“The Sound in Faith”

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 1 provides the first literary treatment of the transatlantic bestseller, Ralph Erskine’s Gospel Sonnets. The chapter argues that the poem makes visible how poetry and homiletics enabled each other and, as they did so, fused together the revivalist minister and the poet, the itinerant and the poem, and soteriology and verse form. Erskine developed an espousal poetics (a poetics based on the metaphor of Christ wed to the believer) that saturated the rhymed couplet with Calvinist thought and helped produce a lived affective theology. While scholars have conceived of the Augustan Age in terms of Alexander Pope’s heroic couplet primarily as an Enlightenement form, this chapter argues that early Evangelicalism contributed a different meaning to poetic form—what Roberts calls the “Calvinist couplet.”