Revival Poetry and Race-Making in the Early Black Atlantic Unavailable

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...