All of these early American verse practices lived and intervened in the social (Cohen 2015). The poetry that appears exclusively religious was no different; in fact, the majority of the poetry that early British North American colonists read and wrote was religious. As scholars of religion have long recognized, religion does not inhabit a special space apart from the social; it is, in Émile Durkheim’s terms, the organization of the social. This essay turns to a prolific new verse culture that arose within the eighteenth century, which was explicitly religious and as such deeply enmeshed in arranging the social—revival poetics (Roberts 2020). Revival poetry encompassed a variety of verse forms and straddled later conceptions of hymn and poetry and piety and sociability that tend to be viewed as distinct. Protestant Christianity deeply influenced American poetry in a variety of ways; in this essay, I return to early evangelicalism to show how revival verse participated in the construction of what would become modern lyric’s address.
Evangelicalism and New Constellations of the Sermon and Verse
There were various forms of Protestant sermons and verse; they were not static categories but changing cultural forms that attached in new ways in the eighteenth century, particularly as German Pietism and its verse culture helped produce varied but widespread changes in transatlantic Protestant Christianity. These changes were in conjunction with new ideas regarding the sublime, poetry, and publics developing in relation to various media. One place to see this is in the revival activity that began to take on new meanings in the British North American colonies during the 1730s and 1740s traditionally called the Great Awakening. As Doug Winiarski argues, this period was a time, not of “resurgent puritan piety,” but of “insurgent religious radicalism” led by lay people whose newly formed religious idioms led them to separate from their congregations and begin new churches and communities (2017, pp. 8). Poetry played a vital role in this changing landscape of religious experience, language, and church institutions, often considered the beginning of evangelicalism in America.
Evangelicalism is a notoriously difficult term to define and can often obscure more than it reveals when applied to the eighteenth century. Evangelical historians have often approached the term from a doctrinal perspective to trace a consistent and identifiable Protestant tradition from the present moment back to the eighteenth century. Yet, the doctrinal emphases used to ground this tradition—usually Biblicism, crucicentrism, activism, and conversionism—ebb and flow in the history of Christianity and can be difficult to isolate convincingly (Bebbington 1989, pp. 2–3). The most helpful historical treatment of the term comes from Linford Fisher who recognizes not only its historical change over time from the fifteenth century to today, but also its flexibility as a category even within the same period of time. Perhaps most important to understand is that “to be ‘evangelical’ was at once a critique and a practice; it was a pursuit of experiential purity, but that purity was incessantly relative to the other modes of Christianity that were out there” (2016, pp. 186). Fisher shows that to be evangelical denoted one’s way of doing Christianity as more authentic than others—and a surprising smorgasbord of Protestant groups, many who would not be considered evangelical today, wielded the term in this way.
Michael Warner’s recent work on evangelicalism likewise moves scholars away from doctrinal definitions. Warner revises the once-presumed rational, secular public sphere à la early Habermas, through attention to early evangelicalism, which Warner places at the center of his analysis of the initial formulation of print publics. He emphasizes a seismic shift from the general expectation that sermons addressed a specific congregation to the idea, dominant by the beginning of the nineteenth century, that effective preaching addressed a limitless number of strangers. Warner highlights this new and controversial practice to offer a crucial defining feature of evangelicalism: “the conversionistic address to the stranger.” According to Warner, this new address—more than changes in theology and pietism—is what made evangelicalism distinct, and it reveals the entanglements of the religious and the secular in early America as new media and their publics emerged (2010, pp. 382). Evangelicalism, he argues, helped produce the structure of secular publics through its creation of the address to the stranger.
Another way to examine the emergence of evangelicalism that takes into account both Fisher’s and Warner’s important insights is through verse cultures. Because poetry was thought to induce the passions, activate feelings of the religious sublime, and partake in the language of heaven, it was one of the primary tools through which a broad variety of Christians came to feel more authentically Christian than others—that is evangelical. Revival verse, like the kind of conversion experience it promoted and facilitated, created felt religious authenticity. The development of evangelicalism in the eighteenth century occurs along with the proliferation of verse and its fusion with the itinerant minister and revival sermon. The turn to a common aesthetic experience, what the famous minister Jonathan Edwards called God’s “sweetness,” that grounded experiential religion for a growing number of Christians over the eighteenth century is central to what religious scholars and religious adherents have come to label early evangelicalism (1733, pp. 415). This religio-aesthetic experience was often spurred by a new kind of sermonic address—the conversionistic address to the stranger—but this was not unique to the genre of the revival sermon. Or, rather, a strict separation between what now appear to be discrete genres were more fluid for revivalists in their lived contexts.
For Isaac Watts, often considered the father of English hymnody, and Charles Wesley, the prolific Methodist hymn writer, and a whole host of revivalists they influenced, revitalizing religion could not happen apart from revitalizing poetry. Watts wrote that poetry was superior to the sermon because it bypassed reason by addressing the lower faculties first and then drawing the mind to piety (1706, pp. xvii). It was the proper tool of God for the enlivening of all Christians and the project of Christian missions. This was why he wrote hymns for what he called the “plainest capacity” (1706, pp. xvi). In an emerging revival culture, hymns moved toward a homiletic function while sermons moved toward a poetic function—which means they began to overlap in their purpose. Over the eighteenth century, the revival poet-minister and the poem as a type of itinerant minister became attached to what was understood to be an awakening of God that heralded the imminent reign of Christ.
Edmund Burke acknowledged the close relationship between the itinerant minister and verse. In Burke’s A Philosophic Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), the itinerant minister serves as a trope for low poetic passions and a foil for the high aesthetic sublime. While arguing for poetry’s superior and “powerful dominion over the passions,” Burke writes, “But it is most certain that [the common sort] are very strongly roused by a fanatic preacher, or by the ballads of Chevy-chase, or the children in the wood, and by other little popular poems and tales that are current in that rank of life” (1757, pp. 48). Here, Burke slides easily between the trope of the fanatic itinerant minister and common verse because for him and his readers, both seem to trade in the same language and affect of the same social class. He sets his high literary notions of taste and the sublime against the large-scale success of an early evangelicalism saturated in a poetic language that induced affective religious experience and a felt authenticity through addressing strangers.
Revival hymns and poems, the most prolific verse forms of the eighteenth century, became a malleable poetics among lay people, who inhabited verse vested with spiritual authority. The introduction of hymns into religious services often resulted in unruly behavior and enthusiastic religious experiences. The reading of hymns in personal devotion and in social settings, as well as exchanging hymns, could do the same (Phillips 2018). One outcome of separating hymns from poetry in literary histories has been that the popular verse history and culture of revivalism in eighteenth-century British North America appears separate from the century’s major aesthetic movements. Yet the various revivalists verse practices were part of the larger verse cultures of the period. And the new ways of experiencing Protestant Christianity were part of an emphasis on the senses and aesthetic experience arising more broadly in the eighteenth century (Greg