Gender, Print Culture, and the Evangelical Poem

I encountered the impressive achievement of Awakening Verse: The Poetics of Early American Evangelicalism by Wendy Raphael Roberts as a reader whose primary interests do not lie in poetry, aesthetics, or theology and doctrine, three areas in which the book makes its most major interventions. My preoccupations cluster around women's writing, gender and sexuality studies, book history and print culture, and Native and Indigenous studies. Given that my interests lie outside the areas of the sterling contributions the book explicitly makes, where do I see Awakening Verse making broader interventions that enhance other avenues of inquiry and critical conversation?To answer that question, I turn to a short narrative published in 1820, "Religion Exemplified in the Life of Poor Sarah," by Phoebe Hinsdale Brown. The narrative recounts the pious life and teachings of Sarah Rogers, a Mohegan woman who lived in Connecticut. In its original appearance in a religious periodical, an untitled, eight-stanza poem ended the piece. In subsequent reprintings, of which there were dozens upon dozens as it went on to be one of the most widely known and circulated religious tracts of the nineteenth century, the poem was rarely included. As I researched the narrative, I became mildly interested in this aspect of its print culture history, but eventually stopped tracking the poem's presence or absence as I pursued another line of argument.1This poem's appearance at the end of "Religion Exemplified" makes sense, since Phoebe Hinsdale Brown was a hymn-writer. Beyond this observation, I never grappled with the difference the poem makes, or does not make (if absent), in this narrative. As Awakening Verse explains the complicated interplay between poetry and hymns in this period and provides a toolkit to understand evangelical verse's importance, I set myself a task: walk through Roberts's argument to test whether and how paying attention to the poem that concludes it matters in thinking about "Religion Exemplified."In her book, Roberts examines what she calls "revivalist poetics—with its own peculiar set of practices, expectations, and influences." In tandem with a sermon, this poetry gave voice to the figure of the "poet-minister." Relying on the metaphor of espousal, the poetry "placed the figure of the woman at the center of revivalist poetics and its affective, lived theology," leading Roberts to conclude that "women influenced and shaped eighteenth-century revivalism far beyond what has been thought."2 Poetry acted as a "print itinerant" which "worked in the idiom of the day i.e. poetry to spread their evangelists' message, entering into new forms of distribution and circulation" (14). This poetry also "valued language for the common Christian," leading to a "broad engagement with revival verse across class, gender, and race" (13). Thinking about Brown as a poet-minister and this narrative as a print itinerant provides a new vocabulary for thinking about the narrative's reach and impact, credited as it was with many conversions. The poem's language is simple and imbued with religious affect, conveying a message that opens it up to diverse readers.But the move that Roberts's argument insistently presses me to make—even against my wishes as someone who could be considered a poetry and theology-averse reader—is to approach the meaning of this poem not only in material ways or through the lens of classed, racialized, and gendered social-historical constructions of identity. Awakening Verse propels me to consider the ineffable and abstract meanings of the poem as well. As Roberts writes, "The circulation of manuscript and print poetry was at least, but not only, a material event" (16). And so I must ask, what is the non-material event taking place in this poem?Guided by Awakening Verse's argument, I first notice that this poem is the climax of the narrative. It is placed immediately after the account of Sarah Rogers's death and presents the unnamed female narrator making meaning of Rogers's life and passing. Suffused with feeling, the poem pulls together the disjointed and episodic incidents recorded in the narrative, forming a coherent and rational statement of Christian belief in the rewards that God bestows on the humble, suffering believer.Interestingly, it is also a poem about the poet and poetry, as Roberts leads me to see. The ambiguous first line of the last stanza, "And rather far, would I thy triumph share," can be read as indicating the poet's desire to emulate Rogers's Christian example in order to attain her own heavenly reward. It can also be read, though, as displaying the poet choosing a particular path for her efforts, rejecting earthly recognition as a poet (the laurels mentioned later in the stanza) to "share" Sarah's "triumph" "far" and wide through the evangelical poetics Awakening Verse illuminates. The poem thus shows a Christian striving to follow Rogers's model in daily life and the poet committing to emulate and spread that example through her writing. It enacts the "story of gods interacting with people as they went about their daily lives," as Roberts characterizes the encounter between poetry readers and the divine (15). Roberts writes, "Through poetry, God would bend the body, contort the soul, and redirect the purposes of everyday people" (16). Without this poem, "Religion Exemplified" does not complete the "redirection" of the poet-minister that Roberts describes. The narrative's trajectory—the model it provides, the encounter it vivifies—is fulfilled through this poem.This reading of the poem, anchored in both theology and poetics and brought about by Awakening Verse's imperative to think seriously about the role of evangelical verse in the early republic, does not move me in a different direction from or simply coexist with the print culture and socio-historical readings I had previously produced. It enhances them. The poem's absence or presence in subsequent reprintings changes the narrative's meaning and exhortation to readers. In my initial research, my eye, trained by our modern assumptions to ignore or look past evangelical poetics, had skipped right over the poem. Retrained by Awakening Verse's useful and transformative argument, I pause on the poem as the narrative's culmination, perhaps as contemporaneous readers did. Although I still do not have the answer to why the poem did or did not appear in various reprintings, I can better see what difference its presence makes. We might say the same about Robert's achievement in Awakening Verse. Thanks to this book, we can better see the difference evangelical poetics made in the history of American culture.