SOURCE: Pope, Alan H. “Petrus Ramus and Michael Wigglesworth: The Logic of Poetic Structure.” In Puritan Poets and Poetics: Seventeenth-Century American Poetry in Theory and Practice, edited by Peter White, pp. 210-26. University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1985.

In this essay, Pope introduces the idea of applying the logic of Petrus Ramus to Wigglesworth's poetry, a method of explication that would be accepted and adopted by Wigglesworth's later critics as well.

No other Puritan poet has suffered more negative criticism and disrespect than Michael Wigglesworth, author of America's first best-seller, The Day of Doom. To many, Wigglesworth, as a caricature of the grim, high-hatted Puritan, sacrificed the fine art of poetry to the sterile dogmatics of religion. Typically, Wigglesworth is portrayed as a humorless man writing galloping fourteneers and doggerel ballads. This negative view of the critics has developed partly from their failure to appreciate, or even...