This poet complained “If what I do prove well, it won’t advance / They’ll say it’s stol’n, or else it was by chance” in the sarcastic “Prologue” to their best-known collection. For 10 points each:
[10m] Name this poet, who in that 1650 collection wrote the self-deprecatory poem “The Author to her Book” as well as “Verses Upon the Burning of our House.”
ANSWER: Anne Bradstreet [or Anne Dudley]
[10h] In the oft-quoted self-deprecatory first line of “The Author to her Book”, Bradstreet refers to her collection as the this three-word hyphenated phrase “of my feeble brain.”
ANSWER: “Thou ill-form’d offspring of my feeble brain”
[10e] Bradstreet’s collection is titled for the tenth of these figures “Lately Sprung Up in America”. In the Prologue, Bradstreet notes how the Greeks made these nine mythological artistic figures, including Calliope, women.
ANSWER: muses [or mousai; accept The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America]