Content area
Full text
The brain is an obsessive topic in Anne Bradstreet's poetry. from The Tenth Muse to the later works, there is almost no poem which does not propose something about the brain. In the poems I will be discussing, the brain appears as weak, wounded, incurable, foolish, tired, and simply bad. It often changes grammatical form, switching from a noun identifying an organ to an adjective denoting a capacity or a verb signaling an activity.1 I would contend that this preoccupa- tion with the brain's multiplex form signals Bradstreet's relentless commitment to the question of thinking. from what is supposed to be her earliest poem ("An Elegy Upon Sir Philip Sidney" [1638]), to the later poems ("The Prologue" and "The Vanity of all Worldly Things" [1643-47]), including "Contemplations" and the thematic of the Andover Manuscripts (published posthumously in 1867), Bradstreet's writing, while haunted by the failure of thinking, nevertheless remains invested in examining how thought occurs. As I will be arguing, in Bradstreet, the brain is neither an allegory for thinking nor simply an organic host for mental operations. Rather, the brain is thinking, constituted by thoughts and sensations that mutate into the material emission of an organ and are almost shaped into objects. Thinking thus becomes organic in the literal sense: it is the organ of the brain that manufactures thoughts.2
In what follows, I will explore this concept of thought forma- tion-that is, how an organ becomes a thought. In part one, I discuss Bradstreet's earlier poetry in order to argue that, in relying on the theo- ries of Phineas fletcher and Helkiah Crooke, Bradstreet formulated ideas about the brain that verge on what might be called a physiology of thinking. In part two, I analyze how Bradstreet's physiology of the brain, as outlined in the Quaternion, finds analogous expression in her epistemology-as formulated in such poems as "An Elegy Upon Sir Philip Sidney" and "In Honour of Du Bartas"-and leads her to endorse the empirical. In the last section of my essay, I focus on "Contemplations" and suggest that Bradstreet's description of mental practice articulates, in a more systematic way, her idea of material thinking, which pervades the self instead of being produced by it.
As Bradstreet specifies in the dedicatory poem to...