Michael Wigglesworth, b. 1631 in England, but lived most of his life in America, a pastor in Malden, Massachusetts. He married three times and had eight children. And he became a doctor in addition to being a preacher and a writer. He wrote a long poem, 224 stanzas, called The Day of Doom. The theme of the poem was the Judgment Seat of Christ, and Wigglesworth portrays vividly both the delight of the saved and the despair of the damned, spending rather more stanzas on the goats or the non-elect. Here’s a sample of the Puritan, Calvinist theology of the poem:

Of Man’s fall’n Race, who can true Grace,
or Holiness obtain?
Who can convert or change his heart,
if God withhold the same?
Had we apply’d our selves, and try’d
as much as who did most
God’s love to gain, our busie pain
and labour had been lost.

Christ readily makes this Reply,
I damn you not because
You are rejected, or not elected,
but you have broke my Laws:
It is but vain your wits to strain,
the end and means to sever:
Men fondly seek to part or break
what God hath link’d together.

Whom God will save, such he will have,
the means of life to use:
Whom he’ll pass by, shall chuse to dy,
and ways of life refuse.
He that fore-sees, and foredecrees,
in wisdom order’d has,
That man’s free-will electing ill,
shall bring his will to pass.

Here’s the interesting part:

Published in 1662, The Day of Doom became America’s first best seller, circulating 1800 copies during the first year. It has been estimated that at one time one copy was owned for every thirty-five people in all of New England; every other family must have had The Day of Doom on its parlor table. The poem went through ten editions in the next fourteen decades, four in the seventeenth century and six in the eighteenth.

Can you imagine such a poem becoming a bestseller nowadays?

James Leigh Hunt, b. 1784 wrote a poem about the Judgment that is much more acceptable to our current sensibilities: Abou Ben Adhem.