Whether by means of a saving encounter with an itinerant’s sermon or a poet-minister’s verse, the transformation of mockery and imitation into experiential conversion depended upon a hyper-personal address. Again and again, evangelicals attest to a moment in which the religious message directed at anonymous crowds suddenly becomes excruciatingly personal. Often this is the sudden feeling that the minister is speaking directly to the potential convert, their eyes locked with electric intensity. For instance, the Black loyalist and minister John Marrant writes a skilled rendition of this recurring trope into his own conversion narrative. He pushes into a revival meeting at the goading of a friend with the intent of interrupting the gathering by blowing his French horn. But before he has the chance to mock the noise of revivalists, with his loud blast, Whitefield appears to look directly at him and says, “Prepare to meet thy God, O Israel.” In an instant, Marrant is knocked off his feet and rendered speechless and senseless (1785).
What is so fantastic about Ireland’s narrative is not so much that his imitation and subtle mockery of revivalism and its verse suddenly flips into personal religious experience, but that his own verse is the instrument. It could be tempting for contemporary readers to imagine the conversionistic address of the poetic lines and Ireland as simply a story of a man speaking to himself. That the two dichotomous roles of the preacher and the convert have collapsed into one person seems to point toward a type of extreme self-authorization. This reading would map onto a general move over the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century from the sovereignty of God found in Calvinism to the increased volition of man expressed in Arminianism. It makes sense in the lyrical imagination of Mill, in which the poet is insular and self-sufficient: the poet who is “feeling, confessing itself to itself,” not to a priest (1833/2006, pp. 349). For G. W. Hegel, the lyric was the embodiment of modern subjectivity; the poem itself was a particular instantiation of the poet who was now “a self-bounded subjective entity” (1975, pp. 921). Charles Taylor mobilizes this development of the modern lyric as evidence of the secular self he describes as buffered; that is, a self upon which the world, including magic and religious forces, does not impinge (2007, pp. 38). This is one way of reading the poem.
Yet, Ireland does not describe his experience of poetic address exactly in this way. He does not imagine that he is speaking to himself or that the words he hears are entirely his own, but instead finds his poem aggressively occupying his mind against his will. Even though the poem is thoroughly ordinary and reproducible, it feels unfamiliar. Ireland writes, “So soon as I had finished this poem, these words in the last verse, viz. ‘The law does breathe nothing but death to slighters of salvation,’ kept continually running through my mind.”
When I had got at a proper distance so as not to be heard, I began to sing wicked and lascivious songs, of which I had a great number; but although I exerted my voice to its utmost power and highest pitch still the words— “The law does breathe nothing but death to slighters of salvation,” sounded louder in my mind than the audible exertion of my voice; I would then form my body in to a bending position and putting a hand upon each knee, would exert all the force of nature within me, shake my head and endeavor to force other objects and subjects upon my mind, but nothing could avail to dispossess me of that impression; I therefore, gave over the attempt. (pp. 55)
In Ireland’s account the poem becomes loosed from his authorial control and aimed at his very soul, which results in contortions, profanity, and the like as he tries to escape its grasp. He cannot even replace it with a new composition. The poet himself is made subject to his own poem’s address. Ireland’s verse, like other evangelical poetry, is activated by sermonic address, and as such it situates the audience as a stranger who then must come into a personalized address through God’s intervention.
This is exactly what happens the next day when the line suddenly makes sense through its personalization:
I felt an unusual conflict within; the aforementioned words running through my mind, all at once I was made as it were to stand!— God was pleased to manifest light to my understanding, and brought it home to my conscience that I was the slighter and contemner of the salvation of Christ; and that the law of God was then breathing death against my soul. The impression was so forcibly brought home to my conscience, that it never become [sic] obliterated from that period until I had reason to believe that Christ was formed in my soul the hope of Glory.
(pp. 56)
His account is particularly provoking because it shows how revivalists crafted a circuit of poetic address based on the distinction of the preacher and the stranger that was strong enough to separate the poet from his own address. His ability to whip up a revival poem and to imitate its forms and ideas takes place within a host of poetic and religious practices—literary games, battles of wit, manuscript exchange, revival hymn singing, barn raising, and prayer. In the narrative, he continually returns to these social situations as they produce and give meaning to his experience of writing his own verse. His narrative teaches his audience how to read a revival poem and what to expect from that reading—and central to the lesson is that the revival poem is so powerful even the poet may find himself at the mercy of his own revival poem’s directed address. In fact, the poem can only become evidence of Ireland’s conversion after he has been made a stranger to it. According to his narrative, this is because of God’s work through the poem—a poem always embedded, as Ireland details, in a wider revival community and its practices.
At the same time as evangelical itinerants directed their sermons and poems to strangers, literary poetry began to detach itself from rhetorical address. Scholars of historical poetics point to the nineteenth century as a period in which literary critics began to create a transcendental poetry increasingly removed from its actual scenes of circulation (Jackson and Prins 2014, pp. 4). The most common definition of this new lyric genre has been “utterance overheard”—an idea taken from Mill’s 1833/2006 essay “What Is Poetry?” in which he famously declared: “eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard” (pp. 349). Rather than a modern definition of lyric, however, Mill was much more concerned with the type of speech the poet performed. For Mill, poems should not have a direct address, especially a political one, but should indirectly address the audience: “the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener” (1833/2006, pp. 349). Although the speech should be overheard, instead of directed rhetoric like that of a sermon or political speech, Mill assumes no personal connection to the listener—he or she is a stranger.
While Mill separated direct and indirect speech according to the positionality of the speaker in order to distinguish between genres, revivalists mediated these two experiences of speech within the convert. Part of revival poetry’s innovation was the conversionist schema embedded in its address that depended upon flipping overheard speech into directed speech. The evangelical conversionistic address to the stranger was already sutured to the poetic address overheard by a stranger. The continual imbrication of evangelicalism and poetry through the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth points to a modern lyric poetic address