Michael Wigglesworth (1631-1705) is best known to literary scholars for his poem, The Day of Doom (1662), and the spiritual diary he kept between 1653 and 1657. A puritan minister at a time when church membership in Massachusetts Bay Colony was in decline, Wigglesworth turned to poetry when illness kept him from the pulpit. His long poem about Judgment Day outsold all other texts printed in seventeenth-century New England, and his later collection of devotional verse, Meat Out of the Eater (1670), enjoyed a modest success. These and a number of manuscript poems, including the anonymous jeremiad “Gods Controversy with New England” commonly ascribed to Wigglesworth, are collected in The Poems of Michael …
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Citation: Morris, Amy M.E.. "Michael Wigglesworth". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 21 June 2005 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4711, accessed 25 November 2024.]
