Sarah Parsons Moorhead and Revival Poetry

Abstract

ABSTRACT Wendy Raphael Roberts attends to one of the better-known revival poets, Sarah Parsons Moorhead (1705/6–74), to argue that her inclusion in modern anthologies would enable a more robust attention to one of the largest verse movements in the eighteenth century—revival poetics. Looking at revival poetry sheds light on the extent of women's leadership in early evangelicalism. Moorhead is particularly important for showing how women inhabited a new tradition of evangelical poet-ministers, through which they acted as spiritual directors to the most well-known revivalists of the day. Currently, the evangelical literary culture of the nineteenth-century can appear in anthologies to arise from within the national period alone, and as a result, Romantic poetry and the rise of the nineteenth-century Poetess lose a large portion of their genealogies, which are, at least in part, in eighteenth-century evangelical formations.