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Anne Bradstreet Anne Bradstreet | The Poetry Foundation (1612-1672) was the first North American poet to see her work printed, yet she wrote from a tightly controlled Puritan world that discouraged women’s public voices. Bradstreet ‘turned to poetry to explore life’s ambiguities and to envision the world anew’.^[1] At its core, the poem ‘In Honour of that High and Mighty Princess, Queen Elizabeth of Happy Most Memory’ is Bradstreet's defence of female capability and intellect, using Queen Elizabeth I as her prime example.

            Bradstreet’s admiring brother in law, Woodbridge, responds to the assumed question be whether poem writing should be a woman's work with assurance that ‘it is the work of a woman, honoured, and esteemed where she lives, for her gracious demeanour, her eminent parts, her pious conversation, her courteous disposition, her exact diligence in her place, and discrete managing of her family occasions, and more than so, these poems are the fruit but of some few hours, curtailed from her sleep and other refreshment’.^[2]

            By addressing critics, Bradstreet’s poem in memoriam of Queen Elizabeth I first appeared in the 1650 edition of the Tenth Muse, a collection meant to showcase the learning and wit of a colonial woman.^[3] Writing in Puritan Massachusetts in the mid-seventeenth century, Bradstreet faced a literary culture that often-dismissed women's intellectual and creative abilities. By celebrating Elizabeth's reign, Bradstreet is making a broader argument about what women can achieve. The poem works on several levels. Bradstreet catalogues Elizabeth's accomplishments such as her military victories, her skilful navigation of religious conflicts, her patronage of learning and the arts. But she's doing more than just praising a dead queen by dismantling the assumption that women are naturally inferior to men in matters of governance, warfare, and intellect.

            ‘In Honour of that High and Mighty Princess, Queen Elizabeth’ is quite distinctive within Bradstreet's body of work, though it shares some common threads with her other poems. This is one of Bradstreet's most overtly political and public poems. While much of her work focuses on personal matters such as her family, her faith, and her struggles with illness, this piece ventures into celebrating a historical female leader. Bradstreet draws on classical and Renaissance allusions, Phoenix, Olympiads, and the Salic law to place Elizabeth among the great monarchs of ancient times, while the poem’s stylistic structure follows the melancholic conventions of 16th‑century court poetry.

 It is assertive in defending women's intellectual and political capabilities, which gives it a pro feminist quality that appears bolder than most of her domestic poetry. The poem also takes on her male critics more directly than usual. Bradstreet explicitly addresses those who dismiss women's abilities, arguing that Elizabeth's reign proves women can excel in governance and scholarship. This combative stance is less common in her more reflective works. Her celebration of Elizabeth’s military victories and diplomatic successes also links the queen’s power to a broader English national pride, offering colonial readers a model of female authority that could legitimize their own literary ambitions.

            Like her other formal pieces, it displays her classical education and love of cataloguing virtues and accomplishments. The elevated, ceremonial tone recalls her public elegies and occasional poems rather than the intimacy of poems like ‘To My Dear and Loving Husband’.^[4] Her religious framework appears here too where she frames Elizabeth's virtues within a providential view of history, similar to how divine purpose filters into her personal poems. The poem essentially bridges Bradstreet's private and public voices, using a historical figure to make arguments about women's worth that likely reflected her own experiences navigating life in Puritan New England.

[1] Aidan Norrie, ‘Drama by Elizabeth I’, in The Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. by Patricia Pender and Rosalind Smith (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), p. 1.

[2] Jane Donahue Eberwein, ‘Anne Bradstreet (c. 1612–1672)’, ‘Legacy’, 11.2 (1994), 161-169 (p,2).

[3] Anne Bradstreet, ‘The tenth muse lately sprung up in America. Or Severall Poems, compiled with great variety of vvit and Learning, full of delight’. (London, 1650).