In accordance with tradition, Anne Bradstreet, like several other Renaissance writers, presents her work The Tenth Muse Recently Appeared in America (1650), through a prologue. Not only does it serve to familiarize the reader with the subject of quaternions (a set of four interrelated poems), but it also allows the poet to "address the reader directly about the craft or likely reception of the work that he waits.” » (Dasgupta, 16 years old). Much like his other public works, the Prologue also adopts the tone of humility characteristic of Bradstreet's writing style. What is striking about her is the excessive nature of her modesty, which borders on self-deprecation. We should advise against taking the poet's words literally. This article attempts to determine whether the supposed tone of humble compromise in the Prologue is, in fact, a posture adopted by Bradstreet to facilitate "affect" (Isobel Armstrong) among his readers, thereby convincing them of his skills as a writer . no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay Although often understood to reflect the "ethos of Puritan self-effacement" (Dasgupta 8), the Prologue is actually a clever ploy used to appropriate Bradstreet's craft while appeasing the predominantly male conservative audience who read it. As Eileen Margerum puts it: “In the classical poetic tradition, the success of a poem depended not on the validity of the poet's feelings but on his successful use of prescribed formulas” (152). Anne Bradstreet, as a 17th century poet, draws on the classical poetic tradition of her predecessors as well as the Puritan narrative tradition which requires her to include "formulas of humility" in her works, regardless of her personal feelings (Margerum 152). The incorporation of these two conventions is evident in the following lines from the Prologue: “To sing of wars, of captains and kings, of cities founded, of republics begun, for my wicked pen are things too superior; or how they all, or each, their dates are past, which poets and historians exhibit. My dark lines will not diminish their value. "The above-mentioned refusal highlights the fact that his poetry does not extend to the writing of history, a male-dominated sphere, much like poetic composition. His apparently gentle stance entails a certain degree of ambiguity regarding the idea that she shapes her public persona to fit what she perceives as a man's world. She goes on to highlight her poetic ancestry by mentioning Guillame de Salluste Du Bartas (a Protestant poet. French) and frequently referring to Sir Philip Sidney's Defense of Poetry This act highlights his insecurities as a writer stemming from the absence of a lineage of female poets. , later prominent feminists Gilbert and Gubar argue that just as male writers experience "influence anxiety" as proposed by Harold Bloom, female writers also experience "authorship anxiety" ("The Infection in the Phrase: The woman writer and the anguish of fatherhood”, 25). Bradstreet's work dramatically identifies itself as an example of this phenomenon, thus fueling the idea that this too is a pretense and that she is very consciously constructing an anxious and uncertain image of the creative process. We are witnessing a transition from the Rhetoric of Impossibility to the Rhetoric of Deception, which is achieved through the intensive use of irony. Judith Butler's concept of self-performance comes into play as we see.