The Day of Doom

"The Day of Doom: or, A Poetical Description of the Great and Last Judgment"[1] is a religious poem by clergyman Michael Wigglesworth that became a best-selling classic in Puritan New England for a century after it was published in 1662 by Samuel Green and Marmaduke Johnson.

The entire first printing of eighteen hundred copies was sold within a year, and for the next century The Day of Doom held a secure place in New England Puritan households".

[3] Its repeated republication made it, according to one 20th century scholar, “the most popular poem that New England has ever known”, with circulation “beyond the wildest dreams of the most high pressure publisher of modern fiction”.

A world that accepted Michael Wigglesworth for its poet, and accounted Cotton Mather its most distinguished man of letters, had certainly backslidden in the ways of culture.”[6] The poem is a "doggerel epitome of Calvinistic theology", according to the anthology, Colonial Prose and Poetry (1903).

[1] Over its two hundred and twenty-four stanzas (the longest of any poem in the Colonial Period), The Day of Doom is an argument to encourage the faithful and challenge the faithless through describing plainly how scripture depicts the amazement (and later the judgment per se) of the unwise.