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
