Anne Bradstreet

Anne Bradstreet sailed to Massachusetts on the Arbella in 1630, an eighteen-year-old bride stepping into the wilderness. Between raising eight children on the Puritan frontier, she wrote — and in 1650 her brother-in-law carried her manuscript to London and published The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America without her knowledge, making her the first published poet of the American colonies.

Her public verse followed the fashions of the day, but her private poems are the ones that last: "To My Dear and Loving Husband" ("If ever two were one, then surely we") and her aching, faith-wrestling verses on the night her house burned down in 1666.