What Is The Tone Of The Prologue

In Bradstreet’s poem “The Prologue,” the common theme throughout stanzas 6-8 is that women are decent poets. In stanza 6, she uses the Greeks as an example to show the hypocrisy of men when it came to female poets and that women are poets. She writes “but sure the antique Greeks were far more mild Else of our sex, why feigned they those nine” (lines 31-32). Simply put, if men didn’t think women were decent artists, why did they make the nine Muses of Greek mythology women? This created a satirical tone in the stanza. In stanza 7, she accepts the precedence that men are better poets but she argues that women deserve “acknowledgement” for their poetic skill (lines 40-42). Bradstreet’s tone here is pragmatic yet demanding because she is being