The Poems of Mrs Anne Bradstreet Together with Her Prose Remains: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

The Poems of Mrs Anne Bradstreet Together with Her Prose Remains, credited to Anne Bradstreet, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of The Poems of Mrs Anne Bradstreet Together with Her Prose Remains by Anne Bradstreet. Read in English by LibriVox Volunteers. In the year 1650...there was published, in London, a book of poems written by a gifted young woman of the New England wilderness, Anne Bradstreet by name. This book bore one of those fantastic and long-winded title-pages, at once a table of contents and a printer's puff, that the literary folk of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries greatly delighted in. It reads thus: "The Tenth Muse lately sprung up in America; or, Several Poems, compiled with great variety of wit and learning, full of delight; wherein especially is contained a complete discourse and description of the four elements, constitutions, ages of man, seasons of the year; together with an exact epitome of the four monarchies, viz., the Assyrian, Persian, Grecian, Roman; also, a dialogue between Old England and New concerning the late troubles; with divers other pleasant and serious poems. By a gentlewoman in those parts." She was born in England, in 1612. In the year 1628, when she had reached the age of sixteen, she married the man in whose loving and grave companionship she passed the remainder of her life, Simon Bradstreet, nine years older than herself, of a good family in Suffolk, a graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, educated to business by her own father, a man of Puritan faith and demeanor, God-fearing, and fearing no man. Two years later, the young people joined the great company of wealthy and cultivated Puritans who sailed away to New England, where, thenceforward, Simon Bradstreet steadily advanced in importance, and came to take a great part in matters of church and state, living out a long career there as colonial secretary, judge, legislator, governor, ambassador, and royal councillor, dying at last in great honor, at the great age of ninety-four, the white-haired and wise-tongued Nestor of the Puritan commonwealth. She was the laborious wife of a New England farmer, the mother of eight children, and herself from childhood of a delicate constitution. The most of her poems were produced between 1630 and 1642, that is, before she was thirty years old; and during these years, she had neither leisure, nor elegant surroundings, nor freedom from anxious thoughts, nor even abounding health. Somehow, during her busy life-time, she contrived to put upon record compositions numerous enough to fill a royal octavo volume of four hundred pages, — compositions which entice and reward our reading of them, two hundred years after she lived. - Summary by Moses Coit Tyler

Recording facts

• Recording title: The Poems of Mrs Anne Bradstreet Together with Her Prose Remains
• Author credits: Anne Bradstreet
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 55
• Listed recording duration: 9:25:54

Catalogue topics

• poetry
• American poetry
• puritan

Opening tracks: first 24 of 55

1. 01 - Prefatory Verses by Admirers — 16:41
2. 02 - To Her Most Honored Father — 4:44
3. 03 - The Prologue — 4:54
4. 04 - The Four Elements — 29:57
5. 05 - The Four Humors — 37:33
6. 06 - The Four Ages — 27:46
7. 07 - The Four Seasons — 16:16
8. 08 - The Four Monarchies Part 1 — 34:33
9. 09 - The Four Monarchies Part 2 — 52:24
10. 10 - The Four Monarchies Part 3 — 35:20
11. 11 - The Four Monarchies Part 4 — 57:36
12. 12 - The Four Monarchies Part 5 — 46:31
13. 13 - The Four Monarchies Part 6 — 8:51
14. 14 - A Dialogue Between Old English and New — 18:38
15. 15 - An Elegy Upon Sir Philip Sidney — 5:04
16. 16 - In Honor of Du Bartas — 5:00
17. 17 - In Honor of Queen Elizabeth — 6:06
18. 18 - David's Lamentation — 2:54
19. 19 - To the Momory of My Father — 4:18
20. 20 - An Epitaph on My Mother — 1:42
21. 21 - Contemplations — 15:09
22. 22 - The Flesh and the Spirit — 6:09
23. 23 - The Vanity of All Wordly Things — 4:12
24. 24 - The Author to Her Book — 2:12

Listen to this recording

Open the complete recording and player on Internet Archive. The player includes the full track list and available download formats.

Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.