The Rhetoric of Early Evangelical Poetry

The dance between historical and literary scholarship of early America is a tangled, confusing, and at times tense one. Yet we could name at least one dictum that has united both fields for decades: "Poetry makes nothing happen."11 Studies of early American religion have tended to view poetry as "insubstantial décor adorning the real stuff of scholarly concern—sermons, conversion narratives, and revival journals" (3). This has been as true for literary scholars of the period as for historians. A key intervention I want to highlight from Wendy Raphael Roberts's Awakening Verse is that "poetic productions served as one of the primary actors in the creation, maintenance, and adaptation of evangelical culture" (3). To Audenize for a moment, Roberts shows us how poetry made evangelicalism happen.In building her case for poetry's key role in eighteenth-century evangelical culture in the Anglophone Atlantic, Roberts engages and advances a methodological movement in poetry studies known as "historical poetics." In the context of American and transatlantic literary studies, historical poetics involves a commitment to move beyond and redefine the canon. One shorthand for this commitment is to inquire what was happening in pre-1900 American poetry besides Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Another way of describing the shared impulses of historical poeticians is to name their twin efforts toward recovering of understudied texts and writers and treating a diversity of poets, texts, forms, and practices.12 Edward Whitley has described this approach as an "abundance model for literary history," exchanging elitist hierarchies in which scarcity of "greatness" polices what poems are worth studying for a curiosity as to what poets were in fact doing and their works related to the cultures of poems' composition and reception.13Awakening Verse embraces this abundance, moving from Ralph Erskine's Gospel Sonnets to Elizabeth Singer Rowe's devotional verse to Sarah Moorhead's counter-public preaching to Phillis Wheatley Peters's evangelical poems with agility and deep historical knowledge.Two examples demonstrate the power of applying historical poetics to early American religion. Early in her study, Roberts makes a distinction between hymnody and religious verse. She notes that in the eighteenth century, "the difference between a hymn and a lyric poem hinged on class" (4). The issue was less whether a text was or could be sung, but rather who the ideal reader was, an observation born of wide reading in the period's poetry. By focusing on non-hymnic verse, Roberts clears the ground for specifically poetic analysis without taking up questions of liturgy, performance, and tunes: worthy topics, but from a different part of the verse ecosystem that she explores. Roberts deftly explains that a hymn was a kind of poem in the eighteenth century, and that it had a particular place in that cultural milieu. While that is not the subject of her study, it is no mean feat to accomplish in a field where scholars of poetry still argue as to whether a hymn "counts" as a poem.My second example raises an issue at the heart of her study: the meaning of the couplet in Erskine's Gospel Sonnets. A work that saw frequent reprintings from its 1740 debut, Erskine's book is long, but contains nothing a modern reader would recognize as a sonnet. Erskine composes in rhymed couplets, giving his writing a family resemblance to Pope, Dryden, and other canonical figures of the century. Roberts carefully and persuasively demonstrates that Erskine's approach to the couplet is not Popean polish. It is a pursuit of what Roberts terms "the poetics of espousal" (29); the completion of two parts as a whole mimics the soul's communion with God, or the marriage of husband and wife. These couplets are simultaneously sermonic and didactic as well as erotic and earthy. They do not simply inspire devotion; they enact and enable it, participating in the emotional fervor associated with "religion of heart." This couplet, Roberts argues, is not the kind to which the classroom anthologies have accustomed us. It has deep influence and wide implications for the development of the figure of the female "poet-minister," the democratization of religious authority in poetry, and the mass appeal of evangelical religious poetry. Such close attention to form combined with rich historiography and archival research enacts historical poetics par excellence, while challenging the field to take more seriously the depth and complexity of poetry's relationship with religion. Scholars of religion now have a clarion call to look directly at the poetry that suffused the early modern phenomena of revival and evangelicalism.I will close by suggesting a few new paths for research that Roberts's work has opened in early American studies. The first is the possibility of taking Roberts's methods and arguments further back in time. As distinctive as Erskine's couplets may be from Pope's and Dryden's, what relationship do they bear to the couplets of Anne Bradstreet or Michael Wigglesworth, two of the most significant poets of seventeenth-century New England? The preponderance of the couplet in early American poetry suddenly seems ripe for closer and wider investigation. A second line of inquiry is into the rhetoric of the sonnet. Just about any student in an A.P. English course today would deny that Erskine wrote sonnets; Erskine would insist that he did. The English Baptist Robert Robinson would call on the Holy Spirit to "teach me some melodious sonnet" in his famous hymn, "Come, Thou Fount of every blessing."14 Sonnets as fourteen-line, formed poems were famously scarce in the eighteenth century compared to the centuries before and after. What did the word mean for writers like Erskine and Robinson in this in-between time? Finally, following Roberts's hymn-lyric distinction and her excellent analysis of poetic stanza and line, we might ask why the evangelical Phillis Wheatley Peters wrote in couplets and the supposed apostate Emily Dickinson wrote in hymn meter. Thanks to Roberts's work, we may actually be far along toward answering that question. Poetry can make that happen.