The Calvinist Couplet: Ralph Erskine’s Gospel Sonnets and Espousal Poetics in Early Evangelicalism

The article provides the first modern analysis of one of the bestselling transatlantic evangelical poems of the eighteenth century, the Scottish minister Ralph Erskine’s Gospel Sonnets. The article argues that the importance of the marriage metaphor and rhyme in the poem provided a specific meaning to the form of the couplet in eighteenth-century transatlantic evangelicalism—a form often associated with an outdated understanding of a monolithic enlightenment. In the case of Erskine, it produced the Calvinist couplet. What the author terms “espousal poetics” designates the much larger presence and purpose of the marriage metaphor in the emerging revivalist community: to fuse the paradoxes of a sound Calvinist theology with poetics.