Michael Wigglesworth: Devoted Preacherman Overcomes Sickliness And Sill

Michael Wigglesworth Devoted Preacherman Overcomes Sickliness And poor Name to Write The First American Bestseller THE MAN (NO MYTH, NO LEGEND) puritan diaries provide feeble fodder for biographical blurbs. Most diaries focus chiefly on spiritual growth. The diary of Michael Wigglesworth is hardly an exception. As noted in the reputable Dictionary of Literary Biography, Wigglesworths private, personal life is meet by much ambiguity and conjecture. Wigglesworth (1631-1705) spent the bulk of his life in Malden, Massachusetts, his activities alternating between preaching, writing preachy poetry, and retching in pain. He examine at Harvard and eventually became a practicing physician and minister. He hardly had a year of preaching under his proverbial belt when an obscure painful, moderate disease smote him silly. The disease ravaged his innards for nearly twenty years, during which date he had to decline the presidency of Harvard and turn to poetry as a means of preaching from his sickbed (Bosco 337-342).When compared to some of his contemporaries, Wigglesworth composed a fairly slim down collection of poetry. However, The Day of Doom, an Edwards-esque diatribe detailing the second coming of Christ, achieved big popularity. Hailed by numerous scholars as the first American bestseller, the poem (comprise of 224 eight-line stanzas) was an warm success in the American colonies. Generations of schoolchildren memorized it, and their pious parents clutched it closely. Perhaps roused by his success, or by his marriage to a woman 25 years his junior, Wigglesworth do a startling recovery and spurned his disease. As Cotton Mather observed, It blithesome God wondrously to restore His Faithful Servant. He... ...mporaries Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor. Wigglesworths style strikes contemporary readers as more appropriate to the pulpit than to poetic stanzas. The didactic style, scarce what Puritan readers favored, displeases most modern readers (Bosco 337-342). Works CitedBosco, Ronald A. Michael Wigglesworth. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol 24 American Colonial Writers. Ed. Emory Elliot. Princeton U Gale Group, 1984. 337-342.Radel, Nicholas F. A Sodom Within Historicizing Puritan Homoerotics in the Diary of Michael Wigglesworth. The Puritan Origins of American Sex. Eds. Tracy Fessenden, Nicholas F. Radel, and Magdalena J. Zaborowska. New York Routledge, 2001.Works ConsultedWigglesworth, Michael. The Day of Doom, or a Poetical Description of the Great and Last Judgment. Ed. Kenneth B. Murdock. New York Russell & Russell, 1966.