The Author to Her Book

“The Author to Her Book” is a poem constructed around a comparison between an ungainly, illegitimate child and the author’s writing. Many critics read this poem as Anne Bradstreet’s reaction to the public circulation of her groundbreaking 1650 work The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, the only collection of her poetry to have been published during her lifetime. Bradstreet uses extended metaphor and the rhetorical form of the apostrophe—a direct address to a listener who cannot respond—to represent the creative process and the writer’s anxiety about the judgment of readers.

In Line 1, the speaker assumes a self-deprecating tone by describing the book of poems as the product of her “feeble brain” and an “ill form’d offspring.” In this comparison, the book is a zero draft, an initial articulation of ideas that comes during the discovery and invention stages of the writing process. The speaker describes the subsequent stage as one in which the book “after birth didst by [her] side remain” (Line 2), a reference to setting aside the draft before returning to it with revision in mind. The writing process in these first three lines is deliberate and solitary.