Anne Bradstreet and the Prehistory of the American Sonnet
In 1973, Kallich, Gray, and Rodney edited a collection of sonnets that includes, curious enough, two early American poems that do not conform to the fourteen-line pattern: Anne Bradstreet’s “To My Dear and Loving Husband” and Edward Taylor’s “Huswifery.” Despite the fact that Bradstreet’s “To My Dear and Loving Husband” looks nothing like a sonnet—it consists of six couplets, five of which rhyme—it nevertheless “demonstrates the first attempt in America to write in such a concise mode,” as the three editors suggest (85). However, a comparison of the poem with Shakespeare’s sonnet 126 reveals striking similarities in terms of form, which brings forth the question of generic boundaries. If, as Felix Sprang summarizes Adorno, art’s “creative potential rests in negotiating form, its ability to stretch or even reject its own formal constraints,” then we should probably revise cognitive literary studies’ thesis of universalism and treat each act of reading as a dynamic process in which a particular understanding of the sonnet form “emerges” (245-47). This article begins with a reading of Shakespeare’s sonnet 126, focusing especially on its rhyme scheme AA BB CC DD EE FF and the mysterious parentheses that conclude the Fair Youth sequence and usher in the Dark Lady sequence. Inspired by Sprang’s idea of dynamic readership, I argue that Bradstreet unwittingly resists/transforms the English sonnet tradition when she wrote a poem that, in many ways, resembles Shakespeare’s sonnet 126—itself an anomaly. I will then move on to discuss John Michael Archer’s phenomenological reading of the missing couplet as an epochê that suspends knowledge and link it to Bradstreet’s recycling of the Shakespearian rhyme scheme in “The Prologue” and “Contemplations.”
Roger Wei-chen Liu is currently an adjunct lecturer at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Taiwan University. From 2015 to 2016, he was a visiting graduate student at the Department of English, University at Albany. His dissertation is titled “American Literature, Law, and Justice: From Bradford to Hawthorne.”