First collection of poetry written in America to be published

Around September 1650, Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America became the first collection of poetry written in America to be published. Though printed in London, the poems were composed in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, reflecting colonial life, Puritan spirituality, and Bradstreet’s personal experiences.

This distinction matters because earlier printed verses about America were typically written by authors residing in Europe or were occasional pieces, not full collections rooted in sustained colonial residence. Bradstreet’s book demonstrated that the New World could generate sophisticated, original literary work comparable in ambition to English productions.

For contemporaries, the collection offered a rare glimpse into the intellectual and emotional world of a New England woman. It showed that the supposedly "plain" Puritan colonies fostered not only religious prose but also artful poetry that wrestled with questions of faith, mortality, and domestic love.

In later scholarship, the recognition of The Tenth Muse as the first American‑written poetry collection to appear in print has made it a cornerstone of early American studies. The volume is frequently included in anthologies and syllabi as the starting point for American poetry, and Bradstreet’s example has been used to trace how colonial writing gradually shifted from European imitation toward more localized, American subjects. The 1650 publication thus stands as a key milestone in the transformation of New England from a remote religious outpost into a participant in the broader republic of letters.