Early American Writers Essay, Research Paper

Early American Writers

In the literature of early American writers there is one common trait

among all the writings: religion. Among Anne Bradstreet and Jonathan Edwards

all speak of their opinion of religion, god, heaven, and material things.

Anne Bradstreet was a puritan wife, originally from England but then

moved to America. Upon moving and settling into her home, her poems became full

of emotion and spoke about concerns from her heart. She was religious and

believed that men had superiority over women.

A common concern in these religious writers was the unimportance of

material things on Earth. In Bradstreet’s Upon the Burning of Our House July

10th, 1666, her house was burned to the ground. Nevertheless, she did not shed

to many tears because she knew that “Thou hast an house on high erect,” meaning

that her real home was in heaven. She found comfort in god and her belief in

her made her strong and able to move on in her life. When she starts thinking

about all her possessions that she had lost she would “Raise up thy thoughts

above the sky . . . ” and remember these things do not matter, what matters is

her “house on high.”

Jonathan Edwards also found comfort in god, “leading me to sweet

contemplations of my great and glorious God.” Jonathan was also a puritan from

the early America, however, he was a preacher.

Like Anne Bradstreet, he did not believe in material things. In his

sermon entitle Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,

he states “now they see that those things on which they depended for peace and

safety were nothing but thin air and empty shadows.” This statement agrees with

what Bradstreet believed in, that nothing (possessions) is important on Earth.

If a person has depended on those things for all your life and then they are

suddenly taken away from you, you will not know what to do.

However, unlike Bradstreet, he portrays god as angry for all the sins of

man and ready to punish them for their sins. He says “The God that holds you

over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over

the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns

like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the

fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten

thousand times more abominable in his eyes than the most hateful venomous

serpent is in our…” He makes people fear god, fearful of ever sinning, and

afraid of burning in the fiery pits of hell. He states that “There is nothing

between you and Hell but the air; it is only the power and mere pleasure of God

that holds you up.” Religion has defiantly influenced Jonathan Edward’s writings.

Anne Bradstreet and Jonathan Edwards were both early American writers

who contained a common charecteristic in their writtings. Both of these puritan

writers have strong thought about religion and did not hold back these thoughts

in their writings.