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,...