Conclusion

Through examples of both print and manuscript poems, the conclusion argues that evangelicalism was a shift in the emphasis on aesthetics and its correct uses more than a theological tenet, and that revival poetry became a central part of not only eighteenth-, but nineteenth-century verse practices and beyond. These legacies, which include the revivalist poet-minister, the print itinerant, espousal piety, the Calvinist couplet, and women poet-minister personae, have important implications for later abolitionist poetry, the sentimental poetess, histories of racialized and gendered aesthetic capacities, the development of lyric address, and the integration of religious experience and practice in American literary history. Though elite defenders of enthusiasm tried to empty enthusiasm of religious radicalism and attach it to literary poetry, the eighteenth century (and beyond) saw the explosion of an enthusiastic poetry explicitly tied to religious revivalism. Ultimately, Roberts argues, literary scholars must grapple with how to write modern literary histories that account for people living with the gods fully present.

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.

“The Sound in Faith”

Chapter 1 provides the first literary treatment of the transatlantic bestseller, Ralph Erskine’s Gospel Sonnets. The chapter argues that the poem makes visible how poetry and homiletics enabled each other and, as they did so, fused together the revivalist minister and the poet, the itinerant and the poem, and soteriology and verse form. Erskine developed an espousal poetics (a poetics based on the metaphor of Christ wed to the believer) that saturated the rhymed couplet with Calvinist thought and helped produce a lived affective theology. While scholars have conceived of the Augustan Age in terms of Alexander Pope’s heroic couplet primarily as an Enlightenement form, this chapter argues that early Evangelicalism contributed a different meaning to poetic form—what Roberts calls the “Calvinist couplet.”

“A Lady in New England”

This chapter argues that women were essential in the development of revivalism and its verse. It traces the verse ministries of Elizabeth Singer Rowe and Anne Dutton through the poetic personae they inhabited. The first created an idealized convert persona that become prolific in evangelical poetics; the second helped define the woman poet-minister role as one of spiritual direction and print itinerancy. Both poetic personae were strategically taken up by the Boston poet Sarah Moorhead when she intervened in some of New England’s most politically charged religious debates and became the idealized convert and spiritual authorizer of Ralph Erskine’s Gospel Sonnets.

The Ethiop’s Verse

This chapter argues that Phillis Wheatley engaged and contested the tradition and history of revival poetics that the first three chapters trace. Wheatley’s poetics entail subtle yet poignant critiques of both the limitations of the personae of white women poet-ministers built upon affective espousal devotion and of the political impotence of an anthropology based in evangelical harmony and appeals to the plainest capacity. Wheatley invented a new woman poet-minister persona, the Ethiop, which introduced the tensions of political freedom and chattel slavery into the Calvinist couplet and lived theology. Through her classicalism she practiced a politics of respectability at the same time that her Ethiop persona engaged in a politics of refusal that exposed white feminine sentimentalism and the domestic at the center of revival poetics, which helped structure the capacities of liberal rights-bearing subjects. Recognizing the ways that Wheatley critiqued revival poetry brings into view how enslaved femininity became a site of dynamic exchange between religious and secular aesthetics and epistemologies. A history of revival poetry, then, not only reveals the full import of Wheatley’s poetic choices in relation to slavery, but also how revivalism was integral to the often secularized story of the invention of race science.

Evangelical Harmony and the Discord of Taste

This chapter argues that harmony was a foundational concept in early evangelical poetics, which located the image of God in humanity within the capacity for poetry; and that this was in contradistinction to reigning British literary criticism that focused on elite poetic taste, especially in regard to enthusiasm, the sublime, and the imagination. Looking specifically at Reverend Samuel Davies’s book of poetry, which provoked an extended controversy in the Virginia Gazette, Roberts argues that the work was controversial because it introduced an evangelical anthropology grounded in the concept of harmony that challenged social hierarchies, including race and slavery. The common perception of revivalism as noisy is best understood in the context of eighteenth-century poetic taste that undergirded social structures. The Gazette controversy highlights that Davies’s poetic form expressed his revival practices, especially communion as the wedding banquet of Christ and the believer. As such, it materialized aesthetics as a bodily experience and opened up an evangelical disposition to the world that encouraged the mingling of senses, which had direct implications on how one imagined the capacity for aesthetic experience and an emerging racialization of the senses. Though Davies stopped short of realizing the abolitionist implications of his own poetics, his extension of the “plainest capacity” into a sublime poetics for the masses along with its social ramifications was ultimately outside of his control.

Introduction

This chapter states, and briefly explains, the main claims of the book: that early evangelicalism must be understood as a central aesthetic movement of the eighteenth century; and that to understand early evangelicalism as it first took shape requires sustained attention to its prolific poetry. The chapter situates the book, which is the first history of early American non-hymnal poetry, within the current scholarship of early American culture and poetry, early evangelical history and hymnody, and British eighteenth-century enthusiasm. The author defines evangelicalism (as primarily a way of feeling and doing “authentic” Christianity) and then three new terms this study introduces: revival poetry (a constellation of verse forms, which addresses the tendency to associate evangelical poetry soley with hymnody); poet-minister (a revitalized role at the nexus of the affective sermon and aesthetic oriented conversion); and print itinerant (an evangelical conception of print within the new practices of itinerancy). The author concludes with a narrative summary of the book and each of the chapters.