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The Day of Doom^m was a religious poem by clergyman Michael Wiaalesworth that became a best-selling classic in Puritan New Enaland for a century after it was published in 1662. The poem describes the Day of Judgment, in which a vengeful God sentences sinners (including, by Puritan theology, unbaptized infants) to punishment in heli. So popular was the work that no first or second editions exist because they were thumbed to shreds.

The poem is a "doggerel epitome of Calvinistic theology", according to the anthology, Colonial Prose and Poetry (1903), that "attained immediately a phenomenal popularity. Eighteen hundred copies were sold within a year, and for the next century it held a secure place in New Enaland Puritan households". According to the Norton Anthology of American Literaturę (Volume 1), "about one out of every twenty persons in New England bought it". As late as 1828 it was stated that many aged persons were still alive who could repeat it, as it had been taught them with their catechism; and the morę widely one reads in the voluminous sermons of that generation, the morę fair will its representation of prevailing theology in New Enaland appear."^m

Annę Bradstreet    Edward Taylor

Wrote about personal Obscure,    difficult

experience    metaphysical poetry inspired

by John Donnę and George Herbert

ELEGIES:

■    Public (written on death of a public figurę)

■    Private (written to a family)

■    Elegy - a poem or song that expresses sadness, especially for sb who has died.

Puritan poets often used:

■    Anaohora (the use of a word that refers to or replaces another word used earlier in a sentence, for example the