Michael Wigglesworth

Amy M.E. Morris (University of Cambridge)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.1: American (US) Writing and Culture: The Colonial Period, 1604-1783.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Scott Slawinski (Western Michigan University)

Dates

Born 18 Nov 1631
Died 10 Jun 1705
Activity 1662-1705

Places

Born in England
Active in United States

Activities

Primary

Clergyman
Poet
Preacher

Other

Divine
Letter-writer/ Diarist
Physician/ Doctor
Religious writer

Resources

Wigglesworth's Works

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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 Wigglesworth

(1989) edited by Ronald Bosco. The diary Wigglesworth kept while a…

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1632 words

Citation: Morris, Amy M.E.. "Michael Wigglesworth". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 21 June 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4711, accessed 05 May 2024.]

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