Yes, And: A Response

What most delights me about each of these incisive responses are the variety of extensions and questions that scholars might take up. There were many possible paths that remained unexplored in the book because I limited myself to one influential through-line, Calvinist non-hymnic revival poems, with the hope that it would lay some basic groundwork—terms, forms, reading practices and theo-aesthetic expectations—that would be portable for scholars whether they wanted to explore the vast array of evangelical poetries or make use of it for their study of other literatures, cultures, or histories.In many ways, Theresa Strouth Gaul is my imagined ideal reader—a scholar with little interest in poetry, religion, or theology who nonetheless finds her work "enhanced" by this history of evangelical poetics. Early on in my research, I started a list of "end poems" (in which "Religion Exemplified" shows up), but there were so many they began to motivate my study rather than be the subject of it. I wanted to know why they mattered and what they were doing, broadly speaking. Gaul demonstrates how after reading Awakening Verse one could approach a tract like "Religion Exemplified" and detail the importance of the poem's expected work in the world and the author's own assertion of print itinerancy. In concert with Gaul's own extensive work on the multiple authorship of "Religion Exemplified," which includes the Cherokee Newspaper editor Elias Boudinot, a slew of questions open up about Indigenous authors and revival poetics to which I will return in a moment.15Cassander L. Smith's and Hannah Wakefield's discerning responses generously point to the extension of the book's arguments to writers of the Black Atlantic (there is a book to be written from Wakefield's first footnote alone). I wish I had Smith's essential new book, Race and Respectability in an Early Black Atlantic, while writing mine because it is fine-tuned to the complexities of respectability within each writer's context, which Smith brings to bear in her response.16 For instance, when Hammon mentors Wheatley through what I label a revival poem (which implicitly signals the plainest capacity), Smith rightly emphasizes that Hammon himself displays his own pious Christianity and complex relationship to respectability. Wheatley's multiple interventions and strategies to navigate a white supremacist society are not the only ways to use, mitigate, redirect, ignore, refuse, or reimagine the racial anthropology embedded in white evangelical verse to different ends. We need to pay attention to the formal choices writers made to navigate the catch-22 of revival poetics in which (to use Wakefield's succinct phrasing) "aesthetic theologies of equality confirmed ethnological theories of hierarchy."While I have tried to evoke an overall cultural milieu steeped in evangelical poetics, each writer, each poet-minister, each print itinerant, and each community have a particular intervention and engagement.17 I hope readers come away with an impression of revival poetry as not only ubiquitous, but complex and worthy of more sustained study. As an expert in the hymn, Christopher N. Phillips could have critiqued the book for excluding hymns and their rich contexts; instead, his response embraces an expansive corpus of revival poetry. As Phillips's crystallization of historical poetics makes clear, we often read forms and their meanings back into earlier works. In doing so, we sacrifice poetry's cultural work in service of a specific story of literary history.Let me join this chorus of extensions by gesturing toward one particular planned chapter on the evangelical long poem and Indigenous resistance that was never written due to time pressures (and one that I still hope to write). In my imagination of the chapter, it would function in a similar manner as the Wheatley chapter—it would gather up the various strands of white revival poetics I followed and contextualized in the first three chapters to offer one example of how Indigenous poetics (focalized through Samsom Occom) responded to and worked against the settler ideology embedded in evangelical poetics (which I only slightly hint at toward the end of the Samuel Davies chapter). Occom could have put his pen to a panegyric or an elegy or an epyllion, as Wheatley did, or even an epic, like some other evangelical ministers. But as far as the published record goes, he stuck to hymns and his name is never attached. And, at least in the published record, he only wrote revival hymns, not classical hymns like Wheatley.I am convinced by scholars who interpret Occom's hymnbook editorial practices as enacting the creation of the Brotherton community.18 I would add that not issuing an inaugural poem about the community, in the style Eleazar Wheelock commissioned student Levi Frisbie to write for Moor's Charity School, is deeply significant. Classical education was used to shore up institutions, colonial (and then American) governments, and Wheelock missionaries adapted it to revival poetics, even though they were suspicious of Greek gods. Occom used evangelical forms for his own purposes, which is perhaps clearest in his evangelical conversion narrative: primarily an indictment of Wheelock's mistreatment of him and his family due to racism and an indictment of arrivant land rights rather than a typical conversion story.19 Occom embraced hymns in print with his edited hymnbook "A Choice collection of hymns and spiritual songs" (1774), which I think was a formal choice that resisted the settler poetic imaginary. I have shown how malleable the terms hymn and poem were in the eighteenth century—one important woman poet-minister, Anne Dutton, defined them as short versus long for her own political purposes in print. Occom molded hymns for his own purposes as well.Many scholars of missions to Native peoples in America have highlighted the issue of eloquence and have shown the complexity of various Indigenous aesthetics that missionaries did not recognize. One particular moment in Angela Calcaterra's reading of Wheelock's failure hinges on him being rejected for not expressing proper eloquence, which she shows in the Haudenosaunee context (which Occom incorporated in his other writings) ultimately meant your words matching your deeds, "setting words to work in the correct forms, in order to enact genuine intention."20 Occom's preface to his collection of hymns reveals that hymns meant something different to Occom than verse for the plainest capacity. He does not take up the issue of high verses low poetry that preoccupied revivalists since Watts instigated this difference, but instead turns immediately to the distinction between outward and inward singing (also an extension of Watts). When he intervenes in what he describes as the "great engagedness of these Colonies to cultivate Psalmody" he decides to redirect the high/low aesthetics discussion (and its embeddedness in evangelical harmony and evangelical anthropology) to Haudenosaunee eloquence: words that match your true intentions and deeds.21This brief and necessarily simplified extension further emphasizes Abram Van Engen's crucial summation: that we cannot understand the significance of formal poetic choices of many of the period's poets if we do not understand the forms of revival verse. As Strouth Gaul helps make explicit, it matters that Boudinot translated "Religion Exemplified" and its end poem; and I think it matters that Boudinot included short revival poems in The Cherokee Phoenix because they worked in complex ways against evangelical long poems and print itinerancy that claimed land. Wheatley did not write alone, and Smith and Wakefield urge us to think about how other Black Atlantic writers negotiated revival poetics, as well as contributed to a Black Calvinist theological tradition. Phillips opens up pressing genre and time period questions. All of these avenues and more are generative, and particularly so because, as Van Engen gracefully reminds us, literary scholarship contributes meaningfully to a historical understanding of culture.