The dance between historical and literary scholarship of early America is a tangled, confusing, and at times tense one. Yet we could name at least one dictum that has united both fields for decades: “Poetry makes nothing happen.”11 Studies of early American religion have tended to view poetry as “insubstantial décor adorning the real stuff of scholarly concern—sermons, conversion narratives, and revival journals” (3). This has been as true for literary scholars of the period as for historians. A key intervention I want to highlight from Wendy Raphael Roberts's Awakening Verse is that “poetic productions served as one of the primary actors in the creation, maintenance, and adaptation of evangelical culture” (3). To Audenize for a moment, Roberts shows us how poetry made evangelicalism happen.
In building her case for poetry's key role in eighteenth-century evangelical culture in the Anglophone Atlantic, Roberts engages and advances a methodological movement in...