In at least 100 words, explain the importance of Bradstreet, including her confirmation of her belief in the afterlife in her poetry.

When Anne Bradstreet wrote poetry, she wrote not to impress but to express. Unlike many of her (predominantly male) contemporaries, Bradstreet created poetry from her soul because she felt she could best display herself in that form. By focusing not on the poetic form as distinctly as the emotional veracity of her feelings, Bradstreet was able to couple the two in a way that many others could not. Her poetry became a hallmark of early American life: it expressed the worries and the intricacies of existence in the colonies while still maintaining the heart pressing emotional quality of good poetry. Bradstreet wrote simply to write and that has made all the difference centuries later. Anne Bradstreet’s male contemporaries, who wrote in a high noble-class manner generally inaccessible to the common person and void of the emotional depth which poetry is so contingent upon, have since fallen from sight, but Bradstreet’s work is kept afloat to this day by the truth and the depth of her emotional feeling. An excellent example of Bradstreet’s reflective poetry is found in Before the Birth of One of Her Children written probably around 1650. Bradstreet wrote this, as the name implies, when pregnant for one of her children. Much of the motivation for the piece lies in the unpredictable nature of childbirth at the time. Every birth was a gamble both for mother and child, many people all over the world were lost during childbirth, and that danger was only increased in the colonies. Bradstreet displays her poetic prowess by employing few poetic devices yet a mastery of language to promote her main goal: a goodbye to the family she may not survive long enough to have. The religious aspects of Bradstreet’s Before the Birth of One of Her Children inundate the poem on a number of levels, as well. Of the many connotations of religion in Bradstreet’s Before the Birth of One of Her Children, one of the most prevalent is that of comfort. In the Puritan religion, God and the church (both in a social and a more abstract sense) existed to support the followers of the religion. The foundation of Jamestown as a "city on the hill" takes its base mainly from this concept. Jamestown was to be a pure community, and was to reach this ideal solely by relying on the proximity of like-minded people and the exclusion of outsiders. Like most social institutions, Puritanism bought obedience with the comforts they provided. In this poem, the comfort the narrator-who is most probably Bradstreet-receives from the tenets of her religion become clear, when, as in line 19, she refers obscurely to the afterlife: "And when thou feel’st no grief, as I no harms." (19). This absence of harms is doubtless a reference to heaven. The narrator’s belief that she will go to heaven is visible in the poem as a whole, as well. Bradstreet’s tone is, while melancholy, obviously very confident. She knows that her soul will continue after her Earthly death. Clearly, Bradstreet equates death with-if not a highly pleasurable and glorious existence-an existence that does not involve the pains and misfortunes flesh is heir to. Puritanism, like the Catholic Church it descended from, is grounded in a belief in heaven. Bradstreet’s beliefs, here, directly correspond to the beliefs of Puritanism, yet this is not always the case. Show full answer