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Sermons generally acted as a means of grace rather than serving as evidence of God’s saving work. Revival poems did both. From an earlier pietistic tradition that relied heavily upon George Herbert’s maxim—“A verse may finde him, who a sermon flies, / And turn delight into a sacrifice”—evangelical poetry became a revered tool for conversion. In the Virginian minister Samuel Davies’s words, it was poetry that had the unique capacity to “diffuse celestial Fervor through the World” (1752, pp. viii). At the same time that poems behaved as evangelical sermons, they also were, according to John Wesley, the language of heaven and of the saint (2006, pp. 36). As such, they regularly appear in conversion narratives at the pivotal moment of conversion or awakening. Revival poems, then, circulated within a context in which they were perceived both as itinerant ministers and as evidence of their own successful intervention. They could be so effective as the means of salvation because their poetic address was not firmly attached to the poet, but to God’s Spirit, which could activate in relation to specific addressees at unexpected moments. They could also serve as evidence of salvation because once personalized through the conversion experience they expressed the language of heaven instilled in the converted’s heart.

This is the case in James Ireland’s conversion narrative published in The Life of the Rev. James Ireland (1819/2005), which tells the story of the Scottish-born immigrant and back-slidden Presbyterian “Jemmy” Ireland in the late 1760s, who had established himself in the social milieu of the young Virginia gentry through his exceptional dancing, exemplary wit, manuscript poetry, and bawdy songs. His poetry circulated in manuscript throughout Shenandoah County, where he served as a schoolmaster by day and the life of the party by night—whipping up verse and performing it on demand. This changed dramatically when a Baptist minister set his sights on Ireland and invited the young man to take up a poetic challenge: compose religious verse. An ensuing battle of wits between Ireland and God resulted in Ireland’s conversion. Soon after, Ireland became the revered poet-minister and leader of a band of young evangelical itinerant ministers who continued to exchange verse and engage in impromptu verse challenges. In other words, his narrative makes clear that revival itinerant ministers participated in and contributed to social verse forms and practices both within and outside of their particular religious context. Ireland tells a fantastically simple story that, while typical of the generic contours of the evangelical conversion narrative, is atypical in that it recounts in detail the conversion of a sociable bard into a revival poet (Hindmarsh 2005; Lindman 2008; Spangler 2008). But what is most unusual is that the poem that induces Ireland’s conversion was his own creation. Because he was the author of the poem, the narrative provides an important description of what could happen to the circuit of poetic address in the conversion process.

Ireland’s account of conversion begins, not with a sermon by an itinerant minister to a crowd of strangers, but with a revivalist’s personal invitation to participate in a poetic game of wit. Specifically, the Baptist minister invites Ireland to imitate and to best the poet-minister. Among a people that embraced Thomas à Kempis Imitatio Christi (c. 1418–1427) as an ideal of the spiritual life, which emphasized solitude, silence, and rejection of the world as a true internal devotion to Christ, this may appear strange. Yet, imitation was a practice that extended beyond the believer imitating Christ and into the evangelistic invitation to Christ. Ireland’s narrative demonstrates that poetic imitation could produce the believer’s imitatio Christi.

This efficacy is one reason many revivalists embraced forms of neoclassical imitation long after ideas of poetic genius became fashionable. In 1772, Sir William Jones’s “Essay on the Arts Called Imitative” represented the general tenor of the times, which identified emotion, not imitation, as the essence of the art of poetry. Evangelical poets were criticized often for missing the mark for both the neoclassical and the Romantic ideals of poetry: they were accused of being both “slavishly” imitative as well as excessively emotional. One of William Wordsworth’s critics, who abhorred what he thought to be an echo of Methodism in the poet’s verse, warned that such pulpit effusions were unfit companions of true poetic inspiration:

Moral and religious enthusiasm, though undoubtedly poetical emotions, are at the same time dangerous inspirers of poetry; nothing being so apt to run into interminable dullness or mellifluous extravagance without giving the unfortunate author the slightest intimation of his danger. His laudable zeal for the efficacy of his preachments, he very naturally mistakes for the ardour of poetic inspiration;—All sorts of commonplace notions and expressions are sanctified in his eyes, by the sublime ends for which they are employed; and the mystical verbiage of the Methodist pulpit is repeated, till the speaker entertains no doubts that he is the elected organ of divine truth and persuasion. (Jeffrey 1814, pp. 4)

Such criticism of Methodist verse applied to Ireland and his coterie of Baptist itinerant poets who were also considered unoriginal enthusiasts. Or, using the words of John Stuart Mill, Ireland, and his lot were not writing the truest form of poetry, lyric poetry, because “it is the poetry most natural to a really poetic temperament, and least capable of being successfully imitated by one not so endowed by nature” (1833/2006, pp. 359). Yet, in the hands of the Baptist minister, the seeming imitability of revival poetry made it a successful evangelistic tool. Revivalists wrote thousands of poems with little to distinguish them from each other. Ireland’s salvation came about because Rev. Fane invited him to imitate revival verse. In fact, the minister did so not despite the fact that he knew Ireland often lambasted revivalists in his verse, but because of it.

The verse Ireland composed in response to the challenge imitated the revivalist sermon and verse he already knew quite well. For example, the final verse of the six-stanza poem, concluded with a minister’s exhortation:

Therefore O sinners let’s embrace,

In order to salvation,

That blessed covenant of grace,

To save us from damnation;

For if we slight

His glorious light,

We’re under condemnation;

The law does breathe

Nothing but death,

To slighters of salvation.

Then let our contemplations rise,

And soar on Christ above the skies,

In that celestial abode;

Where Christ is co-equal with God,

Lay hold of Him as scripture saith

Embrace His truths by lively faith,

Then He’ll us bring

Where we shall reign

Along with Him in glory.

(1819/2005, pp. 53)

Here, Ireland inhabits the voice and role of a revival poet-minister through imitating it. At the same time, his general impious demeanor and well-known impromptu blasphemous verse sets up a strong dichotomy that tips his imitation into mockery.

Because of this, Ireland’s conversion by poetry closely aligns with another key structure found in many evangelical conversion narratives. While stories of sincere seekers abound, many conversion accounts trace an inverse relationship between mockery and repentance by representing the convert as an antagonist who falls under God’s conviction. Just as authoritative prohibitions against revivalists authorized democratic speech, mockery catalyzed conversions (Ruttenburg 1998, pp. 431). Imitators of Whitefield often found themselves saved by their own satirical rendition of the great itinerant. The passionate investment required of successful mockery, such as the internalization of the rhetorical moves of preaching and conversion, could quickly turn into enthusiastic practice under the right conditions. This inversion, in fact, flows from the idea of practicing “more authentic” Christianity, which often figured outward religious forms as dead, and a kind of mockery of the truer, inward religious experience. The majority of white evangelicals were Christians who converted, not to an entirely different religion, but to a different experience of the same form. Evangelical conversion involves making a set form, whether this form is Puritan conversion morphology or the couplet, appear anew or awakened. This is one reason why most revivalists did not so much innovate new poetic styles and forms as direct energy into making them meaningful through personal experience. The old form makes possible the new experience.

Whether by means of a saving encounter with an itinerant’s sermon or a poet-minister’s verse, the transformation of mockery and imitation into experiential conversion depended upon a hyper-personal address. Again and again, evangelicals attest to a moment in which the religious message directed at anonymous crowds suddenly becomes excruciatingly personal. Often this is the sudden feeling that the minister is speaking directly to the potential convert, their eyes locked with electric intensity. For instance, the Black loyalist and minister John Marrant writes a skilled rendition of this recurring trope into his own conversion narrative. He pushes into a revival meeting at the goading of a friend with the intent of interrupting the gathering by blowing his French horn. But before he has the chance to mock the noise of revivalists, with his loud blast, Whitefield appears to look directly at him and says, “Prepare to meet thy God, O Israel.” In an instant, Marrant is knocked off his feet and rendered speechless and senseless (1785).

What is so fantastic about Ireland’s narrative is not so much that his imitation and subtle mockery of revivalism and its verse suddenly flips into personal religious experience, but that his own verse is the instrument. It could be tempting for contemporary readers to imagine the conversionistic address of the poetic lines and Ireland as simply a story of a man speaking to himself. That the two dichotomous roles of the preacher and the convert have collapsed into one person seems to point toward a type of extreme self-authorization. This reading would map onto a general move over the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century from the sovereignty of God found in Calvinism to the increased volition of man expressed in Arminianism. It makes sense in the lyrical imagination of Mill, in which the poet is insular and self-sufficient: the poet who is “feeling, confessing itself to itself,” not to a priest (1833/2006, pp. 349). For G. W. Hegel, the lyric was the embodiment of modern subjectivity; the poem itself was a particular instantiation of the poet who was now “a self-bounded subjective entity” (1975, pp. 921). Charles Taylor mobilizes this development of the modern lyric as evidence of the secular self he describes as buffered; that is, a self upon which the world, including magic and religious forces, does not impinge (2007, pp. 38). This is one way of reading the poem.

Yet, Ireland does not describe his experience of poetic address exactly in this way. He does not imagine that he is speaking to himself or that the words he hears are entirely his own, but instead finds his poem aggressively occupying his mind against his will. Even though the poem is thoroughly ordinary and reproducible, it feels unfamiliar. Ireland writes, “So soon as I had finished this poem, these words in the last verse, viz. ‘The law does breathe nothing but death to slighters of salvation,’ kept continually running through my mind.”

When I had got at a proper distance so as not to be heard, I began to sing wicked and lascivious songs, of which I had a great number; but although I exerted my voice to its utmost power and highest pitch still the words— “The law does breathe nothing but death to slighters of salvation,” sounded louder in my mind than the audible exertion of my voice; I would then form my body in to a bending position and putting a hand upon each knee, would exert all the force of nature within me, shake my head and endeavor to force other objects and subjects upon my mind, but nothing could avail to dispossess me of that impression; I therefore, gave over the attempt. (pp. 55)

In Ireland’s account the poem becomes loosed from his authorial control and aimed at his very soul, which results in contortions, profanity, and the like as he tries to escape its grasp. He cannot even replace it with a new composition. The poet himself is made subject to his own poem’s address. Ireland’s verse, like other evangelical poetry, is activated by sermonic address, and as such it situates the audience as a stranger who then must come into a personalized address through God’s intervention.

This is exactly what happens the next day when the line suddenly makes sense through its personalization:

I felt an unusual conflict within; the aforementioned words running through my mind, all at once I was made as it were to stand!— God was pleased to manifest light to my understanding, and brought it home to my conscience that I was the slighter and contemner of the salvation of Christ; and that the law of God was then breathing death against my soul. The impression was so forcibly brought home to my conscience, that it never become [sic] obliterated from that period until I had reason to believe that Christ was formed in my soul the hope of Glory.

(pp. 56)

His account is particularly provoking because it shows how revivalists crafted a circuit of poetic address based on the distinction of the preacher and the stranger that was strong enough to separate the poet from his own address. His ability to whip up a revival poem and to imitate its forms and ideas takes place within a host of poetic and religious practices—literary games, battles of wit, manuscript exchange, revival hymn singing, barn raising, and prayer. In the narrative, he continually returns to these social situations as they produce and give meaning to his experience of writing his own verse. His narrative teaches his audience how to read a revival poem and what to expect from that reading—and central to the lesson is that the revival poem is so powerful even the poet may find himself at the mercy of his own revival poem’s directed address. In fact, the poem can only become evidence of Ireland’s conversion after he has been made a stranger to it. According to his narrative, this is because of God’s work through the poem—a poem always embedded, as Ireland details, in a wider revival community and its practices.

At the same time as evangelical itinerants directed their sermons and poems to strangers, literary poetry began to detach itself from rhetorical address. Scholars of historical poetics point to the nineteenth century as a period in which literary critics began to create a transcendental poetry increasingly removed from its actual scenes of circulation (Jackson and Prins 2014, pp. 4). The most common definition of this new lyric genre has been “utterance overheard”—an idea taken from Mill’s 1833/2006 essay “What Is Poetry?” in which he famously declared: “eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard” (pp. 349). Rather than a modern definition of lyric, however, Mill was much more concerned with the type of speech the poet performed. For Mill, poems should not have a direct address, especially a political one, but should indirectly address the audience: “the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener” (1833/2006, pp. 349). Although the speech should be overheard, instead of directed rhetoric like that of a sermon or political speech, Mill assumes no personal connection to the listener—he or she is a stranger.

While Mill separated direct and indirect speech according to the positionality of the speaker in order to distinguish between genres, revivalists mediated these two experiences of speech within the convert. Part of revival poetry’s innovation was the conversionist schema embedded in its address that depended upon flipping overheard speech into directed speech. The evangelical conversionistic address to the stranger was already sutured to the poetic address overheard by a stranger. The continual imbrication of evangelicalism and poetry through the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth points to a modern lyric poetic address that comes about in part through innovations in sermonic address and eighteenth-century revival poetry.