Between Pious Exegesis, Devotional Singing, and Prophecy: Cotton Mather’s Scriptural Poetry and Hymns

Abstract: This article examines Cotton Mather’s contribution to an emergent genre of early evangelical verse: scriptural poems and hymns. These compositions were scripture-derived, but they went artistically beyond poetic Psalm translations and line-by-line metrifications of biblical passages, which had been exclusively used in traditional Reformed worship. Scriptural poems and hymns first appeared in British Dissenting churches during the last third of the seventeenth century. As recent scholarship has shown, this genre of religious verse came into its own during eighteenth-century transatlantic revivals and constituted an important dimension of early evangelical culture. Mather’s compositions reveal him as a transitional figure in two eras of early evangelical poetry and hymnody. Looking back to the worship policy of his Puritan forebears, he remained committed to using only Psalms for public worship services, but he also promoted the singing of scriptural poems and hymns in the context of private gatherings. He even composed a number of original scriptural poems and hymns himself. Published in devotional tracts, these works resemble those of his English correspondent Isaac Watts. But they also reflect Mather’s experiential approach to the Bible (heavily influenced by his contacts with German Pietism) and his specific eschatological expectations for an imminent restitution of the spiritual gifts, inspiring Christian poets to compose new verse that would be appropriate for public worship. These expectations in some ways anticipate the connection between poetry and prophecy that would be articulated much later in American Romanticism.