Boucquey Thierry (General Editor). Encyclopedia Of World Writers. 3 volumes
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After Villon left Paris in 1463, he was never heard
from again.
Villon’s poetic inventions are closely tied to his
personal trials and experiences and reflect the
opinions of an outsider and rebel. The social world
into which he was born had two authorities, the
church and the law, both of which Villon managed
to offend. The literary culture that he entered had
two authorities, sacred scripture and the authors of
classical antiquity, both of which Villon used in
his poetry. Villon had studied the Bible as well as
Greek and Roman philosophers, and he was well-
versed in the tradition of French literature, espe-
cially the works of Guillaume de Machaut and
Eustace Deschamps.
The mock will was a popular genre, and Villon
employed this form in composing The Legacy in
1456 as he prepared to leave Paris. These 300 verses
about disillusioned love, lovers going astray, or
lovers in distress are full of wry counterpoints, irony,
and dark humor, as in these lines in which a lover
speaks of leave-taking with no assurance of return:
I’m not without my faults, nor made
of tougher stuff than other men;
human life is an uncertain thing
and there’s no respite from death;
also, I have far to go....
The work that does Villon the most credit is The
Testament, which he composed in 1461. This work
also is structured like a will, wherein he addresses
friends, enemies, and his own alter ego using dia-
logue, self-examination, and jokes. This long
poem, somewhat more elevated in tone, contains
dark insights, as in these lines:
So, have your fill of love,
go to parties and to banquets,
in the end you’ll be no better off
and the only thing you’ll break will be your
head.
Foolish love makes beasts of men . . .
That man is lucky who has nothing.
Villon also wrote many shorter pieces, many of
them addressed to people who aided him, among
them Charles d’Orléans, the parliamentarian who
ultimately pardoned him, and his jailer in prison.
He has been accused of being a poet insensitive to
beauty, but the scarcity of pleasant moments in his
poetry may reflect the scarcity of pleasurable mo-
ments in his life. Many of the so-called slang
poems, those written in the jargon of the criminal
underworld, are manipulative, sarcastic, and even
vitriolic. Throughout his work his outlook is pes-
simistic but honest, and his poems emerge from
his attempts to come to terms with his experiences.
Criticism of Villon’s criminal activities has tradi-
tionally colored criticism of his work, but virtually
all students of literature have heard the echo, in
some form, of Villon’s most melancholy line:
“Where are the snows of yesteryear?” Though his
morals are questionable, his influence is a fact. As
biographer Anthony Bonner states, in a mere six
years Villon “turned out a body of poetry great
enough to leave him with few rivals in the litera-
ture of his own country or in that of any other.”
English Versions of Works by François Villon
Book of François Villon: The Little Testament and Bal-
lads. Translated by Algernon C. Swinburne. New
York: Branden Publishing, 1997.
Poems of François Villon. Translated by Peter Dale.
London: Anvil Press Poetry, 2001.
Works about François Villon
Burl, Aubrey. Danse Macabre: François Villon. New
York: Sutton, 2000.
Fein, David A. François Villon Revisited. New York:
Twayne, 1997.
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)
(1694–1778) novelist, playwright, poet,
historian
François-Marie Arouet, universally known as
Voltaire (an assumed name), is perhaps the
best-known literary figure of the European
Voltaire 297
ENLIGHTENMENT. During his long and eventful life,
he experimented with virtually every genre of lit-
erature—EPIC poetry, history, philosophy, fiction,
and drama—and produced a prodigious amount
of work. Although he was best known in his own
time for his plays, his most widely read work today
is his novel Candide.
Voltaire was born in Paris and was provided
with a classical education by the religious order of
the Jesuits at Louis-le-Grand. Although his father,
a successful notary and member of the bourgeoisie,
wanted him to become a lawyer, Voltaire disliked
the legal profession and preferred to pursue a life of
literature. His first great success was his play Œdipe
(1718), a story based upon the tragic Greek legend
of Oedipus. He spent some time in jail for writing
scandalous poetry and was later exiled to England.
While in England, he met famous literary figures
and became interested in philosophy and science.
He also wrote La Henriade (originally titled La
Ligue; published in 1723), an epic poem in 10 can-
tos based upon Henry III’s siege of Paris in 1589,
and Histoire de Charles XII (1731), a history of the
reign of King Charles XII of Sweden.
Upon his return from England, Voltaire wrote
his first masterpiece, Letters Concerning the
English Nation. In this collection of essays, he con-
trasts the general freedom and tolerance of En-
gland with the oppressive religious and political
climate of France. This made him very unpopular
with the French government.
From the early 1730s to the mid-1740s, Voltaire
mostly lived in his château of Cirey with his mis-
tress, Madame du Châtelet. During his time there,
he wrote a number of plays and historical works,
including Brutus (1730), in which the character
Titus is torn between his love for a tyrant’s daugh-
ter and his responsibility to help liberate his coun-
try; La Mort de César (1731), on the death of the
Roman general and statesman Julius Caesar; and
Zaïre (1732), the story of a Christian child, who is
kidnapped by a Turkish army, and her father,
whose attempt to save her instead results in her
murder. Voltaire also translated the scientific works
of Sir Isaac Newton in Éléments de la Philosophie de
Newton (1736), which did much to make science
more popular in France; and began a famous corre-
spondence with Frederick the Great, king of Prussia.
He was also appointed court poet despite his ene-
mies (who favored neither his literary attacks on es-
tablished social, political, and religious issues nor
his success and wealth), and wrote La Princesse de
Navarre (1744) and Poème de Fontenoy (1745). In the
late 1740s, he began writing short stories in prose, in-
cluding Zadig, ou la Destinée (1748), a story about a
young man who loses his fortune and then experi-
ences a series of “fateful” incidents that only Provi-
dence (or destiny) can understand. Voltaire was also
appointed to the ACADÉMIE FRANÇAISE in 1746, and
completed three more tragedies: Sémiramis (1746),
Oreste (1749), and Rome sauvée (1749).
After Madame du Châtelet’s death in 1749,
Voltaire spent a few years living in Berlin at the
court of Frederick the Great. During this time, he
continued to add to a collection of essays that he
had begun during his time at Cirey with Madame
du Châtelet. The essays were eventually published
as Essay on the Manners and the Spirit of Nations
(1756). In this historical and highly philosophical
work, Voltaire states that people are responsible for
their own destinies, that they have the will and the
means to overcome all obstacles, including those
that are religious, political, cultural, and economi-
cal. Voltaire also began to develop, in concept, what
would become The Philosophical Dictionary (1764),
a series of 73 critical social essays that was repeat-
edly banned by authorities for Voltaire’s portrayal
of the social ills and unrest caused not only by the
government, but also by the established church. In
addition to this work, Voltaire finished writing Le
Siècle de Louis XIV and Poème sur la loi naturelle.
At age 60, Voltaire moved to the small town of
Ferney, where he bought an estate in 1758, and
lived there almost the rest of his life. Once he had
settled down, he produced a massive amount of lit-
erature in almost every genre. He continued writ-
ing plays, produced historical works concerning
King Louis XIV of France and Czar Peter the Great
298 Voltaire
of Russia, wrote the dramatic poem The Lisbon
Earthquake and the novel Candide, as well as com-
pleted The Philosophical Dictionary. It is for these
works and the place in which they were written that
Voltaire is often referred to as the “Sage of Ferney.”
Throughout his life, Voltaire was bitterly hostile
toward organized religion. He viewed the ignorance
of those who unethically and immorally used faith
and church law to further their own causes as both
the cause itself of much human suffering and the
enemy of “enlightened”thought. He even went so far
as to sign many of his letters with the phrase “Ecrasez
L’infame,” or “Crush the Infamous,” which stood for
his position that people should fight the oppression
and bigotry caused by organized religion. In keeping
with his penchant for ever-changing styles and topics,
however, Voltaire also published A Treatise on Toler-
ance, in which he begs people to overlook their reli-
gious differences and treat one another with respect.
From his home at Ferney, Voltaire used his writing
abilities and his immense network of personal con-
nections to fight campaigns against injustice
throughout Europe, particularly in cases of religious
persecution or unfair criminal justice systems.
In 1778, with only a few months left to live,
Voltaire returned to Paris, not having visited the
city for nearly a quarter of a century. He was wel-
comed home by the Parisian people as a hero, and
the premiere of his final play, Irène, was a smashing
success. Voltaire died in Paris on May 30. In the
“Introduction” to Voltaire: Candide, Zadig, and Se-
lected Stories, Donald M. Frame states that “for
much of his life Voltaire’s greatest fame was as the
leading successor to Corneille and Racine in classi-
cal French verse tragedy, which he spiced with
themes from Shakespeare and the East, colorful
and violent visual effects, and thinly veiled social
and religious criticism.”
Critical Analysis
In nearly all of his writing, Voltaire employed a
brilliant sarcastic wit and a highly developed sense
of irony; in Candide, these gifts reached their full
expression.
Candide is the fanciful story of a young man
who wanders around the world, experiencing hor-
rible disasters and witnessing terrifying events.
Voltaire uses the story to present his views on the
nature of good and evil, the absurdity of life, and
the futility of hope. The entire work is, in effect,
an attack on the views of other writers and
philosophers such as Alexander POPE and Gottfried
Wilhelm LEIBNIZ who believed that the human race
lived in “the best of all possible worlds.” Voltaire’s
message in Candide is that the world could be bet-
ter, that it is not yet what it could be.
In the story, the character of Candide falls in
love with the beautiful Cunegonde, the daughter of
the castle’s baron. As a result, he is kicked out of
the castle where he grew up. For the rest of the
story, Candide wanders, sometimes searching for
Cunegonde but often simply trying to escape from
various disasters that continually befall him.
Candide is forcibly recruited into the Bulgar
army (which is really a thinly disguised Prussian
army, led by a thinly disguised Frederick the
Great). He is caught in the Lisbon earthquake, per-
secuted by the Inquisition, finds and loses a fabu-
lous treasure in El Dorado, and sees many friends
die horrible deaths. Until the very end, Candide
believes everything that happens is for the best,
for that is what he has been taught by his teacher,
Doctor Pangloss (who may simply be a caricature
of Leibniz).
In addition to directly experiencing great hard-
ships, Candide also bears witness to others’ hard-
ships. At one point, he encounters six men at a
dinner. It is soon revealed that these men were
once powerful monarchs who had been over-
thrown. Through part of his adventure, Candide
is accompanied by a character known simply as
“the old woman,” the pope’s illegitimate daughter,
who was enslaved by North African pirates and
who had half of her buttock cut off by Turkish sol-
diers during the siege of Azov.
In addition, Candide witnesses the execution
of an English captain whose only crime was not
engaging the enemy closely enough. This particu-
Voltaire 299
300 Vondel, Joost van den
lar part of the story provides one of Voltaire’s cele-
brated quotes: “[I]n this country it is considered a
good thing to kill an admiral from time to time so
as to encourage the others.” The episode was in-
spired by the actual execution of Admiral Sir John
Byng on March 14, 1757, and is an excellent exam-
ple of how Voltaire uses his writing as commentary
about social and political events.
In his adventures, Candide is accompanied by
various unusual characters, many of whom seem-
ingly die only to puzzlingly reappear later in the
story. There is Doctor Pangloss, who stubbornly
continues to believe, despite all the evidence, that
everything in the world happens for the best. There
are Martin, a cynic and realist who seems to be the
only voice of true reason in the story; Cacambo, a
faithful servant to Candide despite the fact that his
connection to Candide brings him nothing but
misfortune; and finally, Cunegonde, a rather sim-
ple-minded young woman who remains the object
of Candide’s affections.
The story ends in the city of Constantinople,
where Candide and his friends settle down to a
simple life of gardening. At the conclusion, Pan-
gloss still believes that they live in the best of all
possible worlds, but Candide has become disillu-
sioned. Having seen and suffered so much, the
young man decides that the only way to achieve
any happiness in life is, as Voltaire puts it, to “cul-
tivate our garden.”
Among his many other works, Candide helped
make Voltaire one of the most famous writers of
the European Enlightenment and, in the opinion
of many, the greatest. Certainly he was the most
prolific, leaving behind more than 10,000 letters
on every subject imaginable, hundreds of pam-
phlets, plays, short stories, poems, and novels. The
central theme running through all of his work is
the power of human reason to overcome prejudice
and to improve life for all humanity.
English Versions of Works by Voltaire
Candide. Holicong, Pa.: Wildside Press, 2003.
Complete Romances of Voltaire. Whitefish, Mont.:
Kessinger Publishing, 2003.
Voltaire and His Letters. Translated by S. G. Tallentyre.
Miami: International Law and Taxation, 2004.
Voltaire: Candide, Zadig, and Selected Stories. Tr an s-
lated by Donald M. Frame. New York: New Amer-
ican Library, 1961.
Voltaire: Treatise on Tolerance. Edited by Simon Har-
vey. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Voltaire’s Correspondence: An Epistolary Novel, vol. 5.
Edited by Deidre Dawson and Gita May. New
York: Peter Lang, 1994.
Works about Voltaire
Bonhome, Denise. What Voltaire Tries to Tell Us. Lin-
coln, Neb.: iUniverse, 2000.
Hugo, Victor. Oration on Voltaire. La Vergne, Tenn.:
University Press of the Pacific, 2003.
Knapp, Bettina Liebowitz. Voltaire Revisited. New
York: Macmillan Library Reference, 2000.
Tallentyre,S.G.Life of Voltaire. Miami: International
Law and Taxation, 2004.
Thaddeus, Victor. Voltaire, Genius of Mockery. White-
fish, Mont.: Kessinger Publishing, 2003.
Walsh, Thomas. Readings on Candide. Farmington
Hills, Mich.: Gale Group, 2000.
Vondel, Joost van den (1587–1679)
dramatist
Joost van den Vondel, known as Holland’s national
playwright and “Prince of Poets,” was originally
born in Cologne but moved to the Netherlands as
a child and settled with his family in Amsterdam.
His father hoped he would take up the family trade
of being a hatter, but the younger Vondel married
the daughter of a Flemish clothier who looked
after the family business while Vondel wrote. His
long life was marked by personal tragedy, includ-
ing the early deaths of his wife and two children
and near-bankruptcy caused by a son who was
then banished to the East Indies and died at sea.
At age 70, Vondel was obliged to find a job in a
bank but was eventually allowed to retire.
Over the course of his life Vondel produced a
huge body of work, including 30 full-length dra-
mas, beginning with Het Pascha (The Passover) in
1612. He also wrote lyrical and religious poetry
and printed translations of Greek and Latin clas-
sics. His plays frequently feature biblical themes,
adhere to classical forms, and show impressive ca-
dences of thought and language. The 10 volumes
of Vondel’s work, collected after his death, illus-
trate in words the Dutch and Flemish Golden Age
that Rembrandt, Van Dyck, and Rubens rendered
in their paintings.
In addition to being a dramatist and poet, Von-
del was also a patriot and a campaigner for politi-
cal and religious freedom. Lucifer (1654) probably
inspired John MILTON with its portrayal of the
fallen archangel torn by personal ambition and
perceived injustice. The portrayal of heavenly be-
ings as capable of all-too-human frailty caused
such outrage that the play was banned after its sec-
ond performance. Lucifer was followed by Exile
(1664) and Noah (1667), creating a trio of tales
from the Bible. Lucifer and Gijsbrecht van Aemstel
(1637) are considered the best works of an author
remembered as one of the greatest poets and cer-
tainly the greatest dramatist of the Netherlands.
English Versions of a Work by
Joost van den Vondel
Lucifer: Joost Van den Vondel. Translated by Noel
Clark. Bath, U.K.: Absolute Classics, 1990.
Lucifer. New York: Theatre Communications Group,
1991.
A Work about Joost van den Vondel
Mody, Jehangir R. P. Vondel and Milton. Norwood,
Pa.: Norwood Editions, 1977.
Vondel, Joost van den 301
302
W
Waldseemüller, Martin (1470–ca. 1521)
cartographer
Martin Waldseemüller was born near Lake Con-
stance in the southern reaches of the Black Forest
in what is now Germany. He studied theology at
the University of Freiburg and served as a cleric in
his native diocese of Constance. He also spent time
at Strasburg and Basel studying geography, partic-
ularly the ancient maps of Ptolemy. By 1507 he
came to the monastery at St. Die in the mountains
of Lorraine, where he was made a canon in 1514.
In typical humanistic fashion he often used a Gre-
cianized form of his name, Martinus Ilacomilus.
In Waldseemüller’s lifetime, the voyages of
COLUMBUS,Amerigo VESPUCCI, and other explorers
significantly revised the scope of the known world.
After his third voyage, Vespucci published an ac-
count of his survey of the coastline of South Amer-
ica. He named the accounts, and the lands he had
explored, Mundus Novus (The New World). Up to
this point, Columbus and his contemporary Euro-
peans insisted that the lands they had reached were
islands, but Vespucci was aware he had reached a
new continent, inhabited he said,“by more numer-
ous peoples and animals than in our Europe or Asia
or Africa.” When Vespucci’s Mundus Novus reached
the small community of scholars, geographers, and
cartographers at St. Die, Waldseemüller immedi-
ately began working on a new map of the world.
In 1507 Waldseemüller published the Introduc-
tion to Cosmography, With Certain Necessary Prin-
ciples of Geometry and Astronomy, To Which Are
Added The Four Voyages of Amerigo Vespucci. In ad-
dition to the core treatise on cosmography, the
work includes two maps, one a globe and one a
plane projection map, as well as the already-fa-
mous letter written by Amerigo Vespucci to the
duke of Lorraine, describing the voyages he con-
ducted between 1497 and 1503. Recognizing the
debt that modern cartography owed to the an-
cients, Waldseemüller included a figure of Ptolemy
on the map, overlooking the world as Wald-
seemüller imagined it.
The 1507 map is unique in many respects. It is
the first published map to represent all 360 degrees
of the known world. It is the first to label the new
continent “America,” since, as Waldseemüller de-
clared, “I see no reason why anyone should justly
object to calling this part Amerige, i.e., the land of
Amerigo, or America, after Amerigo, its discov-
erer.” In addition, Waldseemüller speculated that
if the new lands were indeed a continent, then an-
other ocean must lie between them and the Orient.
Thus his map depicts the Pacific Ocean a full six
years before its sighting was recorded by Vasco
Nuñez de Balboa, who crossed the Isthmus of
Panama in 1513.
In comparison to the 12 different woodcuts of
the map, which hold a more immediate interest,
particularly for students of American history, the
Cosmography often has been overlooked. It con-
tains a detailed analysis of the sciences of astron-
omy and geometry, which Waldseemüller
considered crucial to the study of geography. The
nine chapters cover Waldseemüller’s knowledge on
geometrical and astronomical terms, the circles of
the heavens and the five celestial zones, the climates
of the Earth as well as the winds, and various seas
and islands, including their distances from one an-
other. In his account he drew not only on Ptolemy
but also on the voyages of Marco Polo. All four
parts of the Cosmography were immediately popu-
lar. Though the 1516 reprint of the map left out the
name America, Waldseemüller’s suggestion had al-
ready come into common usage. His 1507 map is
considered “the birth certificate of America.”
An English Version of a Work by Martin
Waldseemüller
Cosmographiae Introductio of Martin Waldseemüller in
Facsimile. Translated by Joseph Fischer and Franz
von Wieser. Manchester, N.H.: Ayer Co., 1977.
A Work about Martin Waldseemüller
Arcinieges, Germán. Why America? 500 Years of a
Name: The Life and Times of Amerigo Vespucci.
Translated by Harriet de Onís. Washington, D.C.:
Villegas Editores, 2002.
Warren, Mercy Otis (1728–1814)
playwright, poet, historian
Throughout her life, Mercy Otis Warren excelled at
many literary forms, including poetry and drama,
but her legacy rests largely on her three-volume
history of the American Revolutionary War, writ-
ten in the later years of her life. She was also a
prodigious letter writer, and her correspondents
included John and Abigail Adams and George and
Martha Washington.
Born in Barnstable, Massachusetts, Warren was
the daughter of James and Mary Allyne Otis, who
also had 12 other children.Warren received no for-
mal education, but she was able to study with her
brother’s tutor, Reverend Jonathan Russell, who
encouraged her early literary interests.
In 1754 Mercy Otis married James Warren, a
prominent local farmer and merchant who would
later become a Revolutionary War general. The
Warrens settled in Plymouth, where Warren raised
her five sons and explored her literary pursuits.
Her earliest works, satirical plays, targeted the
British colonial government. She was spurred to
write such works after an incident in which her
brother James was beaten violently in a Boston cof-
feehouse by a British Tory. Her first published
play—The Adulateur, A Tragedy, As it is now acted
in Upper Servia—was written in verse and pub-
lished anonymously in 1772 in the Massachusetts
Spy. It was “the first play published by a woman
born and residing in English America” (Richards).
Though couched in neoclassical names and tech-
niques, the play is an obvious attack on Governor
Thomas Hutchinson, who in this play is named
“Rapatio.” Her other plays—including The Group
(1775) and The Blockheads (1776)—were also po-
litically satirical, though none of them was ever
staged. Though written in “a refined, academic
style,” Warren’s “primary purpose [was] to create
strong political satire” (Gartner). Two additional
satiric plays appeared in her Poems, Dramatic and
Miscellaneous in 1790.
Mercy Otis Warren is best remembered for her
three-volume account of the war, History of the Rise,
Progress and Termination of the American Revolution,
Interspersed with Biographical, Political and Moral
Observations (1805). Her account provides personal
and political views of an army wife who corre-
sponded with many of the great figures of the time.
The history was Warren’s last published work.
After her husband died in 1808, she continued writ-
ing her letters, which, though often overdramatic
Warren, Mercy Otis 303
and florid, remain important documents of female
thought and life during the Revolutionary era.
A Work about Mercy Otis Warren
Zagarri, Rosemarie. A Woman’s Dilemma: Mercy Otis
Warren and the American Revolution. Wheeling,
Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1995.
Watling, Thomas (1762–ca. 1815)
correspondent, painter
Thomas Watling was born in Dumfries, Scotland,
the son of a soldier. He showed talent as an artist
and briefly worked as a drawing teacher and coach
painter. In 1788 he was arrested for counterfeiting
and only narrowly escaped hanging. In 1791, still
in prison, he volunteered for transportation to the
new penal colony in Australia. After an abortive es-
cape attempt at the Cape of Good Hope, he
reached Port Jackson, New South Wales, late in
1792. The first professional artist in the colony,
Watling became an assistant to a surgeon, an ama-
teur naturalist who was compiling a record of the
settlement’s flora and fauna and who needed
Watling to draw the illustrations.
In 1794 Watling wrote Letters from an Exile at
Botany Bay to His Aunt in Dumfries, an irreverent,
informal account of life in the Australian colony.
Published in England, the book was a collection of
actual letters Watling wrote to his elderly Aunt
Marion. In some of the letters, he describes the
aborigines:
Irascibility, ferocity, cunning, treachery, re-
venge, filth and immodesty are strikingly their
dark characteristics, their virtues are so far
from conspicuous that I have not, as yet, been
able to discern them. One thing I may adduce
to their credit, that they are not cannibals.
In addition to writing letters, Watling also
painted many portraits of the land and its people.
Before his pardon and return to England in 1797,
he made more than 500 drawings of animals, land-
scapes, and other scenes of the new land, almost all
of them remarkable for their draftsmanship and
detail. His drawings of birds proved of consider-
able value to later naturalists, and his portraits of
local aboriginal life are an invaluable early depic-
tion of aboriginal and colonial culture. His most
famous work of art is “Sydney Cove in 1794,” ap-
parently the first oil painting ever made on Aus-
tralian soil.
In 1805 Watling was again charged with forgery
but was later acquitted. There is no record of him
after 1814, and some historians believe he died
soon afterward. His works, both in prose and
paint, are unique in Australian colonial art.
Watling’s letters are valued not only as a classic of
Australian settlement, but also as literature written
from the perspective of a convict.
A Work about Thomas Watling
Thomas Watling: Dumfries’ Convict Artist. Dumfries,
Scotland: Dumfries Museum, 1988.
Wheatley, Phillis (ca. 1753–1784) poet
Phillis Wheatley was brought to Boston from
Africa after having been purchased by John Wheat-
ley, an affluent tailor, as a companion for his wife,
Susannah. She was named for the slave ship, the
Phillis, which transported her to America, and she
assumed the surname of her master. Susannah
Wheatley taught her slave to read and write, and
within 16 months the gifted young girl mastered
the English language. She was particularly fond of
the writings of Alexander
POPE, Thomas Gray, and
John MILTON.
In her teen years, Wheatley composed a series of
39 poems, which were published in London (1773)
as Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral
(1773). Her style was not particularly original, for
she relied heavily on established poetic conven-
tions, especially on the heroic couplets and elegies
favored by Pope.
Many of Wheatley’s poems are conciliatory in
nature. For instance, in “On Being Brought from
304 Watling, Thomas
Africa to America” (1773) and “To the University
of Cambridge, in New England” (1767), she ex-
presses gratitude for having been taken from her
“Pagan land” to a place where her soul could come
to recognize “That there’s a God, that there’s a Sav-
iour too.” Moreover, she sought to revive people’s
yearning to turn their souls toward God.
In other poems, Wheatley was not so concilia-
tory, speaking out against slavery and hypocrisy.
For example, in “On the Death of General
Wooster” (1778), she questions the “disgrace” of
holding “in bondage Africa’s blameless race.”
After Wheatley was emancipated, she became
active in promoting her works. As a result, her rep-
utation as an important African-American poet
grew. Even though her poetry collection was reis-
sued a number of times, she received no financial
remuneration and died in poverty at age 31.
Phillis Wheatley is remembered for having been
one of the rare African-American slaves to receive
an education and for having written some of the
best and most poignant poetry of early American
literature.
Works by Phillis Wheatley
Phillis Wheatley: Complete Writings. Edited by Vin-
cent Carretta. New York: Penguin Classics, 2001.
The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1988.
Works about Phillis Wheatley
Bloom, Harold, ed. African-American Poets: Phillis
Wheatley through Countee Cullen. Langhorne, Pa.:
Chelsea House, 2001.
Gates, Henry Louis. The Trials of Phillis Wheatley:
America’s First Black Poet and Encounters with the
Founding Fathers. New York: Basic Books, 2003.
Wigglesworth, Michael (1631–1705) poet
Born in England, Michael Wigglesworth immi-
grated to America in 1638 with his Puritan parents,
Edward and Esther Wigglesworth. The family
eventually settled in New Haven, Connecticut.
Wigglesworth entered Harvard College at age 17,
eventually earning both bachelor and master de-
grees. He stayed at Harvard to teach, but he also
occasionally preached during this time. In 1654 he
became minister at the Puritan church in Malden,
married the first of three wives the next year, and
was officially ordained in 1656. He also maintained
a medical practice over the years.
Wigglesworth’s most famous work was the
poem The Day of Doom, published in 1662. To
modern readers, the work reads more like a ser-
mon than a poem, with its “Puritan plain style
and a conviction of the rightness of New [Eng-
land’s] brand of Calvinism” (Bosco). Wig-
glesworth states his purpose for writing the poem
in these lines:
Oh! guide me by thy sacred Sprite
So to indite, and so to write,
That I thine holy Name may praise,
And teach the Sons of men thy wayes.
The Day of Doom was written in ballad meter, and is
filled with biblical references. It was quite popular in
its time, with more than 1,800 copies sold in 1662.
His next poem, God’s Controversy with New
England, was perhaps a response to a great drought
that occurred in 1661 and 1662, which Wig-
glesworth believed was brought on by God due to
the sinful and lapsed ways of New Englanders.
In 1670 he published Meat Out of the Eater, a
2,000-line rhyming poem written in various meters.
It is perhaps Wigglesworth’s most personal poem,
consisting of “a series of song ...written as much to
console as to edify ‘enduring’ Christians” (Bosco).
In 1670 Wigglesworth turned most of his en-
ergy to preaching in Malden. Indeed, it appears
that he made very few poetic efforts during these
later years. When he died, he left behind his third
wife and eight children.
Works by Michael Wigglesworth
The Day of Doom or a Description of the Great and
Last Judgment. Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger, 2003.
Wigglesworth, Michael 305
The Diary of Michael Wigglesworth, 1653–1657: The
Conscience of a Puritan. Edited by Edmund S.
Morgan. Magnolia, Mass.: Smith Peter, 1990.
The Poems of Michael Wigglesworth. Edited by Ronald
A. Bosco. Lanham, Md.: University Press of Amer-
ica, 1989.
Works about Michael Wigglesworth
Crowder, Richard. No Featherbed to Heaven: A Biog-
raphy of Michael Wigglesworth, 1631. Textbook
Publishers, 2003.
Dean, John W. Memoir of the Revised. Michael Wig-
glesworth, Author of the Day of Doom. Murieta,
Calif.: New Library Press, 2003.
Williams, Roger (1603–1683) nonfiction
writer, poet, grammarian
Roger Williams was born to a wealthy merchant,
who sent him to Cambridge University, where he
graduated in 1627. He later became a clergyman
with Puritan sympathies and sailed to the Massa-
chusetts colony in 1630. The colonists originally
welcomed Williams, but his questioning of the va-
lidity of taking Native American lands proved too
radical. Upon hearing from the colony’s governor,
John
WINTHROP, that a warrant had been issued for
his arrest, Williams fled with a handful of followers
into the southern territory of sympathetic Indians.
In 1636 he founded Providence Plantations, which
became the colony and later the state of Rhode Is-
land. Native Americans trusted Williams, even as
their relationships with other colonists deterio-
rated. Williams acted unsuccessfully as peacemaker
between the two warring sides in the 1660s and
1670s. He died in Providence.
In 1643 he wrote the Key Into the Languages of
America, the first Indian grammar in English,
which included rhymes depicting Native Ameri-
cans as more tolerant, peaceful, and fair than con-
temporary European peoples. His most influential
work at the time was The Bloudy Tenent (1644), in
which he criticizes religious wars and the union of
church and state. Williams wrote The Bloudy
Tenent as a dialog between Truth and Peace in
which he states that “enforced uniformity (sooner
or later) is the greatest occasion of civil war, rav-
ishing of conscience, persecution of Christ Jesus
in his servants, and of the hypocrisy and destruc-
tion of millions of souls.” He argued that civil gov-
ernments should confine themselves to secular
affairs and allow freedom of religion to their citi-
zens. Williams’s belief in religious tolerance was
considered so dangerous that The Bloudy Tenent
was burned in England in 1645.
While Williams’s initial followers were English
religious and political radicals of the 1640s and
1650s, his most lasting legacy is the influence he
had on later American writers and political
thinkers, such as Benjamin
FRANKLIN and Thomas
JEFFERSON.
Works by Roger Williams
A Key into the Language of America. Bedford, Mass.:
Applewood Books, 1997.
The Complete Writings of Roger Williams. New York:
Russell and Russell, 1963.
A Work about Roger Williams
Gaustad, Edwin S. Roger Williams: Prophet of Liberty.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Winthrop, John (1588–1649) historian,
essayist
John Winthrop was born into a family of wealthy
clothiers and lawyers in Suffolk, England. He entered
Trinity College of Cambridge University in 1602, but
left in 1604. He became a magistrate in 1609, stud-
ied law, and in 1626 became an attorney in the Court
of Wards and Liveries. Winthrop was elected gover-
nor of the Massachusetts colony in 1629, and the fol-
lowing year arrived in Charlestown, Massachusetts.
The colonists elected Winthrop governor annually
until 1634, and then again from 1637 to 1640, 1642
to 1644, and 1646 to 1649, when he died in Boston.
As the first governor of Massachusetts, he dealt
with such issues as religious freedom, interactions
with Native Americans, and the basic survival of
the new settlements.
306 Williams, Roger