A Revivalist Ars Poetica for an Itinerant Coterie
This chapter argues that evangelical wit and poetic networks were central to evangelical conversion, itinerancy, and verse culture (both evangelical and nonevangelical). In fact, to understand evangelicalism as an aesthetic movement means acknowledging itinerant networks as large scale poetic coteries and extemporenous preaching as part of the larger culture of wit in the eighteenth century. By looking at the Virginian itinerant minister James Ireland’s conversion narrative, Roberts shows how poetics and sociability could work in the opposite direction of Erskine, Moorhead, Davies, and Wheatley to help construct a muscularized and white evangelical masculinity among male poet-ministers. The chapter also shows how Ireland’s narrative reveals the importance of revival poetic forms to conversion and to a larger poetic history. Roberts argues that poems became crucial artifacts of evangelical conversion and its punctiliar and historical nature. Perhaps most importantly, she argues that revival poetics was crucial to the development of the lyric and helped constitute its particular mode of address to the stranger.