Marquette University e-Publications@Marquette Dissertations (2009 -) Dissertations, Theses, and Professional Projects The Pulpit's Muse: Conversive Poetics in the American Renaissance Michael William Keller Marquette University Recommended Citation Keller, Michael William, "The ulpP it's Muse: Conversive Poetics in the American Renaissance" (2015). Dissertations (2009 -). Paper 602. http://epublications.marquette.edu/dissertations_mu/602 THE PULPIT’S MUSE: CONVERSIVE POETICS IN THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE by Michael Keller, B.A., M.A. A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School, Marquette University, in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Milwaukee, Wisconsin December, 2015 ABSTRACT THE PULIPIT’S MUSE CONVERSIVE POETICS IN THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE Michael Keller, B.A., M.A. Marquette University, 2015 This dissertation focuses on the interaction between poetic form and popular religious practice in the nineteenth century United States. Specifically, I aim to see how American poets appropriated religious tropes—and especially religious conversion—in their poetry with specific designs on their audience. My introduction analyzes the phenomenon of religious conversion up through the nineteenth century with help from psychologists and historians of religion, including William James and Sydney Ahlstrom. In the introduction, I also explore how revivalist conversion helped inform the poetics of Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Chapter one focuses on Emerson’s poetry, particularly as it enacts Emerson’s poetic principles, in which the poet fills the role of the revivalist preacher. In chapter two, I study Jones Very’s poetry as an extension of this project—namely, the appropriation of sermonic strategies employed by the poet to elicit conversion from his readers (a strategy that, in spite of conventional views of Very’s later poetry, Very employed throughout his poetic career). Chapter three brings Jones Very into conversation with other contemporary poets—Elizabeth Fries Ellet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and John Greenleaf Whittier—as they engaged visual art through ekphrastic poetry. These poems illustrate how popular art in the nineteenth-century U.S. sat at the intersection of aesthetic experience and religious practice and how the lines demarcating these two categories were becoming increasingly blurred. Chapter four observes how the poetry in religious and freethought periodicals reacted to this identity crisis of a New England negotiating its rationalist ideals with its Puritan inheritance. This chapter also includes an appended collection of previously uncollected newspaper poetry. My dissertation contributes to the research field of American literature by offering an in-depth analysis of the interaction between nineteenth-century poetry and popular revivalist preaching, an interaction that is essential to understanding antebellum American poetry. More broadly, as throngs of Americans responded to preaching by finding themselves converted, they also settled into a new personal identity in the midst of a rapidly transforming society. This dissertation explores what role poetry had in that conversive process. i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Michael Keller, B.A., M.A. I would like to thank my wife for her incredible support during the process of writing and defending of this dissertation, including her helpful input on the drafting of these chapters. Similarly, my family has been very supportive throughout my time in graduate school. More broadly, they have consistently offered material and emotional support throughout my entire life, and I am inexpressibly grateful to them for this. My mother-in-law, Jolene Workman, helped make the defense of this dissertation possible by helping to take care of our son, William. This dissertation could not have come to fruition without the consistent feedback and mentorship of Angela Sorby. Sarah Wadsworth and Amy Blair have also been instrumental in helping to shape this dissertation through their helpful suggestions for revision. I would also like to thank the faculty of Marquette University for their thoughtful instruction during my time at the university. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………….i LIST OF FIGURES………………………………………………………………………iii INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………….……..…1 CHAPTER ONE: EMERSON’S CONVERSIVE POETICS……………………………24 CHAPTER TWO: JONES VERY’S SERMONIC POETICS…………………………...55 CHAPTER THREE: SACRED PANORAMAS…………………………………..….....90 CHAPTER FOUR: ABNER KNEELAND AND THE DYING INFIDEL……...…….125 CONCLUSION: THE BIRTH OF PAIN………………………………………………186 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………...203 iii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: A Vision. The Mountain of Flesh……...……………………………………..84 Figure 2: The Fight With Apollyon……………………………………………………108 Figure 3: The Land of Beulah………………………………………………………….109 1 INTRODUCTION In antebellum America, the long-standing figure of the minister was in flux. Broadly speaking, the mission of the minister was still to win converts and nurture believers, but these believers were not the same as they were in pre-Revolutionary America. The American population was expanding geographically, ideologically, and economically, and its ministers were evolving along with it. Similarly, the relationship between authorities and followers, writers and readers, and the sacred and secular were also changing. Many American poets, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jones Very, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Elizabeth Fries Ellet, organized their relationships with readers to include or represent the conversion experience. As religious and freethought1 periodicals show, unheralded poetic contributors to newspapers also assumed this inherent connection between poetry and religious conversion. But how would America reconcile its Puritan roots while becoming a more mercantile, materialist nation, and what role would poetry play? Could lives still be changed—could people still be converted—without the scaffolding of traditional religion? In the pages that follow, I will explore the role poetry played in the struggle for an American identity in the Antebellum United States. Poets would have to wrestle with a confluence of social, ideological, and political forces. In the 1830s, Andrew Jackson was simultaneously galvanizing and polarizing the country. Religious skepticism was 1 That is, periodicals like Abner Kneeland’s Boston Investigator and Robert Dale Owen’s and Fanny Wright’s Free Enquirer, which published articles and poetry challenging religious orthodoxy and promoting progressive causes like contraception and workers’ rights. 2 In Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography, David S. Reynolds describes Whitman’s early exposure to the Free Enquirer, to which Whitman’s father subscribed 2 being disseminated among the American public, and religious leaders were vying for American souls as poets were attempting to establish an American literary identity. As I will show in this study, the destinies of the pulpit and the poet were inextricably linked. In his 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman famously announced the death-knell of the priesthood: There will soon be no more priests. Their work is done. They may wait awhile . perhaps a generation or two . dropping off by degrees. A superior breed shall take their place . the gangs of kosmos and prophets en masse shall take their place. A new order shall arise and they shall be the priests of man, and every man shall be his own priest. The churches built under their umbrage shall be the churches of men and women. Through the divinity of themselves shall the kosmos and the new breed of poets be interpreters of men and women and of all events and things. They shall find their inspiration in real objects today, symptoms of the past and future . They shall not deign to defend immortality or God or the perfection of things or liberty or the exquisite beauty and reality of the soul. They shall arise in America and be responded to from the remainder of the earth (Whitman 24-25). In one sense, this vision makes sense in light of Whitman’s early exposure to freethought journals, which often called for the abolition of the priesthood.2 But Whitman’s relationship to the clergy was not entirely negative. As David S. Reynolds writes, “Whitman on the one hand violently rejected American churches and on the other was vitally interested in American preaching and religion” (5618). For Whitman, the traditional priest has outlived his usefulness, and while it may take “awhile,” Whitman 2 In Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography, David S. Reynolds describes Whitman’s early exposure to the Free Enquirer, to which Whitman’s father subscribed when the poet was a child: “[Walter Whitman] exposed his family to the most radical thought of the day by subscribing to the Free Enquirer…These and other labor radicals of the decade ushered in a rhetoric class conflict [sic], defending ‘productive,’ virtuous workers against the ‘idle’ rich and calling for laws to aid the poor” (654). As I will discuss in Chapter 4, in the context of freethinking journals (descending largely from French Enlightenment thinking), the priesthood was part of the machinery keeping the lower classes down. For the French, of course, this meant Catholic priests, but for American freethinkers, this came to include Christian clerics more generally. 3 displays his faith that this vocation will be evolved out of society as the “new breed of poets” come to fulfill this role. But the doctrine they preach will be