Some Caricatures Really Lived

“So closely does Michael Wigglesworth approximate the unhappy popular conception of our seventeenth-century forbears that he seems more plausible as a satirical construction than he does as a human being. In their descriptions of a Puritan so obsessed with himself, with his own quest for salvation, that he suppressed or ignored all purely human experience, early critics accurately described, not the typical Puritan, but the atypical Michael Wigglesworth” (Daly, p. 129).