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. Bradstreet’s use of apostrophe emphasizes that the book is an inert recipient of the writer’s actions. The poet exercises total control over what the book of poems can say or mean.

When friends “snatched” (Line 3) the book from the writer in this state, they interrupted the creative process in its very early stage. Texts of privileged writers such as Bradstreet frequently circulated privately among friends or a slightly larger social circle. When the speaker's friends “expos’d [the collection] to publick view / Made thee in raggs, halting to the’ press to trudge” (Lines 4-5), they changed the rhetorical context of the poetry collection from communion between the writer and her text to one in which these friends and the publisher assume control over the structure and meaning of the book. The process of printing may introduce errata, or errors, so the implication of Line 6 is that the physical process of printing has made an already imperfect draft even more imperfect. The process of printing also makes the author into just one more reader, but one who has in mind the ideal poem that could have been something like a beautiful child.

Lines 7-10 are an extended comparison between an unlovable, incorrigible child the mother tries to correct and the speaker’s attempts to return to the writing process by engaging in revision. The speaker’s “blushing” (Line 7) is the embarrassment the writer—particularly a female writer, as the poem's constant comparisons to motherhood make clear—feels in being publicly named as an author. The potential judgment of readers becomes an impediment to the writer’s creative process. The writer feels paralysis because her work is “rambling” (Line 8), that is, wandering from reader to reader, rather than being under the control of its author.

After acknowledging the embarrassment the author feels over possible judgment of her work, the speaker re-commits to her creative process because she feels a sense of love and ownership over her work, which Bradstreet compares to the affection mothers feel for their biological offspring. Bradstreet relies on maternal metaphors—a mother bathing a child to clean it and heal its blemishes—to describe what the revision process looks like. Washing the face of the book-as-child is a wholesale effort to revise the book, while dabbing at “blemishes” (Line 12) is the equivalent of polishing a draft. When the speaker attempts to improve the book of poems, however, the result of the revision is that in “rubbing off a spot, [she] still made a flaw” (Line 14).

The problem isn’t just the premature publication of the poems. It is that the poems have some fundamental flaws from conception, ones that no amount of revision can correct. That is the reason the flaw reappears no matter how much the poet reworks the draft. In an expression of humility in Lines 15-18, the speaker complains about the “hobling” (Line 16) of the book-as-child’s “feet” (Line 15) and the “home-spun Cloth” (Line 18) she must use to clothe it. However, the content here contrasts the form: Since "feet” is a pun on metrical feet and lines 15-16 are perfect examples of iambic pentameter (see: Literary Devices), the poetic skills on display undercut the speaker’s modesty.

The speaker essentially washes her hands of this ill-conceived poem/child by declaring it an illegitimate orphan—a father it “hadst none” (Line 22), and its mother is “poor” (Line 23). The speaker would rather abandon her work to “Vulgars” (Line 19)—common people—and “Criticks” (Line 20)—professional readers—than expend more energy on it. The poet’s despair over the book-as-child is that of all artists who lose control over their works during the publication/sharing stage of the creative process.