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.

August 2, 1877, the following poem was printed in the Kokomo Indiana Dispatch:

LEONAINIE

Leonainie – angels named her;
And they took the light
Of the laughing stars and framed her
In a smile of white:

And they made her hair of gloomy
Midnight, and her eyes of bloomy
Moonshine, and they brought her to me
In the solemn night.

In a solemn night of summer,
When my heart of gloom
Blossomed up to meet the comer
Like a rose in bloom;

All the forebodings that distressed me
I forgot as joy caressed me —
(Lying joy that caught and pressed me
In the arms of doom!)

Only spake the little lisper
In the angel-tongue;
Yet I, listening, heard her whisper, –
“Songs are only sung

Here below that they may grieve you –
Tales are told you to deceive you –
So must Leonainie leave you
While her love is young.”

Then God smiled and it was morning,
Matchless and supreme;
Heaven’s glory seemed adorning
Earth with its esteem:

Every heart but mine seemed gifted
With the voice of prayer, and lifted
Where my Leonainie drifted
From me like a dream.

The poem was said to be the work of none other than Edgar Allan Poe, posthumously discovered inscribed in the flyleaf of an old book. Within a few days Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley wrote the following response to the discovery of the poem in his own newspaper:

THE POET POE IN KOKOMO
Passing the many assailable points of the story egarding the birth and late discovery of the poem, we will briefly consider first – IS POE THE AUTHOR OF IT? That a poem contains some literary excellence is not assurance that its author is a genius known to fame, for how many waifs of richest worth are now afloat upon the literary sea whose authors are unknown and whose nameless names have never marked the graves that hid their value from the world; and in the present instance we have no right to say, -“This is Poe’s work – for who but Poe could mould a name like LEONAINIE?” and all that sort of flighty flummery. . . . To sum up the poem as a whole we are at some loss. It most certainly contains rare attributes of grace and beauty; and although we have not the temerity to accuse the gifted Poe of its authority, for equal strength of reason we cannot
deny that it is his production . . .

On August 25th, it was revealed that the poem was the work, not of Edgar Allan Poe, but rather of James Whitcomb Riley himself, who perpetrated the hoax in order to prove that his own poetry was worthy of publication in the finest newspapers and journals and had only been rejected because he was not already famous and accepted as a great poet. Riley was also a great admirer of Thomas Chatterton, a forger of poems in his right, but Riley, unlike Chatterton, went on to become famous in his own right as the author of poems such as Little Orphant Annie, The Raggedy Man and When the Frost Is on the Punkin.

Read all about the Leonainie Hoax.

I learned a new word: kenotic. “The term derives from the Greek “kenos” or “empty” and stands for a poetry of humility or of experience “emptied” of ground for boast or pride. Riley’s kenotic poetry is nothing less than poetry that participates in the mind of a humble God situated on a cross noting human events. Such writing requires dialectical or “koine” (as it is called today) expression. No other American writer before or since has proven Riley’s equal. Much of its power derives from Riley’s fervent and pioneer Methodist roots but also much comes from Riley’s experiences in life.”

Riley wrote kenotic peotry, and I write a kenotic blog. Happy Birthday, Mr. Riley, b. 1849, d. 1916.