Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre

Chapter Four: Hymns, Narratives, and Innovations in Religious Poetry

c h a p t e r f o u r Hymns, Narratives, and Innovations in Religious Poetry With Bible great upon her Table layd Yet with her pen & Inke expresses made — j a n e c a v e n d i s h Jane Cavendish’s lines describe a woman writing, not reading. Moreover, she is writing ‘‘expresses,’’ urgent or urgently felt forms of writing,∞ and so, in some way, the Bible has fired her composition. Of all of the eighteenth-century poets, male or female, Elizabeth Singer Rowe left the best and most diverse body of religious poetry, and Jane Cavendish’s image brings Rowe to mind. As a religious poet she created new forms, experimented fruitfully with existing ones, and was an important part of major transformations in the uses of religious verse. As with The Vision, Rowe gradually learned to use existing kinds of poetry for personal, social, and religious purposes. New genres are created when old ones do not meet the needs of writers and their culture, and Rowe is a fascinating example of this phenomenon. In her ‘‘devout soliloquies’’ and especially in her long narrative poem, The History of Joseph, she broke new ground. Her work is a touchstone for organizing this chapter’s discussion of some types of religious poetry. Religious poetry is a huge subject, and it was in the eighteenth century that it began to be what Blanford Parker calls a ‘‘compartment of literature.’’≤ Rich and varied traditions funneled into it, and the century was filled with religious tension and change that gave the poetry immediacy and unusual significance. Yet a chasm 124 Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry exists between the way twentieth-century critics treated it and the way they dealt with the religious Renaissance poetry of John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan, the Sidneys, and Thomas Traherne. Part of its fall from ‘‘literature’’ may be its association with women poets. Almost as often as critics and historians note the large amount of religious poetry that women wrote, it is judged inferior. Germaine Greer summarizes a common idea, ‘‘Religion remained the principal subject-matter of women’s verse, the principal justi- fication for women’s writing and the best guarantee of a poetess’s success for two hundred years,’’ and she calls hymn writing ‘‘a version of dittying.’’≥ Men wrote an enormous amount of religious poetry as well, and with a very few exceptions theirs too has been neglected or treated with sweeping generalizations. Only Christopher Smart and William Cowper have enjoyed serious, mainstream analysis , and Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley a special kind of attention—compartmentalized . Only a few critics have dissented, as Bonamy Dobrée did when he praised Watts for ‘‘his variety, his metrical experiment, and his imagery’’ and his ‘‘fusion of image with thought and emotion’’ and compared him favorably over several pages to some of his contemporaries. As David Morris has said, ‘‘John and Charles Wesley . . . are not generally considered poets, perhaps for the same reason that hymns are not considered poems. This prejudice impoverishes our understanding of eighteenth-century poetry.’’∂ Margaret Doody agrees: ‘‘The religious experience of the Augustans has never been fully or perfectly treated. I suspect that it is not peripheral but central to Augustan literature.’’∑ We should not ‘‘suspect,’’ we should recognize. Contemplating that eighteenth-century religious poetry was written between that of John Milton and William Blake might lead us to believe that we should take it more seriously and admit that it is a major type of eighteenth-century poetry. The forms that poets loved and wrote well, such as the pastoral and the ode, are found in abundance in religious poetry. Admittedly, it is sometimes hard to draw a firm line between religious and secular poetry. John Sitter and others emphasize how strongly poets felt ethical responsibilities and how often poems that begin humorously come to contemplate eternity, as Swift’s To Mr. Congreve and Cowper’s Task do. ‘‘Sweet is the harp of prophesy,’’ Cowper writes in his celebration of the invention of the sofa: Too sweet Not to be wrong’d by a mere mortal touch; Nor can the wonders it records be sung To meaner music, and not suffer loss. Hymns, Narratives, and Innovations in Religious Poetry 125 . . . . . . . . . . . . . That not t’attempt it, arduous as he deems The labor, were a task more arduous still.∏ Ann Messenger points...