Demand My Voice: Hearing God in Eighteenth-Century American Poetry

The Chief, whose arm to Israel's chosen bandGave the fair empire of the promis'd land,Ordain'd by Heaven to hold the sacred sway,Demands my voice and animates the lay.

(1.1–4)

So Timothy Dwight commences his epic The Conquest of Canäan (1785) asserting God's active participation in bringing the poem to life. God demands the poet's voice—both requesting that his servant Dwight speak while concurrently expressing his own need for Dwight's voice in order to be heard. God incites and claims Dwight's speech by animating "the lay," a word that by the seventeenth century was not only a poetical synonym for song but also a term used in printing for the arrangement of type in the case from which the compositor would take it (OED). God, then, not only animates the poet's song, he is also the organizing and moving force behind the printer's typeface.

The evolution of the word lay from poems about history and romantic adventures sung by minstrels into, by the eighteenth century, a general poetical term for song and a printing locution could seem to epitomize the general march from oral to print culture, which brands Dwight's poem as an anachronistic song that can only rise as a trope through its inky register. Rather than follow such familiar terrain, I identify this crucial moment in the poem in order to interrupt this recurrent narrative, highlighting instead the subtle texture of both print and the oral as they operate simultaneously. This need not be a remarkable point, yet with too few exceptions, early American studies has focused on print to the detriment of orality—an entirely sensible outcome when one views the induction of the American enlightenment and the modern as necessarily print-based.¹ The treatment of oral and religious forms like Evangelical poetry as ephemeral has been a basic feature of two pervasive stories of declension—the simultaneous decline of oral culture and of religious culture—that early American histories overwhelmingly take for granted. The converging accounts of religious and oral decline both result from a scholarly investment in enlightenment paradigms, a term I use in this essay as a trope, not a historical time frame, to designate a narrative trajectory of rational humanity's progress beyond religion.² While there are various influences and circumstances that have maintained the modern sensibility toward these declension narratives, there is growing consensus that they are simply inadequate accounts of the religious history and culture of early America.

Early American literary studies has recently produced methodologies less encumbered by such overemphasis on print culture and more open to the complexity of religious cultures and productions within the newly forming Republic and their relation to nonreligious works. Building on these insights, this essay turns to Dwight's poem in order to highlight the intermixture of print, religious, and oral culture at the end of the eighteenth century. Yet it was not only the mastering of oratorical technique and speaking that mattered; it was also the attunement of ears to hear particular sounds. Ultimately, narratives that can integrate text, orality, and aurality will give a clearer and fuller picture of a world in which people read and recited novels, letters, poetry, and sermons, as well as heard them. Poetry, an oral and a textual space dependent upon and emphasizing sound, will serve as a test case in this essay for exercising alternative approaches to early American literature and religion. Because eighteenth-century poetry was so intimately tied to oratory and sound, Evangelical poetry of the period occupies a crucial axis—where print, aurality, and religion meet—for reexamining these narratives.

Sound Scholarship: Rethinking Enlightenment Paradigms and Declension Narratives

Jay Fliegelman's recovery of the lost "elocutionary revolution," Christopher Looby's argument that print often "spoke" in the new Republic, Nancy Ruttenburg's emphasis on the popular voice, and Sandra M. Gustafson's focus on oratory and performance have all provoked a renewed interest in orality and provide direction for future early American literary scholarship.³ This turn to...