SOURCE: Hammond, Jeffrey A. “‘Ladders of Your Own’: The Day of Doom and the Repudiation of ‘Carnal Reason’.” Early American Literature 19, no. 1 (spring 1984): 42-67.

In this essay, Hammond explores the spiritual logic of Wigglesworth's broad and apparently harsh judgment of the damned and unregenerate of humanity.

1

Modern opinion has generally not been kind to Michael Wigglesworth's The Day of Doom. Most assessments echo that of Moses Coit Tyler, who maintained that in the poet's “intense pursuit of what he believed to be the good and the true, he forgot the very existence of the beautiful” (277). Even such a sympathetic critic as Kenneth B. Murdock conceded that the most popular poet of Puritan New England “was handicapped on the one hand by his allegiance to the letter of the Bible as expounded by his school of theology, and on the other by his knowledge of his audience” (vii). F...