The Day of Doom; Or, A Poetical Description of the Great and Last Judgment: With Other PoemsWigglesworth, Michael
Religion
The Day of Doom; Or, A Poetical Description of the Great and Last Judgment: With Other Poems
Wigglesworth, Michael
Judgment Day -- Poetry
The first edition was published in 1661 or 1662, and the second four
years after. These facts are obtained from memoranda by the author,
which are printed in the Historical Magazine for December, 1863. An
edition was printed in London, England, without the author's name, in
1673. This was, probably, the third impression; the date of the fourth
is unknown. The fifth edition is said to have been published in 1701.
Mr. Dean has made diligent search and repeated inquiries, but can only
find two or three copies of the edition of 1673, and several fragments
which must have been parts of some of the other editions.
There was an edition published at Newcastle, in England, in 1711. The
next edition was published in 1715, called "the 6th edition, enlarged,
with Scripture and marginal notes"—"printed by John Allen, for Benjamin
Eliot, at his shop in King street." From this edition, which was
evidently the seventh, the present one is reprinted, being carefully
compared with that of 1673. Another edition appeared in 1751, "Printed
and sold by Thomas Fleet, at the Heart and Crown, in Cornhill," Boston.
The next edition appeared in 1811, "Published by E. Little & Company,
Newburyport," Mass. The last edition, prior to the present, was
published in Boston in 1828, by Charles Ewer.
Besides the _Day of Doom_, Mr. Wigglesworth published, in 1669, "Meat
out of the Eater; or, Meditations concerning the necessity and
usefulness of Afflictions unto God's Children." The "fourth edition"
appeared in 1689, and subsequent editions in 1717 and 1770. In 1686 he
preached an Election Sermon, which was printed by the colony. Among his
unpublished writings is a poem entitled "God's Controversy with New
England, written in the time of the great Drought, Anno 1662. By a lover
of New England's prosperity."
Mr. Wigglesworth borrowed little from other poets, and what he borrowed
was probably from the commentaries and theological treatises with which
his library abounded, rather than from the poets. Not that his style is
wholly prosaic, for there are passages in his writings that are truly
poetical, both in thought and expression, and which show that he was
capable of attaining a higher position as a poet than can now be claimed
for him. The roughness of his verses was surely not owing to
carelessness or indolence, for neither of them was characteristic of the
man. The true explanation may be, that he sacrificed his poetical taste
to his theology, and that, for the sake of inculcating sound doctrine,
he was willing to write in halting numbers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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