Awakening Verse: The Poetics of Early American Evangelicalism by Wendy Raphael Roberts (review)

Reviewed by: Awakening Verse: The Poetics of Early American Evangelicalism by Wendy Raphael Roberts Hannah Wakefield Awakening Verse: The Poetics of Early American Evangelicalism. By Wendy Raphael Roberts. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 314 pages. Cloth, ebook. On an otherwise unremarkable day in late 1760s Virginia, a young man named James Ireland bent double with his hands on his knees, shaking his head violently to purge his mind of the religious poetry cycling through it. Singing bawdy songs at top volume to drown out his mental traffic, the profligate literary wit could not quiet the poem's message of repentance and faith, a message he did not want to follow. Finally, the poem prevailed over the sinner, and Ireland emerged a redeemed man. After being baited by a minister, he wrote a poem of his own describing his religious transformation. Using his literary gift for wit, Ireland produced a work that mocked his initial aim to avoid salvation and described his eagerness not to collude with the divine. This tale of Ireland's conversion is only one of the many colorful anecdotes that pepper Wendy Raphael Roberts's work on historical poetics, Awakening Verse: The Poetics of Early American Evangelicalism, revealing the power of what she calls "revival poetry" (8) to create change in the world. From the Boston poet who sent a minister a bridle to shut him up, to the sailor converted at sea by a poem his wife stowed in a book, Roberts's book immerses readers in the lively evangelical literary culture of the eighteenth century, persuasively arguing that "revival poetry did things" (211). Although Roberts explores a diverse set of revival poetics within the book, she discerns at least one unifying thread: the divine accomplished its will through poetry. She explains, "When revivalists read poetry, they expected that God would act. Oftentimes he did. Through poetry, God would bend the body, contort the soul, and redirect the purposes of everyday people" (15–16). Amid Roberts's nimble storytelling, poetry remains the key actor. Through an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion, Roberts unfolds how poetry written and circulated by participants in transatlantic revivals transcended human intentions and reordered the social world. The first three chapters of the book establish several different aesthetic theories and formal practices that cohered within revivalist literary culture. Chapter 1 centers on Scottish minister Ralph Erskine's use of the couplet to create "sound believers" (19) who could balance the tensions of Calvinist theology. In chapter 2, Roberts analyzes poetry by English poets Elizabeth Singer Rowe and Anne Dutton as well as Bostonian Sarah Parsons Moorhead to intervene in the historiography of evangelicalism, showing that espousal poetics and the persona of the spiritual director established women in new End Page 464 positions of spiritual authority. In chapter 3, she turns to 1750s Virginia to demonstrate how Presbyterian minister Samuel Davies's poetics of harmony refashioned belles lettres in the interest of the common person. Chapters 4 and 5 contain two different responses to the revival poetics of the first three chapters. In chapter 4, enslaved African and Bostonian poet Phillis Wheatley (Peters) deploys both neoclassical and revival poetics to critically engage with late eighteenth-century anthropological debates. Finally, in chapter 5, Ireland's conversion account provides a window onto the shaping of white masculine evangelical coteries through literary practices of wit, imitation, and revision. One of this book's many notable contributions to scholarship is the poetry Roberts has recovered: a trove of early American verse mostly neglected by historians and literary scholars to this point. In its presentation of a vast new archive, Awakening Verse participates in an ongoing movement to bring poetry from the margins to center of American literary history.1 In several chapters, Roberts considers verse in bound books such as Erskine's Gospel Sonnets, an incredibly popular collection of revival poetry that was first published in the American colonies in 1740 and reprinted many times thereafter.2 At the same time, the book depicts an evangelical print culture that was multiform and fluid. Roberts has retrieved and analyzed evangelical poetry from broadsides, periodicals, pamphlets, conversion narratives, commonplace books, manuscripts, and even sacramental...