SOURCE: Adams, John C. “Alexander Richardson and the Ramist Poetics of Michael Wigglesworth.” Early American Literature 25, no. 3 (1990): 271-88.

In this essay, a response to Alan H. Pope's 1985 essay, Adams contends that proper understanding of Wigglesworth's Day of Doom depends on an understanding of both logic and the rhetorical theory that influenced the author.

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In a recent essay, Alan H. Pope has written that “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” (210). He provides an apt summary of the prevailing judgment of Wigglesworth as “a caricature of the grim, high-hatted Puritan, [who] 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” (210). However, Pope believes that Wigglesworth has been misread, as twentieth-century critics are insensitive to the...