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Full Description
In 1740, Benjamin Franklin published the first American edition of Gospel Sonnets, by the eminent Scottish Presbyterian minister Ralph Erskine. The work, already in its fifth British edition, quickly became an American bestseller and remained so throughout the eighteenth century. Franklin was aware of what most scholars of American religion and literature have forgotten -that poetry played a central role in the "surprising works of God" that birthed evangelicalism.
The far-reaching social transformations precipitated by the transatlantic evangelical revivals of the eighteenth century depended upon the development of a major literary form, that of revival poetry. Literary scholars and historians of religion have prioritized sermons, conversion narratives, periodicals, and hymnody. Wendy Roberts here argues that poetry offered a unique capacity to "diffuse celestial Fervor through the World," in the words of the cleric Samuel Davies. Awakening Verse is the first monograph to address this large corpus of evangelical poetry in the American colonies, shedding light on important dimensions of eighteenth-century religious and literary culture. Roberts deftly assembles a large, previously unknown archive of immensely popular poems, examines how literary history has rendered this poetic tradition invisible, and demonstrates how a vibrant popular poetics exercised a substantial effect on the landscape of early American religion, literature, and culture.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Revival Poetry
Chapter One: "The Sound in Faith":
The Calvinist Couplet and the Poetics of Espousal
Chapter Two: "A Lady in New England":
Forms of the Poet-Minister
Chapter Three: Evangelical Harmony and the Discord of Taste
Chapter Four: The Ethiop's Verse:
The Limits of Poetic Capacity and Espousal Piety
Chapter Five: A Revivalist Ars Poetica for an Itinerant Coterie:
Evangelical Wit, Punctiliar Revision, and Poetic Address
Conclusion: Conversions of Poetic History
Appendix A: Revival Poets and Poetry
Appendix B: Selected Verse
