Revival Poetry and Race-Making in the Early Black Atlantic

Phillis Wheatley never wrote an evangelical hymn. Until Wendy Roberts's 2020 book Awakening Verse, this fact would have seemed of little to no importance. Why bother to remark on a poem that was never written? Roberts's book shows why we should bother by making a persuasive case that Wheatley's omission strategically responded to a vast archive of eighteenth-century revival verse. Against this new backdrop of evangelical poets—most of whom penned hymns—the otherwise unremarkable absence of a hymn in Wheatley's oeuvre is glaring. Roberts insists that Wheatley's choice not to write a hymn was an act of refusal—not just of the evangelical hymn itself, but of the racial implications that were preloaded into the hymn. In the literary world of the early Black Atlantic, the hymn, like other revival poetry, contained theologies of race and anthropological assumptions about Blackness in its very form. Awakening Verse therefore opens up a new perspective on the literary landscape of the early Black Atlantic by showing how writers of African descent deployed the structures, meters, and rhymes of revival verse to intervene in the project of race-making and unmaking inherent in revival verse's form.Roberts demonstrates that the poetic form of evangelical poetry contained a democratizing potential that could threaten the social order, even to the point of upsetting racial hierarchies. Ralph Erskine's 1740 Gospel Sonnets, the subject of Roberts's first chapter and in many ways the foundation of the book, fused "the lowest manner of poetry" with the "highest matter of theology" through what Roberts calls the "Calvinist couplet," disciplining the taste of genteel readers to align with that of the common person (27, 43). For Erskine, Christian neighborliness became a matter of form. To love rhyme was to love God and to love one's lower-class neighbor. The implications of revival verse form for racial hierarchy becomes clearest in the third chapter of Awakening Verse, which addresses the poetry of Presbyterian minister Samuel Davies. While Virginia's mid-eighteenth-century elite scorned revival verse as mere lower-class noise, Davies stubbornly championed "jingling syllables," the rhyme and proportioned numbers of his lines (100). Instead of the markers of elite poetry such as blank verse and a neoclassical style, Davies prioritized what Roberts calls "evangelical harmony," a universalizing value and the center of his poetic theory (94–107). Davies's aesthetic principles threatened Virginia's social order because he insisted that the universal love of sound testified to the image of God in people regardless of race. For this reason, elite Virginia readers associated "evangelical harmony" with a contagious and reproducing Blackness. In their minds, promiscuous poetry like Davies's could lead to racial mixing and even slave insurrection (114).In one sense, revival poetry was so powerful that Virginians trembled at the supposed suggestions of interracial mixing in Davies's poetic form. Yet Roberts shows how the very same formal innovations served the opposite purpose: upholding the systemic enslavement of Black people. When Davies jettisoned belles lettres for a poetics rooted in "evangelical harmony," his shift toward poetry written for those of "the plainest capacity" propped up ethnological theories that denied the intellectual capacity of Black people (99). Roberts explains, "At the same time that evangelicalism provided access to authority for people across socially and historically produced inequities, it could also easily accommodate the debasement of peoples, since it acknowledged that affective religion was based in a common and basic aesthetic experience rather than creed or intellectual assent" (130). In Chapter 4, Thomas Jefferson's infamous criticism of Phillis Wheatley demonstrates this point: "Religion, indeed, has produced a Phillis Wheatley; but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism" (126). Roberts argues that Jefferson's criticism of Wheatley knit evangelicalism to low aesthetic taste as part of his broader project of codifying racial difference and justifying slavery. When it came to race, revival poetics cut both ways: aesthetic theologies of equality confirmed ethnological theories of hierarchy.Roberts's book shifts the terrain of early Black Atlantic literary study by showing that eighteenth-century Black writers made formal choices in order to navigate the tension between revival verse's democratizing potential and its legitimation of racial hierarchies. Reading these writers within a transatlantic, evangelical culture is not new, but recovering much of the print that shaped early evangelical culture makes visible their deep engagement with various evangelical poetics of race. Roberts argues that Wheatley chose a neoclassical style over the revival hymn to strategically sidestep the association of revival poetics with low mental capacity. This formal choice asserted Black capacity for citizenship over and against philosophies like Jefferson's that insisted that low aesthetic taste was an intrinsic feature of Blackness.Wheatley's work offers one case study. Jupiter Hammon, John Marrant, Olaudah Equiano, Richard Allen, Jarena Lee, and Frederick Douglass all engaged the revival verse tradition, whether by including it in their prose or by penning original verse. I close with one intriguing instance for the sake of illustration. The tenth chapter of the 1789 autobiography The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, ends with a revival poem. After forty pages spent recounting his conversion, Equiano describes the whole process again in twenty-eight stanzas that span four pages. Present-day readings of Equiano barely mention this second version, and no extended treatment of it appears to exist. The poem ends with a paraphrase of the same New Testament verse that appears on the frontispiece portrait of Equiano (Acts 4:12). Given what Awakening Verse has shown us about revival verse and race, this poem may be the first place we should look to understand Equiano's theological and anthropological arguments, rather than the last.10Awakening Verse invites its readers into two new worlds. The first is a past world imprinted with the crisscrossing of revival verse through transatlantic evangelical networks. In this world, engaging questions of race as an early Black Atlantic writer meant confronting the looming figure of the revival poet—and, often, becoming a revival poet oneself. The second world is a future world, one where works by Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano appear in books, journals, classrooms, and lecture halls in productive conversation with Ralph Erskine, Samuel Davies, and the many other writers who believed that the poetic, the spiritual, and the social were deeply intertwined. Awakening to these worlds, as Roberts asks us to do, will lead readers into a much richer understanding of the early Black Atlantic.