chapter asserts that Bradstreet’s resistance to easy interpretation strengthens her enduring relevance and demands that contemporary poets encounter her on her own terms.