SOURCE: Bosco, Ronald A. “Reading the Poems of Michael Wigglesworth.” In The Poems of Michael Wigglesworth, edited by Ronald A. Bosco, pp. xviii-xxxiv. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1989.

In this excerpt, Bosco urges a re-evaluation of Wigglesworth's merits as a poet, observing that his contemporaries found his religious writings to be worth repeated readings.

As artist and as devout Puritan, Wigglesworth, to be sure, is a figure not without qualities that tax the critical sensibility as well as the good will of the modern reader. It may be, as Donald Barlow Stauffer has said, that Wigglesworth deserves to be ranked “several rungs down the ladder” of Puritan poets. It may be too that the poetry of, say, Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor reveals a better sort of Puritanism, more humane and more aesthetically and intellectually complete and acceptable to us, than does Wigglesworth's poetry, in which event...