The Bible in American Poetic Culture: Community, Conflict, War 3031401069, 9783031401060

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MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY POETRY AND POETICS

The Bible in American Poetic Culture Community, Conflict, War Shira Wolosky

Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

Series Editor

Ann Vickery Deakin University Burwood, Australia

Founded by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, continued by David Herd, and now headed by Ann Vickery, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics promotes and pursues topics in the burgeoning field of 20th and 21st century poetics. Critical and scholarly work on poetry and poetics of interest to the series includes: social location in its relationships to subjectivity, to the construction of authorship, to oeuvres, and to careers; poetic reception and dissemination (groups, movements, formations, institutions); the intersection of poetry and theory; questions about language, poetic authority, and the goals of writing; claims in poetics, impacts of social life, and the dynamics of the poetic career as these are staged and debated by poets and inside poems. Since its inception, the series has been distinguished by its tilt toward experimental work  – intellectually, politically, aesthetically. It has consistently published work on Anglophone poetry in the broadest sense and has featured critical work studying literatures of the UK, of the US, of Canada, and Australia, as well as eclectic mixes of work from other social and poetic communities. As poetry and poetics form a crucial response to contemporary social and political conditions, under David Herd’s editorship the series will continue to broaden understanding of the field and its significance. Editorial Board Members: Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Temple University Vincent Broqua, Université Paris 8 Olivier Brossard, Université Paris-Est Steve Collis, Simon Fraser University Jacob Edmond, University of Otago Stephen Fredman, Notre Dame University Fiona Green, University of Cambridge Abigail Lang, Université Paris Diderot Will Montgomery, Royal Holloway University of London Miriam Nichols, University of the Fraser Valley Redell Olsen, Royal Holloway University of London Sandeep Parmar, University of Liverpool Adam Piette, University of Sheffield Nisha Ramaya, Queen Mary University of London Brian Reed, University of Washington Carol Watts, University of Sussex

Shira Wolosky

The Bible in American Poetic Culture Community, Conflict, War

Shira Wolosky Hebrew University of Jerusalem Jerusalem, Israel

ISSN 2634-6052     ISSN 2634-6060 (electronic) Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics ISBN 978-3-031-40105-3    ISBN 978-3-031-40106-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40106-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Classic Image / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. . .The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural.

And Moses said: I beseech thee show me thy glory. And the divine said: Behold there is a place by me and thou shalt stand upon a rock; I will put thee in a clift of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by. And I will take away my hand, and thou shalt see my trace. But my face shall not be seen. Exodus 33: 17-22

This book is dedicated to my family: Ariel, Tali, Elazar, Tamar, Nomi. In memory of my teachers and mentors: Sacvan Bercovitch and Harold Bloom, with special thanks to Michael Kramer, Cristanne Miller, Beverly Haviland, and Suzanne Last Stone. I wish also to thank the readers and editors at Palgrave Macmillan for their attentive and fruitful comments.

Contents

1 Introduction:  Biblical Disputes in American Polity and Poetics  1 2 Puritan  Hebraism: Anne Bradstreet, John Cotton, Edward Taylor 13 Covenantal Community  18 Anne Bradstreet’s Biblical Commentary  23 John Cotton’s Hebrew Republic  31 Edward Taylor’s Covenantal Poetics  39 Controversy in New English Poetics  46 3 Biblical  Poetic Wars: Covenant, Millennium, Apocalypse 77 Covenant, Millennium, Apocalypse  79 Revolutionary Poetry’s Mixed Discourses  83 Poetic Apocalypse in Civil War  96 4 The  Bible Divided Against Itself: Abolition, Slave Spirituals113 The Abolition Campaign in Poetry 115 Frances Harper 125 Slave Spirituals 131

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Contents

5 Rewriting  Scripture: Emerson, Whitman, Melville155 Make Your Own Bible: Emerson’s Poetry and Poetics 157 Walt Whitman’s Scriptural Transfigurations 171 Melville: Unwriting the Apocalypse 182 6 Emily  Dickinson’s Biblical Contests: Authority, Gender, History201 Textual Criticism 202 Dickinson’s Woman’s Bible 210 Historicist Poetics 220 7 Women’s  Bibles, White and Black: Twentieth Century and Beyond233 From First to Second Wave Feminism 236 Moore, Plath, Sexton: Scriptural Ethics, Scriptural Ruptures 242 African American Women Poets: Chanting the Bible 256 Cultural Divides 269 Final Remarks 280 Index293

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Biblical Disputes in American Polity and Poetics

In a New World remote from European establishments, the Bible stands out as a cultural institution shared across communities. The Bible is likewise the backbone of American poetic tradition. Yet, there are almost no studies of the Bible in American poetics. While there are many discussions of the Bible in cultural, political, and religious American history, these focus on sermons, essays, political speeches, tracts, and historical records.1 Poetry is at most occasionally cited as further documentary evidence. Specific authors with especially central or prominent biblical association have been discussed—Melville here stands out. But wider studies of poetics, especially as they have come more and more to center on political, ideological, racial, and gendered issues, have strikingly omitted the Bible from discussion.2 Even recent studies of literary print culture efface the Bible, which has been without question the most printed and distributed text in American history.3 Thus, a broader account of biblical traditions and American poetics is missing. Yet the Bible is not only the major impulse through American poetry at least into the twentieth century, but offers one of the most compelling scenes for major topics of American culture as poetry engages them. This study sets out to bring poetic discourses into the discussion of the Bible in America. It explores overlaps between the Bible and poetry: in their richness of language, their invitation to interpretation, their

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Wolosky, The Bible in American Poetic Culture, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40106-0_1

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circulation, their expansion, and also their diversity of meaning. The Bible’s thread through American culture—religious, political, social— extends to literature and poetry as well.4 However, to say that the Bible has been central to American culture is not to say that its position has been unitary, harmonious, or concordant. To be shared has not meant to be in agreement. On the one hand, the Bible provided a common cultural language across many of the diverse groups who came from Europe to colonize North America. On the other hand, these groups from the outset and onward represented a variety of religious as well as other social, political, economic, and cultural forms. These encountered each other in overlap but also argument, dispute, and conflict with each other. Sharing the Bible—first the Geneva Bible, the first to be translated into English from the original Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic, and later in the seventeenth century the King James Version—did not then or later resolve these disputes.5 Biblical reference did not lead to full mutual understanding, accord, or unity. Indeed, common biblical language did not prevent, and arguably contributed to, the ultimate explosion of dispute into violence in the War between the States. The Bible has been a pervasive common reference and also a site of contention, disagreement, debate, and violent conflict. It has played a large part in the most heated disputes in and about America. Most violent was the Civil War, the culmination of decades of passionate disagreement over slavery and abolition. All drew on biblical texts, cited to prove the arguments for and against each position. The battle over women’s status was similarly joined on the grounds of biblical prooftexts. The Bible thus has played a double role: on the one hand, providing a common language within American diversity; on the other, deployed in disputes among divided groups against each other. At issue have been the defining terms of America itself: the freedom of the individual, the claims of property, participation in community, the possibility of joint destinies and values. New England Puritanism took the Bible to be a book of American history. Its venture was shaped by biblical narrative, which in turn shaped America’s own unfolding. As Michael Walzer writes, the Puritan Revolution made “the interpretation of history” into “a religious act.”6 This Puritan pattern was then, as Werner Sollors argues, adapted by subsequent American groups in turn, making biblical claims their own.7 African American culture is indissolubly entwined with biblical interpretation and contests over it.8 Women writers ranged from critique to embrace of the

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Bible, but could not ignore its power in shaping the American culture of gender. These disputes and contests, overlaps, invocations, and applications occur through many discourses: political, social, religious, literature, and includes poetry as well. All of these biblical cultural scenes and conflicts are enacted in the poetry of America, from popular verse to hymns to slave spirituals to canonical writers. Poetry is an underexamined arena in which American biblical cultures have been shared and disputed, with both civility and conflict. Yet the Bible and poetry illuminate each other, sharing common features and powers. In both the Bible and literary arts such as poetry, language flourishes precisely through enlargement and augmenting of meaning. This has been the Bible’s power to speak to each age, and literature’s too. The betrayal of both, I argue, is the attempt to commandeer and reduce their language to absolute claim and narrow purpose. In cultural terms, the Bible has played significant roles in definitions and debates regarding America’s own significance, intercrossing appeal and disagreement, claim and counterclaim, in personal but also civic and national arenas. One argument here is that the attempt to command the Bible and control its language ultimately betrays, and is stymied by, the Bible’s own generative powers, which poetry, engaging with the Bible, enacts and confirms. The Bible in turn gives the poetry that engages it further resonance, appeal, and reach toward readers through a range of American contexts in which the Bible, through most of American history, has been a forceful presence. The Bible is a revelation of paradox. Not only do its texts disperse a wide variety of accounts, interpreting the Bible is a scene of proliferating understandings and claims. Yet the Bible is itself claimed to be a bedrock authority. This tension intensifies in Protestant experience, most densely in America, where there is no, and has never been, one central church authority. Settlement of America was more or less diverse from the outset. Besides Spanish and French Catholics, many Protestant sects arrived ranging from the Church of England to Congregationalists, Quakers, Baptists, Lutherans and other Reformed groups. How to harmonize, or at all control, biblical interpretation was an immediate cause for concern. Luther translated the Bible on the premise that “Scripture is through itself most certain, most easily accessible, comprehensible, interpreting itself, proving, judging all words of all men,” for otherwise “whom are we to believe.”9 Sola scriptura made Scripture the fundamental rock of faith, to which every individual should have access. Yet Calvin noted that even the

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pious “have not always agreed among themselves.” God has not disclosed “full and perfect knowledge, … [and this] keeps them humble and desirous to keep in communication with their brothers.” Affirming interpretive discussion, he also, however, saw the need to keep it in bounds. For “if everyone has a right to be a judge and arbiter in this matter, nothing can be set down as certain, and the whole religion will be filled with uncertainty.”10 Henry VIII, after placing the Bible in every church, in his last speech in Parliament of 1545 complained that “I am very sorry to know and hear how unreverently that most precious jewel, the word of God, is disputed, rhymed, sung and jangled in every alehouse and tavern.”11 As Stephen Greenblatt remarks of biblical translation and access as a “turning point in human history,” Tyndale himself saw that “reading alone, without any instruction as to how to read the Bible, might not be sufficient” and through the rest of his writings provided just such hermeneutic direction.12 In the American context, from settlement and then through the revivals and awakenings, proliferation of religious experience extended to the Bible.13 The claim of sola scriptura to absolute authority at once presumes unitary truth, yet also invests each individual to discover that truth for him or herself.14 Such personalization points, however, not to unity but to multiplicity. Granting to each self an individual encounter of the Bible individualized that encounter. But instead of faith making all experiences converge, the Holy Spirit turned out to speak in tongues, differently to different readers and to different groups. Embraced as the “infallible guidebook for establishing the kingdom of God on earth” that “spoke with unquestioned authority,” the Bible still “said different things to different men.”15 As Shaker Richard McNemar penned: Ten thousand Reformers like so many moles Have plowed all the Bible and cut it [in] holes And each has his church at the end of his trace Built up as he thinks of the subjects of grace.16

Yet another paradox of sola scriptura is that scriptura is never sola.17 The Bible does not stand in or by itself. Biblical encounter always and inevitably takes place within cultural, social, political, and theological contexts.18 Understanding is directed through interpretive frameworks that then become realized in individual ways. As J.G.A. Pocock outlines in Politics, Language, and Time:

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The individual’s thinking may be viewed as a social event, an act of communication and of response within a paradigm system; and a historical event, a moment in a process of transformation of that system and of the interacting worlds which both system and act help to constitute and are constituted by.19

The cultural embedding of meaning, including biblical meaning, can act as both a mode of release and of constraint. However individual interpretation seems, it is always framed by received teachings and assumptions, which churches have attempted to control. Perry Miller writes that Puritan “bibliolatry” insisted that “Scripture was self-evident; it needed no light from other sources, and every verse admitted of but one interpretation.” This seems to release biblical interpretation to all readers, but no less invites control of interpretation by investing the clergy as “the interpreters of the very rules by which they were supposed to be limited.”20 Interpretation, rather than resolving all biblical differences, embeds the Bible in the polities and policies of its readers, which vary and often contend. The Bible becomes a core scene in which appeals to both common and diversity of understanding, discipline, and liberty come into contest. “Infused as it was with the language of hierarchy and obedience,” writes David Donald Hall, “the Puritan project of a literate, Bible-reading people was an instrument of order. But because these same people were entitled to challenge ‘unlawful’ authority, the much-encouraged practice of reading the Bible was inherently unstable, for its message was always open to interpretation.”21 Patricia Bonomi sees clerical disputes themselves as advertising arguments, with individual autonomy pressing back against claims to superior authority.22 The Bible remained the ultimate reference. Yet there was, writes Mark Noll, “no recognized authority greater than the individual interpretation of Scripture, granting to each self the power to discover true meaning of sacred texts” and the “power to act effectively and choose righteously.”23 What the Bible’s intransigence to final claims ultimately points to is not access through it to absolute truths, but rather the modes and values of interpretation itself as open to further argument and other interpretations. The Bible’s paradox of authority and individualism makes it a site where centrifugal and centripetal forces cross. On the one hand, it is a shared text among diverse groups and individuals. On the other, each group and individual understands it differently. In American history, the Bible has centrally played both roles, at once a common reference point and also a scene

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of conflict. This study traces how America’s poetry participated in such biblical discourses, civil and conflictual. Recent studies have emphasized poetic engagement with public discourse.24 New technologies in mechanized presses and transportation increased the volume and pace of publication exponentially, carrying both the Bible and poetry with it. More and more widely available, poetry participated in American discourses, both directly, as recited at public events educational and political, sung as hymns, shared in group readings, circulated in print, memorized and quoted, and indirectly as arenas of cultural and political debate, claim, and counterclaim. This study ultimately explores how poetry enacts the Bible’s cultural power not as agreement, but as interpretive engagement, tracing America’s biblical culture through dispute and civility. It does not offer a survey of poets or attempt to cover all poetic activities across American cultural production. Rather, the purpose here is to approach biblical topics through poetry, to see how poetry and the Bible intersect through core configurations of community, conflict, and war in American culture. Not all poems were widely circulated, nor were they intended to be by their authors. Neither Edward Taylor nor Emily Dickinson published their work. Still, their poetry importantly engages biblical as well as other American cultures. The focus of this inquiry is, then, not a literary historical catalogue, but on poetry as it registers and unveils core biblical cultural engagements. Its aesthetic approach sees poetry, as other literatures and arts, as an arena in which a variety of experiences encounter each other, including history, religion, psychology, philosophy, economics, and politics. In formal terms, each of these areas may enter the text through diction, rhythm, allusion and quotation, rhetorical construction, in complex configurations with each other that poetic analysis addresses and interprets. The formal and the cultural inform and shape each other, both in the text and in its interpretation.25 The Bible has been a cultural text central to the formation of American national identity. As one of the most distributed books in America, it was, in Benedict Anderson’s sense, a “print-language” that “laid the basis for national consciousness,” creating “fields of exchange and communication” among the various groups and people that thus become defined as a nation.26 Scripture becomes a narrative of America in what Homi Bhabha calls a national arena of “social contestation” with “complex rhetorical strateg[ies] of social reference” in its “claim[s] to be representative.”27 The Bible takes on the aspect of nation building as well as being a

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fundamental basis for the emergence of a distinctive American literature.28 Just as Noah Webster undertook to shape an American language in his dictionary and speller, so he attempted an American Bible (1833), more symbolic of national independence than substantively altering the King James Version. Biblical idioms, images, rhythms everywhere resound across American addresses, publications, daily speech. Yet they do so in multiple, sometimes confirming, sometimes conflicting ways. Caught up in both dispersion and consolidation, rivalrous precisely where claims intercross, the Bible frames at least three core topics in American history, religion, and literature. The first involves the schemes of time. The return to Hebrew Scripture by the Puritans redirected them into historical experience, redefining relationships between eternity and time, individual and community, materialism and devotion. Biblical time schemes continued to govern American understandings of its own history, but did so in several ways. Often grouped or blurred together, covenant, millennium, and apocalypse instead mark three distinct pathways of time. Covenant focuses and configures experience within history, as can also millennialism of certain types. But apocalypse announces and propels the end of time, resolving conflict, as also ambiguity and diversity, into a total unified ultimate moment. These different biblical time patterns are claimed and pursued within American poetics. A second topic involves figuration. Biblical exegesis has interpreted Scriptural language as an interplay and hierarchy between the literal and figural. In Puritan America, the return to Hebrew Scripture reopened how “literal” historical events and accounts can be figures for further historical, religious, and aesthetic meanings. Balances and priorities between these different layers then become political as well as religious, pivotal to arguments around core conflicts involving slavery, women’s rights, the meaning of history, and the status of America itself. The meaning and value of figures are likewise central to poetics, including in engagement with the Bible itself. A third topic, closely related to the first two, is the question of equality and the dignity of the person. Here debates over the very message and teaching of the Bible frame definitions of selfhood, democracy, and nationhood in America. Beginning with Puritan poetics, this study pursues these core poetic biblical topics. First discussed is the Puritan return to Hebraism as redefining the relationship between history and eternity, this world and the next, thus establishing patterns of American time schemes. Then poetries of the Revolutionary War are examined, in which biblical discourses intercross

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with Enlightenment and republican ones. The relationships between these discourses mark the nation’s emergence as a new covenant—the etymological meaning of federalism. Millennialism itself is imagined as covenantal. This focus within history and community, however, shifts into apocalyptic ultimacy and confrontation in the approach to the Civil War. Chapter 4 explores biblical debates on abolition and slavery in popular poetry, and slave spirituals as they participate in American biblical contest, at once confirming and challenging core values regarding historical direction and the dignity of the individual. At issue is the basic teaching of the Bible itself as egalitarian or hierarchical. Chapters 5 and 6 treat major writers of midcentury, Emerson, Whitman, Melville, and Dickinson, for whom figuration itself is a central concern. Here Emerson is the outstanding theorist if not practitioner of poetics. Whitman, Melville, and Dickinson each radicalizes the power of figures, engaging biblical language to create webs of inter-referring cultural and aesthetic relationalities. In Whitman, Melville, and Dickinson, poetic language itself takes on biblical rhythm, pattern, and structure: expansive in Whitman, retractive in Dickinson, and disruptive in Melville. Finally, I approach the Bible as a core scene of contest in debates over women’s rights and women’s own self-definition in gendered, political, and religious senses, as enacted in women’s poetry, white and African American, from the end of the Civil War toward contemporary writers. Here the discussion moves into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, where the status of the Bible has become contested in new ways: less as an arena of disputed claims, than as claimed by one set of groups against others for whom the Bible is losing authority. The Bible as cultural presence has receded or splintered. Nevertheless, it remains a resonant poetic resource, if no longer a commanding one. Throughout this project, I underscore the way diverse interpretations, representations, invocations of the Bible, as enacted in American poetry, shift assertion to reflection and interchange, figural extension and elaboration, to open scenes of exchange across contrary, overlapping, ambiguous meanings. As interpretive scene rather than claim to absolute certain truth, the Bible can provide an arena in which divergent experiences and understandings can nevertheless address and respond to each other.

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Notes 1. Mark Noll has written a series of studies on the Bible in America, including In the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life 1492–1783 (NY: Oxford University Press, 2015) and The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization (NY: Oxford University Press, 2022). Many books explore the Bible in American culture, including The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History, eds. Nathan Hatch, Mark Noll (1982) (NY: Oxford University Press, 1982); The Bible in American Life, eds. Philip Goff, Arthur E.  Farnsley II, Peter J.  Thuesen (NY: Oxford University Press, 2016); Eran Shalev, American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). These studies do not discuss poetry. Paul Gutjahr’s The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in America (NY: Oxford University Press, 2018) includes a chapter on poetry by Shira Wolosky, “The Bible in American Literature,” 432–450. 2. Studies that examine American poetry in public space but do not discuss the Bible include:  Michael C.  Cohen, The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-­Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Colin Wells, Poetry Wars (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018); Catherine O’Donnell Kaplan, Men of Letters in the Early Republic: Cultivating Forms of Citizenship (University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution (New York: Thomas Y.  Crowell Co. 1976); R. Cordell, Mary Cullen, “‘Fugitive Verses’: The Circulation of Poems in 19th cent American Newspapers,” American Periodicals: A Journal of History & Criticism, Volume 27, Number 1, 2017, 29–52. 3. Despite the overwhelming presence of the Bible in American print culture, it is not mentioned in Meredith L. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 35, 57–58, 97. Warner’s later book, Publics and Counterpublics (NY: Zone Books, 2005), likewise does not list the Bible, Scripture, or religion in its index. Nor does Joan Shelley Rubin, “Making Meaning: Analysis and Affect in the Study and Practice of Reading,” History of the Book in America Vol 4, ed. Janice Radway (University of North Carolina Press, 2009) 511–527. Likewise, Print Culture in a Diverse America, ed. James Danky Wayne Wiegand (Urbana: University of Illinois 1998).  Studies that do discuss the Bible in literature and print culture rarely mention poetry. These include Erin Smith, “Religion and Popular Print Culture Print,” Oxford History of Popular Print Culture: Volume Six: US

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Popular Print Culture 1860–1920, ed. Christine Bold, Gary Kelly, Joad Raymond, Christine Bold, Ronald J. Zboray, Mary Saracino Zboray (NY: Oxford University Press 2012) 277–292; William Vance Trollinger Jr, “Protestant Publishing in the US: An Outpouring of ‘Faithful’ Words,” History of the Book Vol 4, ed. Janice Radway; Christopher Looby, Voicing America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Thomas Gustafson, Representative Words (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Religion and the Culture of Print in America, eds. Charles Cohen, Paul S. Boyer (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008). 4. Mark Noll’s Rise and Decline is among the most recent discussions of this cultural reach of the Bible, through many arenas, for the years 1794 to 1911; examining how “various ways of treating the Bible affected almost every aspect of national history,  even as that history affected the ways Americans appropriated Scripture,” p.  4, cf. note 1. He does not discuss poetry. 5. David Daniell, The Bible in English (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 409. 6. Michael Walzer, Revolution of the Saints (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 75. 7. Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Dissent (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), chapter 2, “Typology and Ethnogenesis,” pp. 40–65. 8. Albert Raboteau, “African Americans: Exodus, Ethiopia, and Racial Messianism: Texts and Contexts of African American Chosenness,” Many Are Chosen: Divine Election and Western Nationalism, ed. William R.  Hutchison and Hartmut Lehmann, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), that “African Americans have invented a myth of their own exceptionalism, based largely on biblical themes and religious imagery,” and reflecting the “centrality of religion in black culture,” p. 194. 9. Stanley E. Porter, Dictionary of Biblical Criticism and Interpretation (NY: Routledge, 2007), p. 316. 10. William Stevenson, Sovereign Grace (Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 25. Cf. Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), that Calvin wrote: “I acknowledge that Scripture is a most rich and inexhaustible fountain of all wisdom but I deny that its fertility consists in the various meanings which any man at his pleasure may assign,” p. 180. 11. David Zaret, The Heavenly Contract (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 56–7. 12. Steven Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983), pp. 94, 100, 96. 13. Hatch, Democratization, “People were expected to discover the self-­ evident message of the Bible without any mediation from creeds, theolo-

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gians, or clergymen not of their own choosing.” Such faith “that biblical authority could emerge from below, from the will of the people, was the most enduring legacy of the Christian movement,” becoming the distinctive feature of American religion. However, few saw that “a commitment to private judgment could drive people apart, even as it raised beyond measure their hopes for unity,” p. 81, cf. note 10. 14. Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), that “sola scriptura involved instruction on what the Bible’s words really said and mean,” p. 213. Edward Oakes calls sola scriptura an “incoherent position,” “The Paradox of the Literal,” Reform and Counter-­ Reform: Dialectics of the Word in Western Christianity since Luther, ed. John C. Hawley (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1994), 15–30, p. 15. 15. Edmund Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma (Boston: Little, Brown & Co. 1958), p. 80. 16. Cited by Nathan Hatch, “The Christian Movement and the Demand for a Theology of the People,” The Journal of American History, 67:3 (Dec) 1980, 545–567, p.  566, where he explores the rise of a “new form of Biblical authority calling for the inalienable right of common people to interpret the New Testament for themselves,” p. 547. 17. As Mark Noll observes, biblical interpretation is inextricable from its cultural settings, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), pp. 72–73; cf. Hatch, “Sola Scriptura,” that it is difficult to assess “whether Americans were more adept at reading cultural values into the Bible or at reading biblical values into the culture,” arguing that both were “moving in the same direction … of volitional allegiance, self-reliance, and private judgement,” p. 74. 18. Jan Stieverman, “Biblical Interpretation in Eighteenth Century America,” The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in America, ed. Paul Gutjahr (NY: Oxford University Press, 2007), discusses the contexts of Enlightenment, Revolution, Evangelicism. David Donald Hall, The Faithful Shepherd (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), notes that “even though many read the bible for themselves, their understanding of its contents was mediated through general cultural presuppositions,” p. 228. 19. J.G.A.  Pocock, Politics, Language and Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 15. 20. Perry Miller, Orthodoxy in Massachusetts 1630–1650 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1933), pp. 160, 182. 21. David Donald Hall, “Readers and Writers in Early New England,” A History of the Book in America, Vol. 1, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, eds. David D. Hall, Hugh Amory (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 117–151, p.  220. David Donald Hall, Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book (Amherst: University of

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Massachusetts Press, 1996), emphasizes that the “Protestant vernacular tradition insisted on … making the Bible available and calling for the participation of everyone in the practices of reading and speaking,” p. 5. 22. Patricia Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven (NY: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 154. Jon Butler, Awash, traces ongoing authoritarian forces in tension with dispersive ones, where revivalism could be conservative, p. 179. 23. Mark Noll, Civil War as Theological Crisis, pp. 27, 25. 24. Joan Shelley Rubin makes the larger claim of “poetry’s cultural pervasiveness in the late 19th and early 20th century” in many venues, including classrooms, choirs, religious services, family gatherings, including “re-­ reading and reading aloud,” p. 518, cf. note 3. Michael T. Gilmore writes that “poetry functioned more as a ‘public’ and ‘social’ than a private or individual form”, often “composed for ceremonial occasions designed to foster unity among partisans,” with the purpose “to construct both a national poetry and a poetry that aimed to legitimate the nation,” “Poetry” (Cambridge History of American Literature), ed. Sacvan Bercovitch, vol. 1 (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 591–619. Cf. Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution (NY: Columbia University Press, 1987), discusses poetry’s place in the unfolding print arena, p. 47. Beth Barton Schweiger, “Reading the Bible in a Romantic Era,” The Bible in American Life, eds. Philip Goff, Arthur E. Farnsley II, Peter J.  Thuesen (NY: Oxford University Press, 2016), notes how “a growing taste for poetry changed how readers understood the Bible” and that “poetry like the Bible was on the lips of all, copied, printed, almanacs. aspiring poets were everywhere,” p. 71. 25. Shira Wolosky, “Relational Aesthetics and Feminist Poetics,” New Literary History 41.3, 2011, 571–592. 26. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (NY: Verso, revised 2006), pp. 44–46. 27. Homi Bhabha, “Dissemination,” Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (NY: Routledge, 1990), 291–322, p. 297. 28. Sarah Corse, Nationalism and Literature: The Politics of Culture in Canada and the United States (NY: Cambridge UP, 1997), “One of the central roles of a national literature is to assist in the ‘construction’ and ‘invention’ of the nation.” p. 21. Corse does not discuss the Bible.

CHAPTER 2

Puritan Hebraism: Anne Bradstreet, John Cotton, Edward Taylor

To the Puritans, the Bible told the story of American history. It unveiled their own past, present, and future, for individual and community, singly and together, in concrete history and spiritual eternity. It structured their inner life but also their communal organization and understandings of it. This presence of the Bible in their own lives, history, and community took shape through the exegetical practices of biblical interpretation that had developed over Christian centuries and had then been reconfigured by Protestant Reformers and the Puritans themselves. The Bible became an American text and America became a text of biblical exegesis.1 Biblical interpretation through the ages had extended the Bible’s meanings from an account of past events to the design of all time, past, present, and future. This was accomplished through quite rigorous if also variable modes of biblical exegesis, which the Puritans altered and redistributed. The first stratum of biblical extension had been established already in the New Testament as a continuation of the Old. Events in the Old Testament retained their importance as historical record. Their true meanings, however, inhered in their status as prophecy, a prefiguration of New Testament events which were seen to fulfill them in the revelation of Jesus Christ. The New Testament, too, offered an historical account, constituting a “literal” level of exegetical interpretation. But the historical pointed to a higher “figural” level of allegorical meaning, glimpsed through history but

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Wolosky, The Bible in American Poetic Culture, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40106-0_2

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unveiling an eternal vision and pattern made evident in the crucial design of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. This Christic pattern stood at the center of history itself, reframing what had happened in the Old Testament, as literally historical but figural in its true meaning. The Christic figural pattern further served as model for each individual life, in a third “tropological” or “moral” level of meaning, interior to each Christian in conformation to Christ’s sacrifice, suffering, and thence grace of salvation. Lastly, on an eschatological level, the New Testament unveiled the entire course of history from creation to the final End when time itself is abolished. This fourfold structure (quadriga) governed biblical exegesis as a typology, although conducted in different ways at different times. Catholic tradition and then Protestant Reformers gave varying weight to each level—historical, figural, tropological, and eschatological—and differed in how they were seen to inter-relate to each other. Catholics, following Augustine, made the inner spiritual life the center of Christian experience through the Church. As spiritual, his City of God was separate from outward history which was regarded as the fallen City of Man. Reformers, committed to opening access to the Bible to be read by all and suspicious of Catholic biblical interpretation, set about re-translating and re-assessing biblical texts. At issue was a new embrace of history itself in several directions: backward, to a new importance of the Old Testament as historical account; also present and forward, to their own Puritan venture as a continuation of Old Testament history. They themselves were the new Israel, as John Winthrop famously declared before ever arriving on American shores: “We shall find that the God of Israel is among us.”2 On the eschatological level, Puritans looked forward to the End of time, but also saw themselves as approaching such final fulfillments of biblical promises, themselves experiencing an eschatological phase  The Puritan newly historicist leanings redefined their sense of community as embodying salvational experience in time. History is no longer only a fallen City of Man. Granting new importance and value to the “literal” historical level redirected the whole significance of history and social order, as well as their spiritual and eschatological meanings.3 Christian life was not only interior and spiritual, but also exterior in community and history. As H. Richard Niebuhr writes in The Kingdom of God in America, “They insisted on the visibility of Christ’s rule in the social as well as in the personal sphere.”4 Sacvan Bercovitch elaborates: Puritanism had “blurred traditional distinctions between the world and the kingdom of God.”5

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The Puritan venture in America was violent against the Native Americans who helped them survive and whom they then dispossessed; and was in many ways intolerant to others, who were banished from its confines. Recent accounts have critiqued Puritan culture as a “monological and self-­ provincializing historical fiction of an everlastingly white, mostly male, narrowly nationalist, and broadly Protestant America.”6 Theodore Dwight Bozeman regards Puritan biblicism as coercive precisely in its Old Testament “legalist and covenantal element, which laid distinctively heavy emphasis upon obedience to scriptural law.” Their views of “kingship, law and obedience” are “themes drawn essentially from Old Testament sources … through a strict regimen of duty and obedience,” leading to a repressive “readiness to subsume the self in the social whole.”7 Others describe the Puritan as “Bible commonwealth led by the seventeenth-­ century equivalent of the ancient Hebrew judges” in a strategy of “cultural domination.”8 These readings accord with a wave of challenges to what is seen as an earlier Americanist “narrative of historical progress.” In this reading, “the intentions of the liberal subject” are “discredited,” exposing, writes Donald Pease, “the legal, ethical, and literary contradiction intrinsic to a civilizing mission that concealed its own systematic brutality in order to remain effective.”9 Important new attention has been given to those who have been excluded from the American narrative due to race and gender, as well as to the actions that instituted such exclusion. Yet there is an implicit methodological assumption that social order is essentially a mode of coercion, with writers complicit in ideological enforcement even when they seem to critique it. Donald Pease continues: A liberal subject who aspires to take up a stance against racist modes of behavior cannot identify with that position as a liberal subject without simultaneously participating in and profiting from the white power and privilege the discourse of liberalism has allotted to the unmarked subject position of the liberal individual.10

Liberal social order here emerges as a structure that is not only self-­ betraying, but that allows little possibility for its participants to explore such critical viewpoints as this very passage displays. Language itself becomes a trap. Writers are “bereft of a language positively capable of saying that which the dominant mode of thinking renders unsayable.”11 But this makes creativity impossible. As Winfried Fluck comments, the

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resulting view is of “a systemic power … not exerted by agents or institutions of state but by the system’s cunning ways of constituting ‘subjects’ or ascribing ‘identities’ through cultural forms.” The “basic premise” is “the assumption of an all-pervasive, underlying systemic element that constitutes the system’s power in an invisible but highly effective way.” A danger is then “resisting on principle the sophistication of the text itself,” of reduction of the literary work to one set of terms rather than responding to art as an encounter of many.12 The agency and creativity of the writer itself becomes either unaccountable or framed in terms that override those the writer him/herself has pursued. This is not to deny that writers both have and are framed by ideological commitments, although ideology here becomes a circle from which there is no escape: critics’ ideological positioning inevitably frames their interpretations of the writers’ ideological positioning, while assuming the privilege of its own standpoint. It remains possible, nevertheless, to examine the terms that writers themselves proposed and articulated, as a way to open critical and also self-critical discussion. This study approaches the Bible as itself a potent scene in which ideological positions have been derived, produced, and contested through the history and literature of American culture. This very variation speaks for the possibility of creative response and invention by writers to as well as within their cultural experience. The Bible emerges as both a case and a model for cultural discourses in their multiplicity, as participants address and respond to each other in interchange. At issue is interpretation: its conduct but above all recognizing it as the core event in which democratic culture is engaged. Self-consciousness of interpretation shifts discussion from fixed truth-claims to the positions and forms of argument itself. Argument generates interchange as an ongoing form, defining the democratic subject as participating in such interactions rather than silencing them through absolute claims. How to expand and provide the conditions for such interchange is itself a democratic project. In American social orders, forces have worked against as well as for such conditions. What I explore here is the Bible’s, and poetry’s, roles in this cultural project. In the case of Puritan society, many historians have noted social forces working not only for discipline but also for empowerment of its members. Stephen Foster speaks of a “contradiction” in Puritan polity, on the one hand asserting “unity, authority, and suppression of the individual for the good of the whole,” but also lacking “central disciplinary authority, with few ranks, elected officials, and voluntarism.” Puritan polity was

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characterized by “exclusion and intolerance,” but also “broad participation,” with “none denied voice, frequent elections, instructions to delegates.” The Puritans were thus not “atomized individuals” but rather “common in a sacramental sense.”13 Michael Zuckerman similarly traces the communality of the New England towns through a “passage from coercive to accommodative consensus” and “central authority to local community,” verging toward an “almost democratic cast of mind and code of conduct” which cannot be explained “merely by circumstance.”14 The Bay Colony took the Bible as model for this congregational organization of its church and also of its state as at once communal and individualized. In what they called their “biblical” congregations, writes Michael Winship, “individual churches would be internally governed by the elders with the consent of their congregations, who also had to consent to the elders’ appointments.” Winship contrasts the “emphasis on consent and participation” in a “participatory government, with the absolute rule and tyranny of the Church of England’s bishops.” He warns against “earlier Whig readings of Puritanism as seeds of modern democracy.” Yet he shows how Hebrew republicanism relied on “consent of their congregations” and lay “participation.”15 As one sermon puts it, the government “originally established in the Hebrew nation by a charter from Heaven was that of a free republic.” Covenant was the model. It was the core Hebraic structure wherein “the Israelites accepted the law framed by God by their own voluntary and express consent,” with “assent to this covenant repeated thereafter, always by their own free determination.” The result was an interplay of emerging republican principles with biblical culture.16 In church polity, members, rather than being absorbed into a corporate church, constituted the church as only coming into existence through their covenanting act. The minister in turn was called by the congregation, who joined with him in the exercise of church discipline and reprimand, admission and dismission, excommunication and readmission. The congregation could also be called to dismiss the minister. The result is a specific structure of community constitution and the individual within it. Here is a configuration bridging the social contract theory of Lockean individualism, for which it was one resource, and the traditional communal social order.17 The Puritan self is foundationally structured through its participation in community, even as Puritan community is foundationally constructed through the selves who participate in and compose it, in a

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structure that is neither individualist nor collective but can be called ‘congressive.’ In this structure, covenant bridges individual and community, inwardness and society, eternity and time.18 The Puritans, Ruth Bloch writes, “never quite managed to reconcile the restrictive and expansive tendencies of their thought.”19 Sacvan Bercovitch describes America as “always a diffuse regional multiethnic emigrant culture tending toward fragmentation,” combining “national progress” with “ideals of self-interest … and personal fulfilment.”20 Its “corporate identity [was] built on fragmentation and dissent,” in which consensus was itself a myth. Yet it was a powerful one. Functioning “partly to mystify or mask social realities,” community consensus also created them, providing an impetus toward shaping a social world according to core commitments.21 “Ideology” itself, Bercovitch writes, “is not merely repressive.” It is still a mode of “voluntary consent” in which the “terms of cultural restriction may become a source of creative release,” taking place not as “an overarching synthesis” but “a rhetorical battleground.”22 The Bible is such a battleground, in which “cultural restriction” is also a “source of creative release.”

Covenantal Community Puritan America evolved as an experiment in Protestantism removed from the established structures of European Christian institutions. More or less radical modes of both church and state polities reorganized and redefined the relationship between individual and community, autonomy and authority. The individual was not granted autonomy as prior to or independent from communal norms. Yet the corporatist priority of church as defining and placing individuals within it was opened to individual activism. Such shifts in communal and church organization were no less important than theological innovations with which they correlated. As Robert Nisbet writes: “That important differences of purely doctrinal character between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism existed is not to be doubted. But … much more profound and far-reaching [are] the differences … in their ways of regarding the nature of religious community and the believer’s relation to community.”23 Parish, where membership is determined within the geographic domain of an established church, becomes congregational, where the church is itself established— “gathered” or “covenanted”—by called individuals. Church government similarly shifts from appointments made from above through a church

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hierarchy, to authority increasingly distributed among lay members and ministers, who were elected and could be dismissed. Unlike priests, ministers had no special powers to perform sacraments such as Mass and confession, as much an organizational as a theological transformation. The most radical revolution, however, in many ways the basis for all others, was access to the Bible itself. The core and shaping Protestant commitment was that each Christian encounters the Bible directly for him and even herself and not through layers of Catholic teachings now denounced. What made this possible were new vernacular translations of the Vulgate Latin text, along with the technological revolution of printing as the means for their distribution. Unlike Catholic liturgies, central to Puritan services were biblical readings and sermons (John Cotton gave three to four lectures a week to packed audiences). Biblical discussion among the congregants continued in private homes—the practices of the “conventicle” meetings that had been proscribed by the Anglican Church in England.24 This return to biblical text itself impelled a return to biblical languages, both Greek and Hebrew. Puritans strongly embraced Christian Hebraism. This pointed in a number of directions. It led back not only to the Hebrew text but also to Hebrew traditions of its interpretation: to commentaries, Talmudic discourses, midrashim. Harvard instituted Hebrew learning, with its College Laws of 1655 requiring the study of Hebrew along with Greek four times a week for the first year.25 Henry Dunster, the college’s first President (1640–1654), introduced a practice of oral translation “out of Hebrew into Greek” at morning prayer. Above all was new identification with Hebrew Scripture itself.26 Hebraism shaped the very construction and constitution of the Puritan churches as Congregational. They modeled their church community on their understanding of the kehila, the Hebraic community as they interpreted it within Hebrew Scriptures. Public “Election” sermons in particular included discussion of the government of the ancient Hebrews, where “the New England ideas of government were intimately connected with the interpretation of the Bible.” The most common source of political theory “were the Bible and its commentaries.”27 As Benjamin Franklin’s grandfather, Peter Folger, summed up: “New England they are like the Jews / as like as like can be.”28 The Hebraism of Puritan polity involved new senses of history: its status, meaning, and eschatological purpose. Augustinian teaching had directed biblical and Christian experience inward.29 It was in each Christian

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life that salvation was located within the body of the Church and in each death that Last Things were met. The Puritans retained this inwardness with great intensity. But they also extended Christian experience outward, into history where the Catholic Church had been wary to locate it, seeing the Church itself as the worldly site of spiritual things. But history entails community: it is in terms of the group that actions register in historical record.30 And history was both immediate and ultimate. Eschatology itself came to be applied not only to final End Times but within an historical register: in fact, to the Puritans themselves. In one sense this instituted a further literal-historical level, their own history. In another, Puritans identified their own history with the dawning of fulfilled prophecy in eschatological senses.31 They thus renewed biblical pattern in their own historical venture; also seeing that very venture as ultimate, a drawing nigh of ultimate things. The New World had been providentially revealed at just this time for Protestant realization. The two cities of God and man that Augustine had put asunder, the Puritans in America wished to rejoin. Eschatology was historicized, while history became eschatological. What emerged is a Puritan culture that can be called both-worldly: neither primarily other-worldly, as medieval culture was, nor this-worldly, as in today’s secularism. As Sacvan Bercovitch writes, the Puritan reality is both spiritual and material, sacred and temporal, private and public, pointing at once inward to salvation and outward to social vocation, then forward as eschatological redemption.32 Puritans continued their devotion to the inward life, intensively. Yet they placed new weight on exterior historical and communal events. They looked for reward, and feared punishment, in the next world, but also firmly located their religious life in this one. They rejected monastic withdrawal as if that was the true “religious” life. Inwardness and outwardness took on new relationship, both-worldly as coordinate between this world and the next, materiality and spirituality, church and civic life. Calvin saw individuals as living under a “twofold government” with both “spiritual and political duties of citizenship.” Each would address a “different aspect of life,” that of the soul and also the “present life,” the “inner mind and outer behavior,” the “two tables of law as two dimensions of one law.”33 Writes Sheldon Wolin: Puritan culture did not pose “internal against external. Civil government was also concerned with civic consciousness or virtue.”34 Perry Miller likewise writes that Puritans set out “to elect Christ’s kingdom in the whole society … correlating with the inward and invisible kingdom.”35 Hebraic covenant provided the basis, showing that “the Jewish government which was

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peculiarly God’s own rested on compact.”36 Derived in Hebrew Scriptures, covenant extends to further historical and spiritual dimensions, providing the pattern that links individual entry into church fellowship, the constitution of church congregations, and the relationship of church to society and history. Entry into this double estate was through Calling. Each person is called to outward life through worldly vocation of work; to inward life through spiritual conversion. Calling brought the two together. Work was itself a mode of religious vocation.37 There is the spiritual call to Christ in conversion from sin to grace. But Calling is also to vocation in the concrete, material world. John Cotton had written that Calling is not only inward, but also “live[d] by faith in our outward and temporal life … which we live in the flesh.” Such “warrantable calling and employment” is undertaken in common life, not as a religious withdrawal from it. Yet, although in the concrete world, Calling is not merely material. It, too, registers the sense of divine grace.38 And it is social: “aim not at our own but at the public good,” Cotton writes. “It will not think it hath a comfortable Calling unless it will not only serve his own turn but the turn of other men … we live by faith in our vocations.”39 Calling places the self in the life of the community. This likewise was both spiritual and worldly, historical and civic. The core structure across these worlds, binding individual to society and both to God, was covenant itself. Covenant confirmed the Hebraic dimension revitalized by the Puritans on the plane of the concrete, the historical, the communal.40 It established an important stratum of the both-worldliness in which those called were “combined together by holy Covenant with God in this world and the next.” Divine encounter became an “historical theory of covenant of grace as a progressive unfolding,” what Sacvan Bercovitch calls a “developmental typology,” applying Hebrew figures not only to the New Testament and Christian spiritual life but throughout history, until the Second Coming.41 As the “Old Testament abounds with cases where inward covenant is publicly acknowledged by the whole community,” so the “Design” was “erecting of Christ’s kingdom in whole societies,” in correspondence “with inward and invisible kingdom.”42 Covenant bound individual to God, but also individuals to each other under God and God to them, thus constituting them a community. The basis in covenant is made plain in Winthrop’s “Model of Christian Charity” sermon delivered on the Arabella as it sailed to the New World. He takes his text from Deuteronomy: “Thus stands the cause between God and us.

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We are entered into covenant with Him for this work.”43 The people are given divine “leave to draw our own articles,” while God has, with their observance, “ratified this covenant and sealed our Commission.”44 Famously seeing themselves as Israelites fleeing the Egypt of England to cross the Atlantic/Red Sea and found the Promised Land and Kingdom in America; just so they saw themselves as the congregation of Israel in covenant with God and each other. Covenant intricately inter-located individual into community and community as constituted of individuals. Richard Mather explicates Puritanism in this image of Israel’s covenant: not onely to be meant of the private or personall conversion of this or that particular Christian, but also further, of the open and joynt calling of a company, because it is said, they shall come, the children of Israel … and … their saying shall not be, Let me joyne, &c. but in the Plurall number, Let us joyne our selves unto the Lord, so noting joyning of a company together in holy Covenant with God.45

Covenant linked inward to outward, immediate to ultimate. As Bercovitch writes, the Puritans “applied the Hebrews’ collective enterprise to an atemporal private realm,” thus “joining personal salvation with the history of redemption.”46 Covenant—what Perry Miller calls the “the scaffolding and framework for the whole edifice of theology”47—governed each person’s relation to God, but also to each other within a specific constitution of community. Covenant thus structured self and community, in both-worldliness of spirit and earthly time. “There is a “Double Covenant in Scripture,” Thomas Hooker declares, “one of internal salvation and one of outward obedience … joined together with all alike dedicated to godliness.”48 Yet, although covenant was instituted under God, it also assumed a principle of consent, such that a “group of men enter voluntarily into a pact with God.”49 “Mutual consenting,” as Hooker puts it, is the “cement which solders together all societies, political or ecclesiastical.” Free volition is intrinsic to covenant. He who enters “must also willingly bind and engage himself to each member of that society to promote the good of the whole, or member he is not.”50 This is a model of society neither fully collectivist nor fully individualist, but an intermediate category in which self and society constitute each other, with God, in religious terms, a binding principle. Individualism remains a defining impulse of American culture in religious, civic, and economic spheres. In the religious context, however,

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and also in the civic republican, the individual was not considered autonomous but rather embedded in community.51 What is attempted is an interplay between individual and community. Society is not a corporate collective, but “congregational” as a “congressive” association of individuals who retain both independence and interdependence. The church as covenanted among individuals is a mode of commitment at once to the individual and to the communal, in ways that shaped Puritan churches as well as civic life.52 This “congressive’ social structure neither grants to individuals full autonomy, nor absorbs them into a collective church or state. Individuals band together, defining themselves as such a congress, with neither prior as determining the other. Such a congress was seen to be biblically ordered. It was covenant that joined inner experience with outer, self, and community to each other, through past, present, and future; Old Testament Covenant to New, individuals to God and each other in the covenanted church. Covenant reached through all social life “from the individual to the church to society as a whole.”53 Conversion, communion, gathering of a new church, calling of the minister, fasts, thanksgivings as well as civic rituals such as elections, militia promotions, and ceremonies were dedicated to “covenant renewal.”54 The very pattern of call, conversion, redemption governing personal and communal life was centered in covenant as “the work of preparation to be God’s people.”55

Anne Bradstreet’s Biblical Commentary Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672) was, as a woman, neither minister nor magistrate, the two leading offices of Puritan society as organized into church and state. But her association was with magistrates, both her father and husband serving as governors and other public offices of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Born in Northampton, England, she educated herself in the library of the Earl of Lincoln’s estate, where her father was steward. She migrated with her family to Massachusetts in 1630, aboard the Arbella alongside John Winthrop. Her poetry was published in 1650 as The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America by a Gentlewoman in Those Parts, purportedly on the initiative of her brother-in-law, John Woodbridge, and without her knowledge. A posthumous publication in 1678, Several Poems Compiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning, contained her own revisions and additions of poems.

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Debates over Bradstreet’s work reflect divisions in interpreting American Puritanism itself. She is most daring as a woman’s voice, and critical discussion has largely focused on how her gender both locates and dislocates her in Puritan culture and discourses. Opposing arguments present her either as rebellious against Puritan social norms or as submissive to them. On the one hand, she is seen to have “completely accepted the teaching” of her Puritan ministers, with especially her domestic poems regimented into a “purely Christian system” that “merely reproduces the existing ideology of the gender system without questioning the order of things.”56 On the other, she is said to respond with “dismay or rebellion and the assertion of the self against the dogma she encountered,” in tension against her “need for conviction.”57 Weighing these strains between Bradstreet’s faith, poetry, and gender make up much of the history of Bradstreet criticism. Yet there is also resistance to such binary oppositions. In her representations of the female body, Bradstreet can be seen as neither “rebel or conformist,” but rather revealing “contradictions within the ideological systems themselves.”58 The Bible is one core arena in which Bradstreet enacts the tension and also invention in Puritan culture, at once inscribing her within its contexts but affording her means for exploring her own positions. The Bible is an arena for her for both individuality and inclusion in community. Scripture is rarely an overarching framework of her work. But it is persistently echoed within it, at once tying her to her contemporary discourses and also making her own voice audible. With regard to gender, on the terrain of the Bible Bradstreet was, with other Puritan women, on close to equal footing with Puritan men. All were called to read the Bible and follow its ways, and all received schooling to make this possible. Although not in positions of church government nor permitted to speak in public, women nevertheless enjoyed certain rights. They were church members with individually covenanted status. They attended biblical discussions and lectures in the church and also in private group “conventicles,” where they could discuss Scripture and sermons.59 Knowledgeable in the Bible and actively engaged with scriptural study, they were enjoined to teach their children and even to teach each other. That this biblical liberty had firm constraints is dramatically witnessed in the fate of Anne Hutchinson, over whose trial Bradstreet’s father Thomas Dudley in part presided as Deputy Governor. The Antinomian controversy directly tested the authority of the Bible, including the

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minister’s attempts to control its interpretation. Hutchinson’s brilliant performance kept the judges at bay, voicing ambiguities in Puritan doctrine whose own investment in an interiority stood in uneasy balance with communal constraints. Biblical energies staged a tension in Protestant protest itself, as always potentially schismatic and proliferating. Accused of teaching beyond the authority of women, Hutchinson insists the private religious meetings in her house were “lawful for me to do, as it is all your practices, and can you find a warrant for yourself and condemn me for the same thing?” The Bible was her warrant. She cites “a clear rule in Titus that the elder women should instruct the younger,” insisting that her private teaching is permitted “if you have a rule for it from God’s word.” Whatever “I spake,” she pursues, “I proved it by God’s word.” Indeed, it was precisely when she seemed to detach from biblical ground that the hard-pressed court finally found a fissure in her theological mastery. Her claim to authority through “immediate revelation” through “the voice of his own spirit to my soul” (although citing Scripture to do so) was seized upon, declaring “the revelation she brings forth is delusion.”60 Hutchinson stretched the bond between inner spirit and outward community to the breaking point, with biblical text the fraying thread between them. The specific debate over an inward “Covenant of Grace” as against an outward “Covenant of Works” only underscores the biblical controversy. As Governor Winthrop dared her: “you said the gospel in the letter and words holds forth nothing but a covenant of works.”61 How to balance the letter of conduct against or with inner spirit was fundamental to the Puritan’s reinterpretation of religious life as both-worldly: in the world rather than withdrawn from it, while at the same time never reducing to mere materialism. Hutchinson’s deviation from Puritan preaching was in fact hard to detect, since they too gave priority to grace over works.62 Yet the appeal to “immediate revelation” could be “taken to mean without the medium of the Scriptures” and thus “the end of the Bible as the foundational source of religious truth.” This would be to compromise “the authority of the Bible’s official interpreters, the ministers, as well as the end of all external moral restraints.”63 In this Hutchinson threatened not only theological heresy, but what Winthrop called the “incorporation into the commonwealth [that] ties every member thereof to seek out … the welfare of the body.”64 Within the Puritan project and its strains, what are identified as Bradstreet’s divided voices—faithful and skeptical, this worldly and otherworldly, public and private—are neither starkly opposed nor fully

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reconciled. Her desire is to answer to both. This takes place not least through the biblical language, imagery, and reference to which Bradstreet responds and through which she charts ongoing reflection. Bradstreet’s was the Geneva Bible, which included notes and comments on Hebrew that the later King James eliminated, removing “the openness to engagement, the in and out movement between literal sense and meaning, the many kinds of explanation” that were “an essential element of understanding Hebrew.”65 Bradstreet’s own writing, both her historical, political, and philosophical verse—her long epical presentations of “The Four Elements,” “The Four Humours,” “The Four Ages of Man,” “The Four Seasons, the Four Monarchies”—and the personal poems that today are much preferred are both public and private, communal and personal, with the Bible one link between them. The strong preference for Bradstreet’s “private verse” today sees it as a mode of “self-expression and self-investigation,” in which the “inner man is distinguished from social man” as “the private voice.” When she “writes of her personal or family concerns and emphasizes private lessons,” she is “original.”66 But this division ironically maintains gendered assignments into public and domestic spheres, relegating women to the latter.67 Bradstreet’s personal verse is no less a part of her culture than is her public writing. Nor does her public voice differ from her private one as “distinguished by scriptural quotation and dogmatic overtones.”68 Her private meditations are seeded with Scripture. They draw from Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Genesis, Exodus, and various prophets.69 The Bible is a language that she speaks and a framework she inhabits.70 Bradstreet’s verse reflecting on her personal experience is likewise biblical, with religious positions phrased in biblical terms. Yet warnings against reading Bradstreet’s biblical figures as fully typological and Christological are well taken.71 Bradstreet’s poems to her husband have been seen as a fully consolidated typology, “reconciling apparent conflict” among the “dualisms” between “flesh and spirit, earth and heaven” through “identification of husband and Christ.”72 This overstates Bradstreet’s consolidations as a teleology of figures that resolve into unity. What Bradstreet’s figures offer is a variety of strands that propels an array of relationships and responses to them. She variously responds to and deploys the Bible, at times suggesting typology but not necessarily with resolutions into Christic or eschatological unity. Indeed, rather than typological, her work can be seen as interpretations of the Bible and commentary on it, where the Bible is not merely private to her but links her

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indissolubly with her public world. It gives her the scope to represent to herself and others her experiences and understandings. Bradstreet’s poem-letter “To her Dear and Loving Husband” presents such a commentary on the Bible. Rich biblical figurations are rewoven into her own idiom as wife to beloved husband, without, however, full typological conversions into Christ or transcendence out of time. If ever two were one, then surely we. If ever man were loved by wife, then thee. If ever wife was happy in a man, Compare with me, ye women, if you can. I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold, Or all the riches that the East doth hold. My love is such that rivers cannot quench, Nor ought but love from thee give recompense. Thy love is such I can no way repay; The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray. Then, in love let’s so persever, That when we live no more, we may live ever. (AB 225)

The opening verse refers to Genesis 2, interestingly as pre-fallen, where the two humans are pledged to “be one flesh.” But the greater scene of the poem is situated through the Song of Songs. Bradstreet’s “Compare with me, ye women” recalls Song 1: 9: “I have compared thee” and the Songs repeated addresses to “ye daughters of Jerusalem” (1:5, 2:7, 3:5, 11, 8:4). The poem thus itself becomes an address, not least to the Bible and its readers. “Gold” adorns Songs 1:9-10, 5:11-15, although to “love more than whole mines of gold” recalls more precisely Psalm 19:10: “More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold” (Psalm 19 also presides over “Contemplations” in its figure of the sun as bridegroom). “My love is such that rivers cannot quench” recalls “Many waters cannot quench love” (Song 8:7). This is language at once immediate to Bradstreet and biblical. In the woman’s speaking voice, it confirms her desire and right to speak, to love, and to claim, biblically endorsed by the Song of Songs’ Shulamite as speaker. The concluding couplet rests on the rhyme of “persever/ever.” Perseverance is a Puritan doctrinal pillar, outlined in the Westminster Confession of Faith (chapter 17:2). It brings Bradstreet’s poem into the orbit of covenant, since perseverance is said to rest on “the covenant of grace” by which the soul once receiving cannot “finally fall away from the

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state of grace; but shall certainly persevere therein to the end and be eternally saved.” The biblical reference for perseverance is God’s “everlasting covenant” with David (2 Samuel 23:5; Isa. 55:3). As Jonathan Edwards writes in his “On the Perseverance of the Saints”: “and I will make an everlasting covenant with them, that I will not turn away from them, to do them good” (Jeremiah 32:39, 40).73 The connection to covenant is in any case integral to the poem’s marriage imagery. Covenant was made with an individual, but also extended to the “whole family, a whole church, a whole state,” promising blessing both in the world and in the soul’s salvation. Marriage is a core figure linking all these realms. No longer a sacrament as in Catholicism, nor yet is marriage mere contract between autonomous individuals. Puritan marriage is instead covenantal, between woman and man and God: “It is a marriage-covenant that we make with God.” Of the many figures for relationship to God, marriage was embraced as “the closest comparison.”74 Critical feminist readings of Bradstreet’s marriage poems find in them traditional hierarchies of husband and wife.75 The poem “To My Dear and Loving Husband,” however, displays little hierarchy. It speaks first of the poet’s own desire and experience of love. Then, she moves to a “we” who “live” together in their marital union. The focus is in the world and body, with the final reference to eternity reflecting her earthly condition rather than eclipsing it. If in its doctrinal understanding the Song of Songs is an allegory of the love of soul to Christ, that is not what is pursued here.76 Intensely intimate, the poem is not yet private, but rather inscribed within and as an image of social relationship.77 Within the terms of Bradstreet’s art, the Bible exercises her poetic invention as at once individual and communal, both as sharing of biblical language and in the world it weaves. In this, she is more textual than doctrinal. “As Loving Hind” (AB 229–230), “Another” of the poem-letters to her husband, plunges again into the Song of Songs, with a passionate wit.78 The poem is populated with figures from the Song, amplified through puns and repetitions, like a tapestry woven with biblical imagery: As loving hind that (hartless) wants her deer, Scuds through the woods and fern with hark’ning ear, Perplext, in every bush and nook doth pry, Her dearest deer, might answer ear or eye; So doth my anxious soul, which now doth miss A dearer dear (far dearer heart) than this.

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Still wait with doubts, and hopes, and failing eye, His voice to hear or person to descry. (AB 229).

The Song’s “hinds of the field” (Song 2: 7: :5, cf. Proverbs 5:19) become “the loving hind.” “My beloved is like a roe or a young hart” (Song 2:9) is here punned as “hartless,” missing her male hart/heart. “Roe” becomes “dearest deer” and “dearer dear,” the two then combining into “dearer heart.” The Song’s “doves” (Song 2:14, 4:1, 5:2, 5:12) emerge “as the pensive dove” who “doth all alone … bemoan.” Together at one tree, oh let us browse, And like two turtles roost within one house

weaves into the verse Song 2: 12: “cooing of turtledoves is heard in our land” and Song 7:8: “I will go up to the palm tree, I will take hold of the boughs thereof.” Bradstreet remakes the Song of Songs as a deeply personal account of her love for her husband. It leans away from the allegory of love between the soul and God, toward love between woman and man, although keeping the wider resonances of both religious and communal commitment. In Bradstreet’s interpretive rendering, the poem additionally directs the Song of Songs not only to an expression of love but also of anxiety. Bradstreet’s memoir “To My Dear Children” (AB 240) has been seen as a testament to counter-Puritan tendencies, citing her confession that in moving to America her heart “rose” to admissions of a youthful “carnal” heart and “vanity.” Other perplexities concern dips in religious “joy,” “the verity of Scriptures,” “atheism” and even questions as to whether the “Popish” version of Christianity might not be a correct one. Such confessions of waywardness in diaries, however, was integral to Puritan practices of self-examination. And Bradstreet, recording her doubts, also answers them, perhaps as a model for her children’s own inevitable encounter with religious questions.79 What is striking in the poem “As loving hind” is how it inhabits the biblical scene and language as an expression of such searching and perplexity. It represents hers as an “anxious soul,” “perplext” by “doubts and hopes,” with “sad groan,” and “thousand doleful sighs.” The missed beloved occurs in the Song of Songs itself, of course, but only as a brief incident in Song 5: 5-8. Here it makes up the full poetic text, an interpretive commentary of Bradstreet’s that underscores and elaborates scenes

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she chooses and emphasizes. The tale is, in her rendering, not only one of union but of separation. The poet loves but also yearns with unease, searching for the elusive beloved “with doubts, and hopes and failing eye.” The fact that such marital separations were due to her husband’s being “Absent Upon Public Employment” (AB 226) connects the individual experience of separation to community service, not as opposition between public and private but as the inscription of private and public in each other. “Upon the Burning of Her House” written in 1666 is among Bradstreet’s last poems, as the personal marriage poems written in 1641–1642 are among the earlier verses (indeed the same years in which she was writing the “public” poems often said to be her “early” work). Here the weight of the poem shifts in the face of profound loss. This does not, however, make the poem merely doctrinal or fixed emblem.80 As Anne Stanford argues, the poem fully registers Bradstreet’s suffering and indeed attachment to the house she has lost, although not as a contest against “dogma.”81 The poem intensely dwells in Bradstreet’s earthly home, domestic but also very much as a site of social life. The poem’s opening 12 lines exclaim in shock and horror of “piteous shrieks of fire” and “fire.” Confronting this distress, Bradstreet marshals Job 1:21: “I blest His name that gave and took.” She does so, as she writes, for strength, in order “not to leave me succourless.” This is not to celebrate the loss of earthly things, which Job never does, nor to transcend it. The next 15 lines instead emphatically lament her loss in a detailed list, as if retaining her home in language. The anaphora of negations—“Nor, No, Nor” only reassert the experience of absence, specifically of social scene: Under thy roof no guest shall sit Nor at thy table eat a bit. No pleasant tale shall e’r be told Nor things recounted done of old. (AB 292)

The poem’s final 15 lines then turn away from the world, or try to. They are introduced with the biblical “all’s vanity,” a reference to Ecclesiastes—a recurrent Bradstreet biblical site, most fully in her poem “The Vanity of All Worldly Things.” “Upon the Burning of Her House” comments on and responds to Solomon, re-posing Ecclesiastes’ questions about life’s meaning within her own text. What gives life value? “Is’t honor … is’t in wealth … is’t in beauty?” Religion here does not silence questions, but is

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a framework for asking them. The governing biblical image in the poem’s conclusion is from Paul: “Thou hast a house on high erect / Framed by that mighty Architect” (2 Cor 5:1). Yet this appeal to a higher world does not cancel the loss of her earthly home. The poem’s final couplet reiterates both impulses: “The world no longer let me love” implies that she still does, even knowing “My hope and treasure lies above.” Rather than closure into a heavenly image or an apocalyptic ending of world and time, the poem may be seen as her biblical commentary on suffering such as Job’s.82 Job’s plight is a mystery which the Bible does not explain. Yet its biblical narrative offers an anchor for response to earthly tragedy, which Bradstreet can reflect on, but not resolve, through Ecclesiastes. The language of her cultural world mediates her experience as a resource, affirmed not least through Bradstreet’s composed voice, natural diction, confident if artful rhymes and steady rhythms. Through these she enacts biblical idioms whose meanings are both shared and her own.

John Cotton’s Hebrew Republic John Cotton (1585–1652) was minister to Anne Bradstreet, as indeed also to Anne Hutchinson.83 He arrived in Boston in 1633 as a celebrated preacher and Hebraist, to become one of the colony’s leading figures, including in its most unsettling controversies: not only of Anne Hutchinson but of Roger Williams as well. The two disputes strangely mirror each other, reflecting the complexity if not casuistry of Cotton’s attempts to balance the interior spirit and external society that together made up the Puritan venture. Hutchinson claimed to be following Cotton’s own theology in her granting priority to inner voice over social order, grace over works, spirit over letter. Yet this is precisely what Roger Williams accused Cotton of failing to uphold, accusing him of betraying spirit to social order.84 Both controversies turn on the status of the Bible. Thomas Dudley, Bradstreet’s father, challenged Cotton as to whether Hutchinson’s “revelations” had biblical authorization: asking “whether you do approve of Mrs. Hutchinson’s revelations as she hath laid them down [to] be of God or no?” Cotton’s answers prove nigh indecipherable. Yes, “revelations” are possible, but they “should never [be] dispensed but in a word of God and according to a word of God.” Of Hutchinson he only will say (other than that he doesn’t really remember much about her doctrinal opinions) that it can be hard to tell whether or not hers were in fact “a revelation

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without the word,” in which case “that I do not assent to, but look at it as a delusion.” (Dudley’s response is: “Sir, you weary me and do not satisfy me.”)85 What Cotton intends, as he attempts to clarify in a letter to Thomas Shepard, is the complete necessity and reciprocity of both letter and spirit: “For the Spirit comes in the mouth of the word, and the word in the mouth of the spirit.” Each should confirm the other, although the priorities can be hard to untangle: The word, & Revelation of the spirit, I suppose doe as much differ, as, letter, & spirit. & therefore though I consent to you, that the spirit is not separated from the word, but in it, & ever according to it: yet above, & beyond the letter of the word it reacheth forth comfort & Power to the soule, though not above the sense, & Intendment of the Word.86

Cotton finally breaks with Hutchinson when he becomes convinced that her revelations were indeed independent of Scripture and ministerial authority. As Winthrop remarks, “a word comes to her mind and then an application is made.”87 Cotton himself attempts to join together word and spirit, so even individual “revelation” is “out of the word.” He warns in his treatise on the Covenant of Grace: “take heed therefore of all revelations in which the word of God is silent; for the spirit of God will speak Scripture to you.”88 Cotton’s dispute with Roger Williams likewise turns around difficult balances between letter and spirit. If Hutchinson saw Cotton as preaching inward spirituality, Williams accused him of literalist betrayal of Christ’s “spiritual” kingdom in seeing the state as also spiritual, rather than rigorously separating church from state. Disagreements over typology frame the dispute. Granted that the “national church under the Jews … did type out the Christian Church or churches in the Gospel” writes Williams, nonetheless “Master Cotton knows that [Christ’s] kingdome was not earthly and therefore his sword cannot be earthly.” “The material Sword of the Church of Israel” cannot fully “type out the spiritual sword of Christ Jesus.” Outward social order must not interfere with inner spirituality. For Cotton, however, Williams charges, “the acts both of Israel and of New England are simultaneously literal and spiritual.”89 Cotton in turn argues against Williams that a community which agrees to “submit … to the lawes of his [God’s] word” has “as much Truth and reality of holinesse, as Israel had. And therefore, what holy care of Religion lay upon the Kings of Israel in the Old Testament, the same lyeth now upon Christian

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[magistrates] … to protect … the Churches.” Cotton envisions convergence between the biblical Israel and the Massachusetts Bay Colony in a typology extending into actual historical time. “Canaan was Typical … Christs Kingdom is spiritual,” but in a Godly community such as New England’s there is a continuity between the two Testaments, linking the two together.90 As Cotton declares in his 1636 “Sermon delivered at Salem” responding to Williams, “the church covenant, wherewith the people of Israel and Judah did join themselves to the Lord, especially after their return from Babel; and yet more especially under the days of the New Testament, was a perpetual covenant.”91 He affirms in an essay on “How Far Moses Judicials Bind Massachusetts” that “if the Jewes be now still under the bond of them & so to observe them when they are an established commonwealth; then we are bound to observe them because there is no other revelation: that they shall be other Lawes.” Cotton concludes: “tis part of the happiness of Christian nations yet they are subject to the Lawes of the commonwealth of Israel.”92 Cotton’s sermon to the Arbella on its departure carrying Winthrop and Bradstreet to the New World, addresses them as New Israel, taking 2 Samuel 7:10 as its text: “I will appoint a place for my people Israel, and I will plant them, that they may dwell in a place of their own.” In this coming “land of promise they have provision for soule as well as body,” both spiritually and civically.93 In one of the few poems by Cotton that has been preserved, biblical experience is the model of history. Contributed as preface to Samuel Stone’s “A Congregational Church is a Catholike Visible Church,” the poem plants the scene of New England on biblical territory, as a reborn Zion: How well dear Brother art thou called Stone? As sometimes Christ did Simon Cephan own. A Stone for solid firmness, fit to rear A part in Zions wall: and it upbear. Like Stone of Bohan, Bounds fit Josh 15: 6, 18:17 ‘Twixt Church and Church, as that ‘twixt Tribe and Tribe. Like Samuel’s Stone, erst Eben-Ezer hight To tell the Lord hath helpt us with his might. Like Stone in David’s sling, the head to wound Of that huge Giant-Church, (so far renown’d) Hight the Church-Caholike, Oecumenical Or at the lowest compass, National; Yet Poteck, Visible, and of such a fashion,

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As may or Rule a world or Rule a Nation. Which though it be cry’d up unto the skys, By Philistins and Isralites likewise; Yet seems to me to be too neer a kin Unto the Kingdom of the Man of Sin: In frame, and state, and constitution Like to the first beast in the Revelation Which was as large as Roman empire wide, And Ruled Rome, and all the world beside. Go on (good Brother) Gird thy Sword with might, Fight the Lord’s Battels, Plead his Churches Right. TO Brother Hooker, thou art next a kin, By office-Right thou must his pledge Redeem. Take thou the double portion of this spirit, Run on his Race, and then his Crown inherit. Now is the time when Church is militant, Time hast’neth fast when it shall be Tryumphant.94

Samuel Stone is likened to “Cephan,” the Aramaic/Greek name Jesus gave Peter as Rock (Petrus) in John 1:42. This transmutes to “Stone of Bohan,” marking the inheritance in Israel of “the tribe of Judah” as “fit to rear / A part in Zions wall” (Joshua 15:6). Further puns in almost midrashic fashion shift to the Israelite war against the Philistines to take possession of the land. As in 1 Samuel 1 7:12, “Stone” is now that which “Eben-Ezer hight” (ev’en is “stone” in Hebrew), marking boundaries with the Philistines. A further turn of “Stone” makes it the pebble with which David felled Goliath (1 Samuel 17: 49). Goliath here, perhaps not shockingly, represents the Catholic Church, “as large as Roman empire wide,” further identified with the “first beast in the Revelation” (13). The poem’s conclusion with Church “militant” and “Tryumphant” likewise invokes Revelation, in ultimate triumph at the End of Days, in a Puritan millennialism that aligned their venture with biblical prophecy and its ultimate fulfillment.95 Cotton further distinguishes between a “National” church such as England’s, where membership is based on geography, to a Congregational church covenanted by Called members both spiritual and worldly, which allows what he calls a “National Civil-State”: “Though Christ abolished a National Church-State [he] instead thereof set up a Congregational Church: yet Christ never abolished a National Civil state, nor the Judicial Laws of Moses, which were of Moral equity, but established them rather in their place and order.”96

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Cotton pursued a number of biblical projects for the New English Israel. He wrote the Preface and was a translator from the Hebrew Psalms for the Bay Psalm Book. The first book published in America, it went through seventy editions in the first decade, becoming a staple in church singing.97 It not only attempted to return to a more faithful translation of the Bible but also to “build a stronger collective identity, to develop distinctive colonial interpretations like the ‘federal covenant,’ and to counter excessive pietistic individualism.”98 As Cotton explains in the “Preface” to the Bay Psalm Book, “no Protestant doubteth but that all the books of the Scripture should by God’s ordinance be extant in the mother tongue of each Nation that they may be understood of all.”99 Thus the Bible can reach each Christian, but as a bond among them, with Psalms to be sung “not by some select members but the whole Church is commanded to teach one another.” This includes women, based on the precedent of Miriam. As Cotton writes in the “Preface” to the Bay Psalm Book “All as well as Moses sing, the women also as well as the men.” Other translations, however, “have rather presented a paraphrase then the words of David translated,” including “alterations of the sacred text.” Attempting also to follow Hebrew parallelism, Cotton notes in the preface that there are psalms which “run in rhythms,” which he had explained in his treatise Singing of Psalms as “the verses observ[ing] a certain number and measure of syllables, and some of them run in meter also.”100 But this is not to take “poetic licence to depart from the true and proper sense of David’s words in the Hebrew verse.” The “faithful endeavour [is] to keep close to the original text.” For, as Cotton famously concludes, “God’s altar needs not our polishings.” Cotton’s fullest venture into Hebraism occurs when he was invited by Winthrop in 1636 to “make a draught of laws agreeable to the word of God, which may be the fundamentals of this commonwealth.”101 He had already been invited to “go through the Bible and raise marginal notes upon all the knotty places of the scriptures,” addressing these “hard places.” As the translators of the Geneva Bible had conceded, “all things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves” and would benefit from ministerial guidance.102 His task was to conform the Bible and the society to one another, both for biblical reading and for communal practice. Cotton’s code was published as an “Abstract of Laws,” called by John Winthrop “Moses his Judicials.” Although not itself formally adopted by Massachusetts Bay Colony, the “Judicials” significantly influenced subsequent Massachusetts law and became the basis of law for the New Haven

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Colony, later Connecticut.103 Something like a constitution in the form of Biblical commentary, the “Judicials” were constructed out of passages mainly from Deuteronomy, Exodus, and Leviticus.104 As such, the document has been dismissed as “purely Old Testament legalism,”105 and described as a mode of disciplinary, coercive regimen in opposition against inner spirituality.106 This stark division between external law as betraying inner spirituality, however, runs counter to Cotton’s profound attempt to sustain their correlation. Cotton’s “Judicials” outline for a biblical polity gave concrete form to Puritan government as an alignment of individual and community, church and state. The text draws on civic as well as church institutions derived, as Michael Winship explores, in political traditions reaching back to England and to earlier political philosophy, including emerging republican trends.107 But these are framed within biblical terms, not only as religious but also as civic.108 Cotton cites Hebrew texts and draws on their social-political vision. The result is an altered political-­ historicist theology, redefining history and political community as arenas of spiritual life. John Cotton was among the chief theorists of covenant. In The Way of the Churches (1645) he confirms covenantal relations across spheres: To prove the necessity of the church covenant argued thus from the covenants of the Old Testament and the veiled references to covenants in the New. All civil relations are based on covenant. Fellow members are of the same body but only by mutual Covenant, [as] between husband and wife in the family, Magistrates and subjects in the Common-Wealth, fellow Citizens in the same City.109

Cotton’s “Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven” helped define the terms of the Congregational Church as “gathered” or “covenanted,” established when called individuals, each from his and her individual religious experience, come together to write and sign a church covenant. He elaborates its complement as state in Moses his Judicials. The Judicials’ outstanding feature is the way Cotton intertwines British civic traditions as radicalized by Puritan practices with Hebrew Scripture. Moses his Judicials opens with the Deuteronomic call to “Give your selves wise men … known amongst your Tribes, and I will place them for Rulers over you” (Deut. 1:3). This is his basis and model for electing Magistrates. The mixed government of classical politics of monarchy, aristocracy, and people, Cotton assigns to the congregational church in his “Keys of the

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Kingdom of Heaven,” with the elders of the church like aristocrats who have “authority,” the people as having “power” and “liberty,” and Christ as monarch.110 The first chapters of the Judicials on “Magistrates” and “Free Burgesses and Free Inhabitants” institute such a mixed government as balancing between delegates elected through the people’s “liberty,” combined with constraints on both delegates and people by concurrent procedures, under an elected governor. Cotton refers such mixed delegations of power to scenes in Exodus and Deuteronomy, when Moses is told by Yitro to appoint judges over the people, “to let them judge the people at all seasons,” “to make it lighter for thee, … and they shall beare the burden with thee” (Ex: 21: 22, Ex. 18: 22, Deut. 17: 8). The appointment of Bay Colony judges within every town, Cotton bases on the verse: “Judges and Officers shalt thou make thee in all thy gates” (Deut. 16: 18). “Judicials” Chapter IX stipulates that “Tryall by Jurors not be denyed … partly to preserve the liberty of the people, and partly to prevent suspicion of partiality of any Magistrate in the Court,” in accordance with the biblical injunction “Justice, justice you shall pursue” (Deut. 16: 18). The jurors themselves “are not to be chosen by any Magistrates, or Officers, but by the free Burgesses of each towne,” with punishment or imprisonment duly “declared and tried in the next court,” as in 2 Sam. 23:3, “He that ruleth over men must be just, ruling in the fear of God” (cf. Deut. 25: 43-46, Ex. 1: 13-14). In the church, the elders have “authority” while the brethren “preventeth the tyranny and oligarchy and exorbitancy of the elders” through their “power and liberty to choose their officers,” a “power” also to share judgment in juries of peers as “an act of popular liberty.”111 Conviction in court requires, as in the Bible, two witnesses. Similarly in the state, the Judicials declares the “right and due establishment and balancing of the liberties or privileges of the people … and the authority of the magistrate” who are themselves drawn from among the people, as in Exodus 18.21, which instructs to “provide out of all the people able men” to serve as “rulers” as cited in Judicials chapter I. Cotton’s biblical quotations and imagery persistently project an image of government as taking place as a community closely knit together. He especially marks terms for “midst,” “among,” “within” (kerev/mikerev. mikol/bekol) as, for example, regarding the boundaries of “gates” (Judicials I). Cotton stipulates that magistrates must be elected “from among (mikerev) thy brethren” (Deut. 17: 15). Nobles and governors “shall proceed from the midst of them (mikirbo)” (Jer. 30:21). Just so the towns are to

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“have Judges within themselves,” which “Judges and Officers shalt thou make thee in all thy gates (bikol shaarecha)” (Deut. 16: 18). “Able men” shall be “provided” (in Cotton’s Hebrew gloss, “taken or received”) “out of all the people (micol haam),” to be both of them and leading them, as was done in Exodus when Moses was commanded to appoint alongside himself “rulers of thousands, rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens” (Ex. 18:21-22). Following the biblical practice of welfare in which the community is responsible for those in need, Judicials III on “the protection and provision of the Country” institutes the Deuteronomic law for provision for the poor, the widow, and fatherless “within thy gates” (asher beshaarecha) (Deut. 14: 29). Taxes must help preserve “the livelihood of each Town within itself,” including overseeing inheritances that transfer land out of the township. Here common good is balanced against the individual right that “to everyone shall his inheritance be given” (Chap. IV:3, Numbers 26:53-54, 35:3). In a requirement that powerfully shaped New English polity, Cotton draws on Sabbath rules limiting distances for travel so that “no man shall set his dwelling house above the distance of half a mile (or a mile at furthest) from the meeting house of the Congregation” (“Judicials” Chapter IV). The town culture of New England is here strengthened, compared to the South’s plantation life, where considerable distances prevented the growth of towns and their civic involvement.112 The unit of the town Cotton ties to Hebrew citations of belonging: “All Israel shall hear, and fear, and shall do no more any such wickedness as this is among you” (“bekirbecha”) (Deut. 13: 12). Or, as Cotton notes in the margins regarding the translation, “Heb: in the midst of thee.” The Hebrew terms that thread through the text and marginalia build an abiding sense of boundary and trespass, of incursion and guard against it, integrity maintained and defended. Penalties for crimes involve separation from group—and it is worth noting that the sentences Cotton proscribes are, in criminal cases, less harsh than those then current in England. Conviction, requiring as in the Bible two witnesses, features banishment, which was Hutchinson’s punishment, and karet, the punishment of being “cut off from the people” (VII.9: Numbers 15: 30-31).113 Chapter X sums up the Judicials in just such imagery of bounding and binding: “All wickedness is to be removed out of the camp … for Jehovah thy God walketh in the midst of the camp” (“bikerev machanechah”) (Deut. 23: 15).

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In his decisive letter to Lord Say and Sele, where Cotton warns that in the New World titles cannot command rulership, he outlines his vision of New English biblical polity: The word, or scriptures of God doe contain a platform not only of theology but also of other sacred sciences … which he maketh ethics, economics, politics, church-government, prophecy, academy … God’s institutions (such as the government of church and of commonwealth be) may be close and compact, and coordinate one to another and yet not confounded. God hath so framed the state of church government and ordinances, that they may be compatible to any commonwealth.114

Theology is listed with ethics, economics, politics, church government, matters internal and external, religious and civic, all framed by the “word of scriptures of God” as their “platform.” In these diverse arrangements church and state are not “confounded” but “coordinate one to another,” in a commonwealth as a biblical republic.

Edward Taylor’s Covenantal Poetics In one of the miracles of literary history, the poems of Edward Taylor (1642–1675) were discovered by Thomas Johnson in 1937  in the Yale library, where Taylor’s grandson Ezra Stiles (himself a devoted Hebraist) had brought them on becoming President of the College. This had been against Taylor’s will: Taylor had forbidden the publication of his work, presumably as his private meditations.115 Privacy in turn has remained largely the premise of critical discussions of the poems.116 As “Meditations,” the poems were indeed composed as a means of personal preparation by Taylor before administering the Lord’s Supper communion in the Westfield church he served as minister. Meditation has continued to guide their interpretation, alongside other spiritual practices. The poems’ tripartite structure is charted as opening with humility (memory); an elaboration of a topic making up the body of the text (understanding); and closing appeal for spiritual aid (will). Debate, however, continues as to how “mystical” Taylor is or isn’t.117 The poems have also been seen to follow stages of the conversion experience, described by William Perkins as “terrors of repentance” in “misery of sin”; “due examination” of the spiritual state; leading to “action of the minde renewed and sanctified” toward “the elevation of the heart to God.”118 In accordance with another pattern, the

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poems are seen to conform to Puritan private devotion laid out by Thomas Hooker, wherein the “Lord prepares the hearts of his people to call upon him, a heart mourning for sin, and sends up a prayer from an humbled heart and broken soul.”119 Such preparation is then realized in communion, with Taylor’s metaphors seen as enacting incarnational doctrine as translation from concrete to abstract.120 Other discussions identify the poetic pattern as Psalmic.121 What is constant through the structural progress of Taylor’s poems, however charted, is their biblical engagement. It is in biblical reference, citation, exegesis, and commentary that the patterns of humility, development of topic, and appeal for grace take on substance. The Bible remains at center stage in the poems, providing the scaffolding of their progress as well as the substance of their material. Almost every poem is launched, like a sermon, from a biblical text cited in its title. Further, almost every poem treats not only the New Testament, as might be expected given the tie of the poems to communion, but also, in some sense especially, the Old. The poems are thus specifically typological, with typology the outstanding textual feature of Taylor’s verse through all of its patterns.122 In these exegetical terms, the progressive structures charted for the poems as a three-part movement first establish a type, then develop it, and conclude with a confirmation of Taylor’s place within such biblical pattern. This engagement with the Bible points the poems beyond the inner spiritual experience where they have been insistently located.123 This is firstly evident in the correlation between the poems and sermon cycles Taylor delivered on the cited biblical texts, before ministering communion: that is, in his public role as minister.124 His biblical frame distinguishes him from meditation tradition as well. Unlike in classic meditation, the poems do not visualize Christ, but rather textualize encounter with him.125 Christ’s textuality emerges beautifully in Meditation 2:8, where Christ is God’s “Love Letter to us from above,” embellishing “each Letter, Syllable, Word, Action sounde,” bidding his “Love to mee spell out” so he can “read, and read it.” Here as throughout, a major image system is that of the word itself. As John Cotton instructs: “To reade the word and to meditate thereon is a daily part of Christian holy life.”126 Almost all of Taylor’s poems revolve around typological correlations between Old Testament and New, in an intricate detail that reflects the newly intensified Puritan engagement with the Old Testament as Hebrew Scripture. Old Testament emerges as a full stratum rather than a superseded prologue to the meaning and pattern of religious and communal

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life. The Harvard College Library caught fire in 1764, but many books and catalogues remain (having failed to be returned by borrowers), helping retrace its Hebrew collection. Catalogues show that during Taylor’s residence, the collection included full sets of Hebrew Scriptures in editions with traditional commentaries, such as Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Nachmanides, and the Targum Onkelus. The Targum was also included, in original Aramaic and “Chaldee” translation, in stunning polyglot Bibles such as the one owned by Increase Mather (the name Increase itself was from the Hebrew Yosef ), preserved at Houghton Library. The Printed Catalogues of The Harvard College Library list complete sets of the Talmud, works in Hebrew by Maimonides, Kimche (Radak), and other commentators, the Shulchan Aruch by Joseph Karo, and the multi-volume Annotations on the Bible which incorporate extensive commentaries on Hebrew language and Jewish exegetical material.127 Arriving in New England in 1668, Taylor graduated Harvard in 1671. In his Graduation Speech  he  compared Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and English. Hebrew surfaces persistently through his various writings. These include paraphrases of the Psalms and Job based on the original texts; Hebrew words in his sermons and the headings and texts of his poetry; and references to Jewish sources and commentaries in his prose works. Upon Types of the Old Testament is sprinkled with Hebrew philology and exegetical comments, as are sermons in the Christographia. Called to be minister at Westfield upon graduation, Taylor himself owned in his library the exceedingly detailed and learned Annotations of the Bible, compiled by Henry Ainsworth and Matthew Poole. Taylor repeatedly refers to its commentaries in his prose works.128 Taylor’s poetry reflects his Hebraism in several ways. Hebraism goes far to situate what has long been considered bizarre and unseemly imagery, Taylor’s switches in diction and illogical and non-metaphorical tropes such as puns and word-play based on letters inverted and reordered; chiasms and other constructions involving word order and juxtaposition rather than analogy or likenesses.129 These lettrisms are familiar language formations in Hebrew Scripture and midrashic commentaries on it.130 Taylor’s typological elaborations also tilt toward the Old Testament, giving textual priority to Hebrew Scriptural imagery and language which then anchor and direct New Testament figuration. In this sense, Taylor reads the New Testament through the Old as much as the Old Testament through the New. In broader terms, Taylor’s Hebraic engagement signals altered stances to history itself, and with it, a reassessment and revaluation of time, materiality, and the earthly world. The concrete temporal realm

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takes on new, positive relationship with spiritual experience, in a textual both-worldliness reflecting the Puritan venture as it extends religious life into history and community as well as inner spiritual devotion. Calvin had restricted all hymnal singing to biblical sources, which he also made central to devotion both public and private. As Cotton writes in his “Preface” to the Bay Psalme Book, the psalms could be performed “both in our publicke Churches, and in private.”131 Puritan devotion in fact had a variety of scenes: public in church; in the smaller social contexts of conventicles where sermons and the Bible were discussed, also family meetings, which Edmund Morgan calls a “family covenant,”132 and “secret” devotions where spiritual exercises were undertaken in the “closet” of personal privacy, as  at “the very center of Puritan spirituality.”133 Taylor himself specifies these different scenes in his poem “The Joy of Church Fellowship Rightly Attended.” There he writes of how …the Saints Encoacht for Heaven In all their Acts, public and private, nay and secret too, they praise impart. they with Hymns do offer up their Heart.

This text openly affirms “secret” individual devotion as “Acts” continuous with “public” church service and “private” smaller gatherings. Taylor’s poems are undeniably interior, focused through his inner states. But, as this poem’s title of “Church Fellowship” announces, they remain tied to his culture’s communal aspect. In this poem, community is expressed through the plural “Saints” of which Taylor counts himself a part, and in the imagery of them “EnCoacht,” in a common journey to redemption: “In Christ’s Coach they sweetly sing / As they to Glory ride therein.”134 As do the many references to song and music in Taylor’s work, “Hymns” occur as a joint congregational event engendering fellowship. As Cotton directs in The Bay Psalm Book “Preface”: “psalms are to be sung by a joint consent and harmony of all the church in heart and voice,” that in “singing ordinary psalms the whole church is to join together in heart and voice to prayse the Lord.”135 “Joy of Church Fellowship” is part of a series at the end of Taylor’s collection God’s Determinations. There fellowship is represented in imagery of house, city and gates, tabernacle, ark, coach of spiritual journey, and music itself. The poem “The Soul admiring the Grace of the Church Enters into Church Fellowship” is set in “this City”—not as Augustine’s

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City of God separate from the world but within their historical living place (ETP 331). This echoes the image of Winthrop’s foundational image of “City on the Hill,” making their new home a figure for Jerusalem Old and New. Winthrop exhorts the Pilgrims to found their covenantal community in accordance with the “words of Micah”: we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection … always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body … [so] we shall find that the God of Israel is among us.136

Taylor’s poetic “City” is bounded, “Walled in with Discipline,” guarded with “gates” that define common space. The pronouns of the poem mark the shift to communal experience as a “they” who together undergo the stages of spiritual progress in God’s “coach.” In “The Soul admiring the Grace of the Church Enters into Church Fellowship,” there is no specific typological citation or correlation. The Bible, however, remains the text’s foundation, fulfilling what it calls the “demand the Word to shew” while weaving throughout biblical echoes. The imagery of “Two Passions,” “Desire and Feare” as “both ways thrust” appear together in, for example, Psalm 145: 19-20 KJV “He will fulfil the desire of them that fear him: he also will hear their cry, and will save them.” The poem situates the soul between these two passions, together enacting a Puritan balance between “Discipline” and “Love,” although desire in the end triumphs: “Joy conquers Fear.” Intersection of personal and communal experience in this poem is evident in its plural grammar, the invitation to the “City,” and its explicit appeal to covenant. Converted “Saints” are invited to Encovenant With God: and His: They thus indent. The Charters Seals belonging unto this The Sacrament.

Conversion, covenant, charter, communion, and seals are intertwined. Both public and private life were shaped through the core pattern of redemptive call, a “quest for assurance of grace that dominated their spiritual lives.”137 Puritan life, public and private, reenacted the redemptive

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drama of repentance and hope for grace that shaped their spiritual and historical journey. Sacraments were called, as in Taylor’s poem, “seals of the Covenant.” Popular eucharistic manuals and Sacrament Day sermons encouraged the understanding that “in receiving the Lord’s Supper, we renew covenant with God.” The covenant of the church was the point of reference for other ordinances of mutual communion.138 Writes Hambricke-Stowe in Practices of Piety: Covenant making … resembled the mood of the preparatory stages of salvation …. The covenant was, in fact, implicitly renewed on many occasions . . Self-examination, repentance, and all the stages of preparation that were expounded first in relation to conversion were also the marks of the day of [covenant] renewal.139

Church fellowship is implicit throughout Taylor’s poems. Typological correlations between Old Testament and New are represented through imagery of leaders and places of gathering. Meditation 2:20 takes the tabernacle as itself a type of Christ—“Thou art my Tabernacle”—providing a “House of Worship”—“I can’t thee Worship now without a House.”140 Meditation 2: 29 calls on Christ to be “Antitype” to Noah’s “Ark.” “All that would not be drownded” must be “Arked in Christ.” Mystical interpretations of the Song of Songs often focus on interior love. But Taylor also directs the erotic story to the tradition of love between the church and Christ. In Meditation 2:63, “thy Church” is “thy Garden,” imaging the “Palace Garden of King Solomon” while further recalling “Eden’s Garden: Adam’s Palace bright.” All these point ultimately to “Zion’s Paradise, Christ’s Garden Dear, His Church.” Meditation 2:9 takes Moses in Deut. 18:15 as “Looking glass … Type” of Christ in his persecution as an infant, his role as “Mediator” and leader across the “Red Sea into the Wilderness,” as well as bringer of “Gods own Law.” Type to antitype outline not only personal savior but leader of the people. As Moses “founded … Israel’s Church-hood, Worship, Ministry” so “thou didst too gospely.” Meditation 2:9 again cites “Seals” and “Covenant” to mark Christian fellowship, typologically through Moses unto Christ: He did confirm his Office Worke with Wonders, And to the Covenant annexed Seals, Thou thine in miracles, and more in numbers, And Gospell Seals unto they Church out dealst. (ETP 95, 2:9)

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The language of Charters, Seals, and Covenant firmly place the poems within historical contexts immediate to New England polity and strikingly to legal discourses. This encompasses communion as well. As poems preparing to minister the Lord’s Supper, the Meditations fittingly devote many texts to the communion feast, which is necessarily a group affair, shared among church communicants together. Meditation 2:102 addresses the “Bread” of Christ in Matt. 26:26 as “Th’ New Covenant,” with “Articles Divine.” Christ as “King of Zion” institutes this “New Covenant” as extending the “Institutions, Zion’s Statutes, th’Laws” of the Old: Unto the Articles of this Contract Our Lord did institute even at the Grave Of the Last Passover, when off its pact, This Seale for our attendance oft to have, This Seal made of new Cov’nant wax, red di’de In Cov’nant blood, by faith to be applied.

The grammar is plural, the language public and indeed legal. It reaches back to the Passover whose “pact” is fulfilled in Christ’s communion as “Last” Supper. “Pact,” “Articles,” “Seals,” “Contract,” “Covenant” all bind and adjudicate among members of a community. There are poems that elaborate a full judicial procedure, an evolution in covenant theology that Perry Miller describes.141 The terms of religious experience become those of judicial sentence and constitution of polity. Thus, in Meditation 1:38 (cf. 1:39), Heaven is a “Court of Justice” with “God’s Judge himself, and Christ Attorney” and “Advocate.” Meditation 2:103 (ETP 266) portrays divine rule as legal and constitutional: “The Deity call[s] a Parliament” where “Law” is voted concerning “Gods Elect.” Not just the individual is here addressed, but the people are called to the “New Covenant.” The language is emphatically contractual and economic. Under the advocacy of “Grace” the “Credits Good,” and “Rests in her Bill.” “Types” drawn from Old Testament “Ark and Mannah,” “Passover,” and “Paschal Lamb” announce the “Lords Supper” as “Cov’nant” and “Seales” that shape history and community: This First Edition did the Cov’nant tend With Typick Seales and Rites and Cermonie That till the Typick Dispensations end Should ratify it as Gods Testimony.

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The Old Testament is textual “first Edition” of the “Covenant,” whose “Typick Seales” remain ratified in the subsequent edition of New Testament. The legal and legislative implications of “Dispensations,” “ratify,” “Testimony” along with “Seales” establishes the Bible as public document governing New English life. Such concretized court scenes are one way in which Taylor’s poems, and the Bible itself, is made historical. Taylor likewise introduces into his “Meditations” material images immediate to contemporary New England. In Meditation 2:22 (ETP 119) the “Paschall Lamb” is represented as “roast Mutten” cooked in a “Dripping Pan” he “licks.” “Crums” of the Passover are searched for, as in Hebrew practice, seeking “Leveaned” bread that has fallen “in mouseholes.” Manna is depicted in Meditation 2: 60A (ETP187) as mundane material “disht dayly food,” processed as “Quorns,” “wheate,” ‘Searcde” (sieved) in a “backhouse,” for a graphically physical “Queasy Stomach.” The “Ark” in Meditation 2:9 takes into its saving community “Rattlesnake and Squerrell,” two animals indigenous only to the Americas.142 Taylor’s concrete, material representations of New England life, as also his intense biblical textuality, accords with New English commitment to the this-worldly, historical dimension of the Christian life, as realization of Scripture in the world. Yet it can be asked: Does Taylor’s poetry serve the Bible or does the Bible serve his poetry? Is there a clear priority? Or is art another scene of tension between established orders and individual initiative? John Cotton’s conclusion of the “Preface” to the Bay Psalm Book that “God’s Altar needs not our pollishings” is gainsaid, perhaps by the Bay Psalm Book itself, but certainly by Taylor. Taylor without question polishes.

Controversy in New English Poetics Covenant theology offered New England a way of interweaving the different strands of its religious, social, and political commitments. From the outset, however, this very “uniting a whole thought upon a single concept” concealed strains and cracks in the Puritan edifice.143 Individual and community, religion and politics, material and spiritual, this world and the next were brought into new, more mutually confirming relationship than had been the case in medieval Christianity. Yet these poles, always in tension, could easily break apart. Biblical engagement itself contributed to fragmentation even as it was taken to be the basis of community. Sola

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scriptura, in inviting independent reading, assumed a common understanding. Instead, despite ministerial guidance that attempted to contain them, it generated multiple readings. Max Weber famously saw the origins of capitalism in Puritan attention to material life.144 Theologically, material prosperity was to be regarded as a consequence and not a cause of election, a post-facto outward sign of inward grace freely given by a God whose omnipotence could not be influenced by human action. Such distinctions, however, proved hard to maintain. Pursuit of earthly goods for their own sake was an ever-present danger, difficult to untangle from godly blessing. Winthrop had already warned in his “Model of Christian Charity” against the dangers of “dissembling with our God” by “falling to embrace this present world and prosecute our carnal intentions, seeking great things for ourselves and our posterity.” John Cotton, in architecting Calling, likewise cautioned to maintain both “diligence in worldly businesses, and yet deadness to the world.”145 Similarly difficult to keep in balance was the double commitment to individual experience and common good. American Puritanism had linked together Luther’s “inward experience of second birth” with Calvin’s “social destiny of saints bound together in covenant.”146 Inward Call was to conjoin with outer Calling both in work and in civic life. The assumption was that these would be in harmony, “the personal covenant on the same axis as the social,” the “personal will at one with the collective will.”147 In Puritan sociality and religion, the collective was not a preestablished and unitary group but a’ “congressive’ coming together of individuals, as covenanting of called selves, creating “a community of voluntary fusion of members.”148 Yet the very individualism that grounded covenantal community also pulled against it. A “double focus on social need” resided alongside a “personal necessity of individual transformation,” but the balance was inherently, and increasingly, volatile and mutable.149 As Michael Wigglesworth (1631–1705, Harvard class of 1651) warns in “God’s Controversy with New England:” The Lord had made (such was his grace) For us a Covenant Both with the men, and with the beasts, That in this desart haunt … “Our temp’rall blessings did abound But spirituall good things Much more abounded, to the praise Of that great King of Kings.150

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This priority of spiritual over temporal, however, became cast over by “dismal clouds” which “O’respread from east to west.” Wigglesworth demands: … how is it that I find In stead of holiness Carnality, In stead of heavenly frames an Earthly mind, For burning zeal luke-warm Indifferency, For flaming Love, key-cold Dead-heartedness, For temperance (in meat, and drinke, and cloaths) excess? … Self-will’d, perverse, such as can beare no yoke; A Generation even ripe for vengeance stroke. Such were that Carnall Brood of Israelites That Josua and the Elders did ensue.

Jeremiad warnings against falling away from the covenantal path at once lamented and also called and claimed New England to be New Israel.151 But this, as Wigglesworth intones, required anxious reckoning between evidences for and against “holiness” versus “Carnality.” Edward Johnson (1598–1672) in the poem “You that have seen these wondrous works by Sion’s Savior done” declares New England God’s “second work,” carrying forward the first biblical one. The Puritan “Israel to redeem … shall far more glorious seem.” In this new “Sion” Scriptures search bright light bring forth … With outward work inward grace.

Yet, in a (half?) tongue-in-cheek verse on “New England’s Annoyances,” somewhat comical complaints about eating endless pumpkins and other trivialities give way to questions about the justice of covenantal community: And we have a Cov’nant one with another, Which makes a division ‘twixt brother and brother: For some are rejected, and others made Saints, Of those that are equal in virtues and wants.152

Edward Taylor himself took direct and active part in controversy concerning covenant and entry into church membership. His arrival in New England in 1668 coincided with the struggle over the Half-Way Covenant,

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proposed as a way of extending baptism to children who had not had a testifiable conversion experience. Solomon Stoddard was urging communion for all children of church members of good standing, without conversion or even the preparatory steps toward receiving grace—the “Contrition” and “Humiliation,” which open Taylor’s Preparatory Meditations.153 Theologically at issue is how much will and volition an individual has as a way to affect his conversion process, in light of the all-­ powerful, sovereign, divine will. In the name of the latter, Taylor rejects the idea of communion as itself a “converting ordinance.” Inward conversion through God’s grace is necessary to enter into covenant and communion, making invalid a “halfway” outward church membership. Only thus would a “Congregational model” of baptism for full church membership be followed, as seen to be attested in the Bible.154 Taylor’s controversy with the “Halfway Covenant” registers one tension between inward and outward forms. A different tension emerges in the way he expands the typological corollaries between Old Testament and New. Calvin had insisted on exegetical constraints, requiring all correlations to be anchored in the biblical text.155 The limits of typology were a topic of dispute  between John Cotton and Roger Williams. Williams insisted on separating figural from literal, inner experience from temporal order. Cotton, however, refused to “abandon the literal parallel between the biblical chosen people and the children of Israel in New England,” extending typology to civic life.156 Taylor, in making typology into material for this poetry, without question goes beyond typological correlations established in biblical texts. He instead constructs elaborate and often fanciful extensions. This includes entering himself into the pattern of typologized signs, not only in witness to his spiritual life, but as poet.157 Devotional as his verse is, Taylor is clearly conscious of his role as writer and the art of writing. His poems are strewn with pens and ink, paper and quills, representing the process of writing as much as of interior examination or biblical figuration. As he puts it, “Through dim types we first Pen feather’d catch” (2:8). His can be described as writing about writing. Words, language, songs, inscription are among Taylor’s core tropes. His poetic practice is likewise deeply engaged in the materiality of language: sounds, puns, acrostics, chiasms, baroque word orders that have puzzled commentators.158 Puritan language theory, however, held, as William Bradford instructs, that men should speak “in a plain style, with singular regard unto the simple truth in all things.”159 As Perry Miller describes Puritan plain style,

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language “was to be kept wholly subordinate to the Bible, to be nothing but a transparent glass through which the light of revelation might shine, to have no character of its own, to be unrelievedly plain.”160 Taylor himself preached in support of the plain style, explaining that “Grace excels all metaphors. The varnish laid upon it doth but darken and not decorate it—its own colors are too glorious to be made more glorious by any color of secular glory.”161 But imagery in Taylor emerges as a cloudburst of figuration, natural, mundane, celestial, linguistic. Is this an assertion of individual imagination against spiritual conformity, a danger, as Karl Keller wonders, of “taking more delight in one’s creations than in created beauty”?162 Here poetics parallels quandaries of biblical interpretation itself. Exegesis should faithfully adhere to textual signs, as inspired by the Holy Spirit which was said to speak to all readers in one voice. Yet ministers relied on learning and training, to guide the congregation’s understanding and control the text itself, indicating the need to do so.163 Exegesis was thus claimed to be plainly textual but performed as an art of elaboration. Such tension between words and the Word is vivid in an account of John Cotton’s conversion to Puritanism in 1610. Invited to preach to a University audience that expected from him “Invention, Elegancy, Purity of Style, Ornaments of Rhetorick, Elocution, and Oratorious Beauty of the whole,” he instead “resolved to preach not the enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in the demonstration of the Spirit and of power,” thus distinguishing between “the word of wisdom, and the wisdom of words.”164 Taylor’s figures have been analyzed as metaphorical conversions from literal to spiritual, an attempt “to figure spiritual love by physical,” in order “to illustrate religious doctrines”; as “spirit triumphing over literalism, grace over legalism, light over shadow.”165 Taylor’s language, however, resists transparent transfer from concrete to abstract, signifier to signified, letter to spirit. Instead, it calls attention to its own material composition through associations, inversions, multiplications of phrases, sounds, and letters. Taylor specifies concrete objects and terms of his mundane life. Language itself generates relationships through associations of its material composition. Nor is this simply a failure of language due to its inability to represent divine things and its entanglement in a fallen world.166 On the contrary, Taylor lingers lovingly on linguistic intricacy and its material elaborations. The multiplication of metaphors does not demonstrate their failure, nor are they “inverted” in “opposition” to the glory of God.167 Rather, the intensity of language and its materiality registers Taylor’s

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double commitment, both to the other world and to this concrete one, without however absorbing one into the other. What his poems portray and enact is that very double both-worldliness. This involves a variety of relationships in which his figures, tropes, and types at time mutually reflect each other and at times strain against each other. Taylor’s “Meditations” can be extremely daring in their material/spiritual duality. In Meditation 1.6, “Am I thy gold? Or purse, Lord, for thy wealth,” the poet is himself  very material “gold” in the divine “purse,” punningly “refined… in mine [a pun on individual value?] or mint.” As a “golden Angel in thy hand” the poet is both Christian and coin (Angels were a coin introduced by Edward IV). Despite the utter distance between material gold and divine reflection, both are called “thine image and inscription stamped on me.” The poem concludes with an elegant chiasm of mutual imaging, despite the traditional incompatibility, indeed contradiction, between money and spirituality: Then shall I be thy money, thou my hoard: Let me thy angel be, be thou my Lord. (ETP 16)

Meditation 1: 7 (ETP 17), taking as its text Psalm 45.2 “Grace in thy lips is poured out,” dares to represent Christ as a “still” for making alcohol, with “spirits” a pun on alcoholic drink: Thy human frame, my glorious Lord, I spy A golden still with heavenly choice drugs filled; Thy holy love, the glowing heat whereby, The Spirit of grace is graciously distilled. Thy mouth the neck through which these spirits still. My soul thy vial make and therewith fill.

God’s “Humane Frame,” Christ, is a “Golden Still with Heavnly Choice drugs filld.” Through it “the Spirit of Grace is graciously distilld.” The text’s pun on “spirits” stretches from the lowest materiality of whiskey to the highest immateriality of spirituality. Punning likewise ties election to alcohol production: “choice drugs.” Alcohol-making “Still” puns on “still” as eternity. The “Spirit of grace” is both the Holy Spirit and alcoholic spirits, in chiasm sequence with the phrase “graciously distilled,” punning again on “still” as does the “spirits still.” “Still” here shifts through polyptoton of grammatical cases and forms including the noun

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apparatus, the verb distilled, the adverb still. Christ’s “mouth,” delivering the Word, is the “neck” of a bottle out of which grace is poured into “My soul.” “Thy vial” is a triple pun on glass container, the vileness of fallen man, and a violin through which the poet praises the possibility of grace. It is as mundane imbiber that the poet receives grace in further chiasms and puns, going on to pray: “Thy words in Grace’s tincture stilled, Lord, may / The tincture of thy grace in me convey.” Meditation 2:106 (ETP 273) is likewise made of puns as linguistic material and imaginative mastery. The humility that characteristically launches Taylor’s poems is represented in a dense paranomasia purporting but also defying poetic poverty and pleading for poetic redemption: I fain would Prize, and Praise thee, Lord, but finde My Prizing Faculty imprison’d lyes… I fain would praise thee, but want words to do’t: And searching ore the realm of thoughts finde one Significant enough and therefore vote For a new set of Words and thoughts hereon And leap beyond the line such words to gain In other Realms, to praise thee: but in vain 2:106

“Prize,” “Praise,” “Prizing” (appraising), “imprison’d” are linked together in their material language construction. Interestingly, Taylor compares finding the “Significant” word to a civic “vote.” Grace itself is invoked as a “new set of Words” for the act at once poetic and devotional “to praise thee.” In this poem, Taylor theorizes his own linguistic / spiritual conundrum as the need to oppose those who “From the Signatum teareth off the Signe:” Morality is here no market ware, Although it in the Outward Court is free, A State of Sin this Banquet cannot beare. Old and New Cov’nant Guests here don’t agree … Food is for living Limbs, not Wooden legs: Life’s necessary, unto nourishment Dead limbs must be cut off: the Addle Eggs Rot by the heat the dam upon them spent. A State of Sin that takes this bread and Wine From the Signatum teareth off the Signe. (2: 106)

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Against those who regard “Outward Court” as reducing “Morality” to “market ware,” Edwards counters this view in which “Old and New Cov’nant… don’t agree.” Material life is “necessary” and requires “nourishment.” The “bread and Wine” of communion remains physical if also symbolic, in accordance with Calvin’s challenge to transubstantiation. Calvin’s Institutes instruct that the communion should be made from “common bread,” the bread of ordinary daily life, as “intended solely to feed the stomach.”168 Calvin had similarly praised those who “find in the material world and its organizational structures a real source of spiritual truth.”169 Taylor is poetically true to these principles, calling, in the low diction and concrete physicality for which he has been criticized, the “State of Sin” “Addle Eggs/ Rot by the heat.” He thus rejects tearing the “Signe” from the “Signatum.” The two remain mutually invested rather than a structure that abrogates the material. Just so, in the next stanza Taylor includes as “Principle of Life” “Food Naturall” for “natural Life”; alongside “spiritual food” for “spirituall life.” He proves his argument with reference to Psalm 115:17 “the dead don’t praise” as “The Dead don’t eate.” And yet, especially in his imagery of writing itself, Taylor walks a tightrope between praise of God and praise of poetry and poetic imagination, “Phancy” and “thy Praises,” as in Meditation 1:32 (ETP 51): Thy Grace, Dear Lord’s my golden Wrack, I finde Screwing my Phancy into ragged Rhimes, Tuning thy Praises in my feeble minde Until I come to strike them on my Chimes. Were I an Angell bright, and borrow could King Davids Harp, I would them play on gold. But plung’d I am, my minde is puzzled, When I would spin my Phancy thus unspun, In finest Twine of Praise I’m muzzled, My tazzled Thoughts twirld into Snick-Snarls run. Thy Grace, my Lord, is such a glorious thing, It doth Confound me when I would it sing.

The opening image of a “Wrack” puns on rack and wreck, here as image of the Cross through “Screwing”—the screws of the Cross’s nails, the screws of a torture rack. But this torture is also a “Tuning,” a training for Taylor’s poetic “Praises,” just as suffering leads to salvation. In his opening humility, his “Rhimes” are “ragged,” his mind “feeble.” Yet “Chimes”

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look ahead to accomplished music, in an image of bells that point churchward. “David’s Harp” typologically matches Taylor’s own artistry with Hebrew Scripture, specifically the Psalms, as he does in calling his own poems “Mictams,” a Psalmic heading and term for song. The second stanza plunges into a tangle of punning, alliteration, colloquialism, and polyptotonic switches in word forms, such as spin/ unspun; miming his “Phancy” as he twists it into a “Twine” snare: “puzzled,” “muzzled,” “tazzled,” “twirl’d into Snick-Snarls.” Words here are the material of his experience, entangling in its wit rather than transparent to some prior meaning. His “Phancy’s” process does not simply bid for a “Grace” that would let him “sing,” but exhibits its own exuberance. In his very declaration that “Grace … doth Confound me when I would it sing” his intricate song verges on eclipsing grace. The poem concludes with language granted and offered: Oh Golden Word! Lord speake it ore again, Lord speake it home to me, say these are mine. My Bells shall then thy Praises bravely chime.

Through the “Word,” God bends toward Taylor to “speake it home to me.” But which are “these,” which “mine?” The concluding “Bells” presents the poet himself as a church, his “Praises” in fact “thy” Word. And yet “My Bells” are also his own words. Edward Taylor’s role as poet as well as minister can be seen as his double Calling (along with serving as physician to his community). His labor with words may be another arena in which his Christian life was conducted. The Puritan commitment to both material and spiritual life can frame the materiality of his writing and its mundane scenes within, rather than against, his spiritual vocation. Seeing these antinomies through his biblical engagement affords a model in which the self’s energies address and are galvanized through encounter with what is given and shared. In its combinations of linguistic response, Taylor’s poetry can be called a venture into biblical commentary. Sacvan Bercovitch suggests Taylor’s plays on “names, numbers, puns,” and other word-connections to be “Cabbala-­ inspired relationships.”170 By stretching biblical encounter and commentary into far regions of personal imagination, Taylor enacts the Puritan venture’s attempt to align inner and outer, individual and community, with biblicism as a cultural anchor.

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John Cotton called the Bible the “key of knowledge … belonging to all the faithful.”171 Yet “all the faithful” were made up of individual readers, each with his and her own understanding. Alice Baldwin remarks of the Puritans: “All believed that the way intended by Christ was shown in His gospel,” but adds, “men did not interpret the gospel alike, and the different opinions caused constant and often bitter discussion.”172 As Sheldon Wolin writes, the Bible was intended “to strengthen collective identity,” and in this strove to “counter the danger of private images and disintegration into private visions.” “Individual consciousness” faced “God alone,” but had to be balanced by the “need for order in society.”173 These two poles were to be bridged by covenant, in a sense governing biblical interpretation as well as biblical community. It authorizes individuals to embark into textual worlds that also come to them through already established modes and understandings. Each person approaches a shared text, individually but also in responsive relationship. Puritan readership, like Puritan selfhood, is not autonomous, but conceived as membership in a church and state. Puritan “Christic selfhood,” writes Bercovitch, is one where “true individuation is not self-contained but is a public and communal commitment.”174 Neither autonomous in later liberal senses, nor collectivist as obediently subordinate to a hierarchical authority, covenantal Puritanism is ‘“congressive’ as in between individualism and collectivism. It sought to recognize each individual as the basis for social organization, which in turn shaped the individual in church, state, and in biblical interpretation itself. How difficult this balance was to maintain is attested in Puritanism’s own history, which is a record of controversies regarding Church membership, the status of non-Church members who increasingly flocked to New England’s prosperity, and the treatment of sectarians such as Quakers and Baptists who were excluded and exiled, as were Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams. Facing what Perry Miller describes as “the most incoherent individualism the Protestant world had yet confronted,” communal life was the experience of “rivalry among the churches.” Yet their controversies, “even while appearing as contention, proclaimed that they were all members of one single society.”175 Biblical discourse provided common terms for disputes and disagreements as a forum for negotiating both individual desires and communal commitments.

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Notes 1. Sacvan Bercovitch, “The Biblical Basis of American Myth,” The Bible and American Arts and Letters, ed. Giles Gunn (Philadelphia: Fortress Press 1983), 219–232, writes that “it is through the Bible that America interpreted itself, using its vocabularies, making ‘America itself the text they interpret,’” p.  219. Noll, Rise and Decline traces how in an America “largely devoid of meaningful national institutions,” American “imagined community conceptualized around the centrality of Scripture.” 2. John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” The Puritans: A Sourcebook, eds. Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson (NY: Harper and Row, 1963), 194–199, p. 198. 3. Sacvan Bercovitch, “Typology in Puritan New England: The Williams-­ Cotton Controversy Reassessed,” American Quarterly, Summer 1967, Vol. 19, No. 2, Part 1 (Summer, 1967), 166–191, p.  179. Cf. Victor Harris, “Allegory to Analogy in the Interpretation of Scriptures,” Philological Quarterly, 45 (1966), 1–16, pp.  5–6, 10–11, on the Protestant refusal “to jettison the historical statement,” proposing a fusion of “heaven and earth.” Thus, Samuel Mather writes that types “are not bare Allegories” but “are literally and historically understood.” This led to an “interest in the social, public nature of types,” 5–6, 10–11. 4. H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (NY: Harper, 1938), p. 144. 5. Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent (NY: Routledge, 1993), p. 148. 6. Bryce Traister, “Introduction” American Literature and the New Puritan Studies ed. Bryce Traister (NY: Cambridge University Press, 2017) 1–20, p. 1. 7. Theodor Dwight Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), p.  160. Theodor Dwight Bozeman “Federal Theology and the ‘National Covenant,’” Church History, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Dec. 1992), 394–407, p. 396; Theodor Dwight Bozeman, The Precisionist Strain (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), pp. 23, 25. William Schiek, reviewing Bozeman in “Disciplinary Religion and Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638,” 17th century News, Vol. 62, No. 384, Fall Winter 2004, p.  236. Philip Gorski, Disciplinary Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), similarly describes Calvinism as a “disciplinary revolution” which in Foucauldian terms created “more obedient and industrious subjects” but “with less coercion and violence,” thus increasing “the regulatory power of the state,” p. xvi. Michael Warner’s The Letters of the Republic briefly mentions the Bible as essentially unitary and coercive: a “subjection in an ideally non-negotiated social order [of] “Righteousness,”” p. 35.

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8. Darren Staloff, The Making of an American Thinking Class: Intellectuals and Intelliigentsia in Puritan Massachusetts (NY: Oxford UP, 1998), pp. 10–13. In the course of his discussion, however, Staloff concedes that “consent had been an important feature of the parallel institutions of church and state,” although as an “essential prerequisite of cultural domination,” p. 115. 9. Donald Pease, “9/11: When was ‘American Studies after the New Americanists’?” boundary 2 33, No. 3 (Fall 2006): 73–101, p. 84. 10. Pease, p. 88. 11. William Spanos, “American Studies in the Age of the World Picture,” The Futures of American Studies, eds. Robyn Wiegman, Donald Pease (Durham, NC: Duke UP 2002), 387–418, p. 402. 12. Winfried Fluck, “The Age of Expressive Individualism and Cultural Radicalism,” The Futures of American Studies, eds. Robyn Wiegman, Donald Pease (Durham, NC: Duke UP 2002), 211–230, p.  216. Johannes Voelz, Transcendental Resistance: The New Americanists and Emerson’s Challenge” (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2010), offers a sustained discussion of these critical ideologies, focusing on Emerson. 13. Stephen Foster, The Solitary Way (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), pp. 6. 14, 44. 14. Michael Zuckerman, Peaceable Kingdoms (NY: Alfred Knopf 1970), pp. 7–10. Zuckerman explores the often delicate balance between disciplinary control and community consent with elements of rights, voice, participation suggestive of later republicanism, p. 47. Puritan society displayed a “new conception of social order by consent not sovereign rule,” where “public action rested on public opinion,” p.  188. Yet the town meeting also exercised a “principle of coercion” and was “not intentionally a school of democracy,” p. 191. Puritanism was therefore not a “liberal society of atomistic social freedom,” but included elements of “communitarian coercion,” p. 257, although significantly shifting from “assent to sovereignty” to “consent of the governed” with “power residing in the people by negotiation and consensus,” p.  230. Cf. Richard Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee (NY: Norton 1967), on the tension between “congregational polity” as arising from dissent and disruption of the given order, and the “equally impelling need for social order in the New World,” p. 147. Michael Winship, Godly Republicanism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), offers a careful overview of Puritanism and republicanism, and the resulting tensions between “coercion” and “cooperation,” p. 218. 15. Winship, Godly Republicanism, pp. 5, 431. Winship, does not consider Puritanism democratic, but resists disciplinary readings by emphasizing the contemporary political contexts of resistance to monarchy, protection of liberties, limits to government, p. 185.

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Cf. Michael Winship, “Godly Republicanism and the Origins of Massachusetts Polity, William and Mary Quarterly, Jul. 2006, Third Series, Vol. 63, No. 3 (Jul. 2006), pp. 427–462, pp. 427, 431. Cf. Perry Miller, who repeatedly warns that Puritanism “contributed to liberalism only accidentally. Its own goals were authoritarian and intolerant,” The New England Mind, The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939/1953), p.  417. Cf. Philip Gorski, that “Far as they may have been from contemporary ideals of democratic life, the Puritan polities of New England were still remarkably egalitarian and participatory,” with no hereditary aristocracy and absolute monarchy, American Covenant (Princeton University Press, 2018), pp. 51, 62. 16. Nathan R.  Perl-Rosenthal, “‘The Divine Right of Republics’: Hebraic Republicanism and the Debate over Kingless Government in Revolutionary America,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Jul. 2009, Third Series, Vol. 66, No. 3 (Jul. 2009), pp. 535–564, p. 562. 17. Stevenson, p. 21. “For Calvin, contract is an assertive act by the human will; covenant a responsive act to God’s Call,” p. 22. 18. Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956, 48–63. 19. Ruth Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 61. 20. Bercovitch, “Biblical Basis,” pp. 224, 226; Bercovitch, “How the Puritans Won the Revolution,” p. 599. 21. Bercovitch, Rites 29–30. 22. Bercovitch, Rites, p. 355. 23. Robert Nesbit, The Social Philosophers: Community and Conflict in Western Thought (London: Heinemann, 1973), p. 203. Nesbit sees this change as a deleterious decline from Medieval associationism. Cf. Mark Noll, America’s God, p. 139. Martin Marty, Righteous Empire (NY: Dial Press, 1970), “The Reformed approach had a much greater effect on how theology was applied than on how it was formulated,” as “more material and less liturgical,” “more engaged” as an “invitation to exert oneself in the world,” p. 35. 24. Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700 (University of North Carolina Press, 1991), on conventicles and other forums of Puritan meeting and discussion, p.  12. Patricia Bonomi, “Religious Dissent and the Case for American Exceptionalism,” Religion in a Revolutionary Age, eds. Ronald Hoffman, Peter J.  Albert (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994), describes how neighborly devotional groups, including women, gathered together to interpret the Bible, pp. 44–45.

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25. Judy Walzer, unpublished “Report to the Dean of Harvard College, Aug. 1, 1979,” Samuel Eliot Morison recounts the practices of recitation in Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, Part I (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1936), 195–6. 26. Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1952), “interest in the Old Testament always led back to Hebrew, which always led to contact with Jews,” p. xxxii. Samuel Preus, From Shadow to Promise: Old Testament Interpretation from Augustine to Luther (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 31–33. 27. Alice Baldwin, The New England Clergy and the American Revolution (NY: Frederick Ungar, 1958), p. 5. 28. Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), p. 7; Michael Kramer, “New English Typology and the Jewish Question,” Studies in Puritan American Spirituality, Vol. III, Dec. 1992, 97–124, pp. 101–103. As Emil Kraeling puts it, “Calvin not only Christianized the Old Testament but revised Christian principles with Old Testament ideas, interpreting Jesus on the basis of Moses, the New Testament on the basis of the Old.” The Old Testament Since the Reformation (NY: Harper and Brothers, 1955), Chapters 1 and 2, pp. 26–27. 29. Norman Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium (NY: Oxford University Press, 1961) on how eschatology was directed inward by Origen and especially by Augustine, in the image of the City of God beyond earthly conditions, p. 29. Cf. Miller, New England Mind, p. 417. 30. Bercovitch, “Typology,” underscores that a rejection of history “denies the applicability of typological exegesis to the public, social life of man,” p. 8. 31. There is debate as to how “eschatological” the Puritans thought themselves.  Most agree with Bercovitch that New England Orthodoxy “intensely shared the millenarian hope, anticipating its advent in America itself,” “Typology,” p. 180. Cf. Harris, that “millenarianism” was “inspired by Luther and the other Reformers” against the “purely spiritual figural prophecy” of Augustine and Origin where eschatology is a “new promise of the end of the world,” pp. 10–11, cf. note 30. 32. Sacvan Bercovitch, Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), p. 13. Cf. Jane Eberwein “Anne Bradstreet,” Legacy, Vol. 11, No. 2 (1994), pp. 161–169, that all Puritans strove to be “worldly” in contrast to monastic ascetics whom Protestant reformers denounced, p. 165. 33. Stevenson, p. 52, cf. note 10.

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34. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision (London: George Allen Ltd, 1966), p. 172. 35. Perry Miller, New England Mind, p. 433. 36. Baldwin, p. 24. Miller, New England Mind: “The Children of Israel were first chosen as individuals, but [this then] becomes a covenant for group as well.” As in the Old Testament “inward covenant is publicly acknowledged by the whole community,” pp. 414–415. 37. Richard Niebuhr, Kingdom of God, pp. 20, 75, cf. note 32. 38. Calvin, Institutes, II, 548. 39. John Cotton, “Calling,” The Puritans: A Sourcebook, eds. Perry Miller, Thomas H.  Johnson (NY: Harper and Row, 1963), 172–3; cf. Miller, Errand, p. 89. 40. Robert Hanning, The Vision of History in Early Britain (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), traces the Christian “theology of history” to this “Hebrew religious thought and tradition, where history was seen as providential” and “ratified in a series of covenants made between God and man to guarantee, as it were, the eternal value of a world of becoming,” p.  6. Cf. Tom Driver, The Sense of History in Greek and Shakespearian Drama (NY: Columbia University Press, 1960), pp. 39–66. 41. Sacvan Bercovitch, “Bibliographical Preface,” Typology and Early American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972), p. 251, where Bercovitch also links typology to covenant theology as “succeeding stages of the history of redemption” in a “communal” project. Mason Lowance elaborates this historical dimension such that “Biblical objects or events now might not only prefigure other biblical events or concepts but also the events of later history,” The Language of Canaan (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 62. 42. Miller, New England Mind, citing John Mitchell, pp.  415, 433. Karen Rowe’s claim that the “New Testament Covenant of Grace surpasses, indeed abrogates, the previous Covenant of Law” ignores the Puritan, and indeed Calvin’s own return to the Old Testament covenant as perpetual. Saint and Singer: Edward Taylor’s Typology and the Poetics of Meditation (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 20. 43. John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” p. 195. 44. Miller, New England Mind, “John Winthrop had declared that the societies of New England were in a direct covenant relationship with Jehovah, exactly as the chosen people of the Old Testament had been,” p. 254. 45. Cited by Bercovitch, “Typology,” p. 181. 46. Sacvan Bercovitch “Puritan New England Rhetoric and the Jewish Problem,” Early American Literature, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1970, 63–73, p. 66. 47. Miller, Errand, p. 60.

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48. Cited Perry Miller, New England Mind, p. 420. 49. Bercovitch, “Typology,” p. 181. There is an ongoing theological quandary here of how much God predestines grace and how much humans prepare for it, with the shift to revivalist “Arminianism” granting the convert a more active role for the coming to grace. 50. Miller, Errand, p. 90. 51. Stevenson writes: Calvin does stand “against the modern view that humans are their own masters and power is the central motive.” Yet he “calls up the public respect of individual conscience,” putting “the irreducibility of individual conscience in continuous tension with human partiality and finitude.” Thus selves are “far from autonomous … dependent on a moral order reflected in but transcending the world,” pp.  10–12; p. 25, cf. note 10. 52. Cushing Strout, The New Heavens and the New Earth (NY: Harper and Row, 1974), calls the “puritan paradox” the combination of a calling that prescribed “indivdualistic striving for self-control and self-betterment within a setting that established social as well as religious meaning for the individual’s efforts,” p. 107. 53. Mark Noll, America’s God, pp. 39–40. 54. Charles Hambricke-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), p. 127. 55. Hambrick-Stowe., pp. 129–130, 131. 56. Douglas Wilson, Beyond Stateliest Marble (Nashville: Highland Books, 2001). Timothy Sweet, “Gender, Genre, and Subjectivity in Anne Bradstreet’s Early Elegies.” Early American Literature 23 (1988): 152–74, 169–170. Frank Shuffelton, “Anne Bradstreet’s ‘Contemplations,’ Gardens, and the Art of Memory,” Studies in Puritan American Spirituality 4 (1993): 25–43, p.  35. Cf. Jeffrey Hammond, that “the poet becomes virtually indistinguishable from the biblically shaped identity that she appropriates,” Sinful Self, Saintly Self (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), p. 104. Cf. Robert Daly, God’s Altar: The World and the Flesh in Puritan Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), “In Bradstreet’s work, theology became poetics as well as poetry,” p. 85; Jane Eberwein treats the divisions in Bradstreet as “dialectical” argument, where the “poet is always confident that tensions would resolve into unity.” p. 165,” cf. note 59. 57. Anne Stanford, “Anne Bradstreet, Dogmatist and Rebel,” New England Quarterly, 39 (1966), 39: 3, 373–389, p.  374. “It is the statement of dogma and the concurrent feeling of resistance to dogma that gives much of that writing [its] vitality,” p. 374. This is the implication of Adrienne Rich’s contrast between Bradstreet’s devotion to the “glory of God” and

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the “poignancy to her more personal verse,” “Forward,” The Works of Anne Bradstreet, ix–xxi, p. xviii. Cf. Wendy Martin Triptych: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), who sees Bradstreet as caught in “conflict between personal feelings and religious duty,” p.  33. Emily Stipes Watts, “The posy UNITY: Anne Bradstreet’s Search for Order,” Puritan Influences in American Literature, ed. Emory Elliott (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 23–37; “Bradstreet’s dark vision did not allow for a redemptive or soteriological approach to history,” pp. 26–28. Michael Ditmore: “Bliss Lost, Wisdom Gained: Contemplating Emblems and Enigmas in Anne Bradstreet’s ‘Contemplations,’” Early American Literature, 2007, Vol. 42, No. 1 (2007), 31–72, further secularizes Bradstreet, seeing her as portraying nature and human history in its “vicissitudes, havoc and agonies … without being involved in the temporal scheme of redemption,” p. 39. 58. Jean Marie Lutes, “Negotiating Theology and Gynecology: Anne Bradstreet’s Representations of the Female Body,” Signs 22.2 (Winter 1997), 309–40, p. 311. 59. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 281. Assessing the position of women in Puritanism depends on whether comparison is made to what came after or before it. Amanda Porterfield, Female Piety in Puritan New England (NY: Oxford University Press, 1992), reviews arguments around the position of New England women, weighing privileges of church membership, Puritan spiritual equality, increased authority, and affection in the family, as against continued legal and social subordination and debility, pp.  82–84. She argues that “the Puritans stand on the cusp of the divide between early modern and modern social orders,” whose dissenting status “augured for a modern liberal order” for gender as well, pp.  51–2. Edmund Morgan The Puritan Family (NY: Harper & Row 1944, 1966), notes that the New English “Puritan wife” held privileges in comparison with earlier periods and even contemporary England. “Her husband’s authority was strictly limited. He could not lawfully strike her, nor command her anything contrary to the laws of God … explicitly defined in the civil codes.” Although under the rule of her husband, she yet had “authority equal to that of her husband” in relation to children and servants, p. 45. 60. David Donald Hall, The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638, A Documentary History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), p.  337. Patricia Caldwell, “The Antinomian Language Controversy,” Harvard Theological Review, 69, 1976, 345–367; Lisa Gordis, Opening Scripture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), sees Hutchinson’s claims of “immediate revelation” as “only subtly different from the norms of Bible reading that the Massachusetts Bay clergy advocated,” p. 169.

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61. Hall, Antinomian Controversy, p. 324. 62. Amanda Porterfield, pp.  99–100: that Hutchinson stepped over the acceptable line in granting her “own experiences … as much inspiration and authority as the Bible,” cf. note 87. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004), argues that regarding the distinctions between the covenants of works and grace, “Hutchinson’s ‘heresies’ arguably do not lie outside of Puritan doctrine at all,” p. 54, but that her “emphasis on immediacy extended to a contempt for the mediating power of the language of the Bible itself,” p. 55. At stake is the “boundary between private conscience and public order,” p. 62. 63. Michael Winship, Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 179. 64. Ronald Cohen, “Church and State in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts: Another Look at the Antinomian Controversy,” Puritan New England: Essays on Religion, Society and Culture, eds. Alden T. Vaughan, Francis J. Bremer (NY: Saint Martin’s Press, 1977), 174–186, p. 179. 65. David Daniell, The Bible in English, p. 297, cf. note 5. 66. Agnieska Salska, “Puritan Poetry: Its Public and Private Strain,” Early American Literature 19 (1984): 107–21, p. 119. 67. Bradstreet’s well-known “Prologue” to her longer public epics undercuts the division, declaring that she will not “sing of wars, of captains and of kings” when she then does so, while situating herself in the domestic kitchen, requesting “thyme or Parsley wreath, I ask no Bays.” 68. Ditmore, p. 59, cf. note 84. 69. The Works of Anne Bradstreet, ed. Jeannine Hensley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 272–291. Hereafter cited as AB followed by page number. 70. Zach Hutchins, “The Wisdom of Anne Bradstreet: Eschewing Eve and Emulating Elizabeth,” Modern Language Studies, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Summer 2010), pp.  38–59, details Bradstreet’s biblical involvement, from The Tenth Muse’s “David’s Lamentation for Saul and Jonathan” where “even the apparently secular history of ‘The Four Monarchies’ is, in large part, a redaction of biblical narratives,” to “Contemplations” which revisits Eden, and “The Vanity of All Worldly Creatures” as not only quoting but rewriting Ecclesiastes, pp.  40, 49. He argues that Bradstreet, in saying ““Vanity say I” “assumed identity as herself the preacher,” p. 50. 71. Ditmore focuses on “Contemplations,” where he argues that the sun does not represent the “Son,” but rather “the material qualities of the sun to the exclusion of any Christological hint.” His distinction between the use of the Bible as “poetic but not theological allusion” is hard to accept, p.  65. He similarly underscores the importance of Ecclesiastes to Bradstreet, but calls it “secular wisdom,” p. 32, cf. note 84.

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72. Rosamund Rosenmeier, “‘Divine Translation’: A Contribution to the Study of Anne Bradstreet’s Method in the Marriage Poems,” Early American Literature, Fall, 1977, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Fall, 1977), pp. 121–135, pp. 122, 125. She describes the text as “a single unified poem about the temporal and the eternal, about their intersection in man who must… live in both worlds at once,” p. 117. Robert Daly similarly sees Bradstreet’s figures as an immediate typology that imaged “in the perceived world … the communicable glories of God,” in a “harmonious creation of a single God … held together by Him in a web of intrinsic correspondence,” pp. 91–92, cf. note 84. 73. Joel. R. Beeke and Mark Jones, “The Puritans on the Perseverance of the Saints,” https://www.monergism.com/puritans-­perseverance-­saints. Jonathan Jonathan  Edwards, “Of The Perseverance of the Saints” https://www.ccel.org/ccel/edwards/works2.xi.vii.html. 74. Morgan, Puritan Family, p. 9. “Every marriage was founded on a covenant to which the free and voluntary consent of both parties was necessary,” p. 30. 75. Sweet, “the domestic poems merely reproduced the ideology of social discourse which reifies gender,” p. 169, cf. note 84. 76. Hambrick-Stowe reads the poem as expressing “the ecstasy of her own mystical union with Christ,” p. 19, cf. note 82. Rosamund Rosenmeier in Anne Bradstreet Revisited (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991) rightly emphasizes how persistently Bradstreet “echoes biblical voices,” p. 5. But ultimately her focus is on wisdom literature, turning wisdom itself into a figure of Christ. Her reading of the marriage poems becomes almost a code of Christic allegory representing “Christ’s presence in the life of the married couple,” pp. 114, 121–123, and culminating in a “resolution of conflict,” p. 115. 77. Ivy Schweitzer, The Work of Self Representation: Lyric Poetry in Colonial New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), reads the poem as “culminat[ing] in the marriage relation in its individual and collective forms,” p. 174, but one that reflects the “structural inferiority of woman’s social and religious roles … the lovers in this poem may be equal in affection but not equal in position,” p. 176. 78. Another source could be Du Bartas’ “Divine Weekes” which provides a naturalistic description of both turtle dove and mullet, Requa, p. 11. 79. Eberwein places Bradstreet’s memoir within such practices of self-­ examination and suggests that Bradstreet could have been writing her confession as a model for her children. She finally sees Bradstreet’s “argumentation” as culminating in “unity,” pp. 165–6. Robert D. Richardson, “The Puritan Poetry of Anne Bradstreet,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 9 (I967) 317–31, notes that Bradstreet’s experiencing “severe

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doubts about her faith does not make her any the less a Puritan” and was a sign not of “the rebelliousness of an anti-Puritan temperament, but as an attempt to achieve the Puritan ideal of living in the world without being of it,” p. 318. 80. Charles Hambrick-Stowe, p. 16. 81. Stanford, “Dogma,” p. 373; Ann Stanford, Anne Bradstreet: The Worldly Puritan (NY: Burt Franklin, 1975), pp. 107–8. 82. As Rosenmeier argues, “Divine Translation,” p. 113, citing Rev 19:1 and Luke 12:40. “I am come to send fire on the earth,” cf. note 102. As Richardson writes, “there is a genuine conflict which is resolved, if at all, with difficulty,” p. 321, cf. note 109. 83. Elizabeth Wade White, Anne Bradstreet: The Tenth Muse (New York, 1971), writes that “it is likely that Anne Bradstreet attended his [Cotton’s] lectures and sermons as often as she could.” John Harvard Ellis, The Works of Anne Bradstreet (New York, I897), p. xiii, says it is probable that Cotton officiated at Anne and Simon Bradstreet’s marriage. Anne was a member of Cotton’s parish both in old and New England, until she moved to Ipswich. 84. A full account of these two complex, much debated controversies exceeds this discussion. Michael Winship’s Making Heretics gives a detailed account of the unfolding of the  Hutchinson trial. Perry Miller’s Roger Williams: His Contribution to the American Tradition (NY: Atheneum, 1970, 1953) remains the classic treatment of the controversy. Cf. Stephen Foster, “New England and the Challenge of Heresy, 1630 to 1660,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 38, R (Oct. 1981) 624–60. 85. Hall, Antinomian Controversy, 341–2, cf. note 88. 86. Correspondence of John Cotton, ed. Sargent Bush, Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), p. 231. 87. Stephen Foster “New England and the Challenge of Heresy,” p.  645. Foster underscores both that dissension was integral to the Puritan venture, not an anomaly, but also the core commitment to “individual godliness is attained and practiced in company,” thus invested in balancing individual with community life, p. 626. 88. John Cotton, “Treatise on the Covenant of Grace,” 1671 Early English Books Online, pp. 87, 178–179. 89. Bercovitch, “Typology.” 90. Bercovitch, “Typology.” Cf. Jesper Rosenmeier, “The Teacher and the Witness: John Cotton and Roger Williams,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Jul. 1968, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Jul. 1968), pp.  408–431, pp. 420–421. 91. Quoted Larzer Ziff, The Career of John Cotton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), p. 19.

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92. Worthington C. Ford, Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2nd series Vol. XVI, 1902, 280–284. 93. John Cotton, Gods Promise to His Plantation (1630), ed. Reiner Smolinski (Georgia State University), DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska – Lincoln. 94. John Cotton, “Preface to Samuel Stone’s ‘A Congregational Church is a Catholike Visible Church,’” American Poetry of the 17th Century, ed. Harrison Merisole (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press 1985), p. 381. 95. Miller, New England Mind, p.  415; Miller, Errand, p.  68; Winship, Making Heretics, defends this Puritan millenarianism, p. 60. 96. John Cotton, The Bloody Tenent Washed Clean New York, Arno (reprint) 1972, p.  126. Cf. Bercovitch, “Typology,” as a covenant “by which a group of men enter voluntarily into a pact with God,” where the “personal conversion” of the “particular Christian” is one with the “joynt calling of a company,” p. 181. 97. Hannibal Hamlin, Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (NY: Cambridge University Press, 2004); G. Lloyd Jones, The Discovery of Hebrew in Tudor England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), p. 82. 98. Amy Morris, “The Art of Purifying: The Bay Psalm Book and Colonial Puritanism,” Early American Literature, 2007, 42:1, 2007, 107–130, p. 120. 99. “Preface to the 1640 Bay Psalm Book,” facsimile internet archive. Cf. “The Draft of the Preface to the Bay Psalm Book,” Zolton Haraszti, The Enigma of the Bay Psalms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 107–115, p. 110 . It was Haraszti who proved that the Preface was written by John Cotton, as was the translation of Psalm 23. 100. Haraszti, Enigma, p. 37. 101. John Winthrop, Journal (ed. 1908) I 105, 110, 196, Massachusetts Colonial Records I, 174. 102. David Donald Hall, “Readers and Writers in Early New England,” A History of the Book in America, Vol. 1, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, eds. David D. Hall, Hugh Amory (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 117–151, p. 138. 103. John Cotton, “Abstract of Laws and Government” first printed in 1641, reprinted by Will Aspinwall 1655, Early English Books Online. Edward Chauncey Baldwin in “The Permanent Elements in the Hebrew Law” shows how Cotton’s laws influenced and were incorporated into subsequent Massachusetts and Connecticut basic laws, claiming that “The Connecticut Colony, like Massachusetts, adopted in part the Hebrew Torah,” International Journal of Ethics, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Apr. 1915),

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pp.  360–371, p.  364. Isabel Calder remarks in “John Cotton and the New Haven Colony,” New England Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 1, Jan. 1930, 82–94, that the code was not adopted probably because it was “too brief and general.” But she also notes that it was not rejected, p.  87. Cf. J. F. Maclear, “New England and the Fifth Monarchy: The Quest for the Millennium in Early American Puritanism,” The William and Mary Quarterly Third Series, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Apr. 1975), pp. 223–260. 104. See Shira Wolosky, “Biblical Republicanism: John Cotton’s ‘Moses His Judicials’ and American Hebraism,” Hebraic Political Studies, winter 2009. 105. Everett Emerson uses this phrase in John Cotton (NY: Twayne, 1965), p. 145. A failure to see the full role of the Bible in the “Judicials” appears in Isabel Calder’s “John Cotton and the New Haven Colony,” New England Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 1, Jan. 1930, 82–94, where the code is described as “not biblical in a sense that its contents were drawn from the Bible,” but rather that its “provisions [are] supported by marginal scriptural references to prove that they are in harmony with the word of God.” But scriptural reference is systematic and formative throughout. 106. Theodore Dwight Bozeman, in his extensive treatment of Cotton in To Live Ancient Lives, devotes very few passages to the “Judicials,” which he sees as outward and repressive in its fixation on Old Testament law, p. 160. 107. Michael Winship points out that the term “republican” is multivalent and contested in both meaning and history; yet he argues for its application to early American Puritanism, Godly Republicanism, p. 4. 108. R. J. Ross, “Distinguishing Eternal from Transient Law: Natural Law and the Judicial Laws of Moses,” Past and Present 217 (Nov. 2012): 79–115, places the Judicials among the “histories of the ancient Hebrews … drawing on the Talmud and rabbinic commentaries” that emerged in the sixteenth century, which depicted “the Jewish commonwealth less as the tutor of a stiff-necked, spiritually impoverished people than as an honoured model of state and legal order, being the only one designed personally by God,” p. 90. 109. John Cotton, Way of Churches, 1645, p. 4, also 2–3, 61–62. Baldwin, p. 25. 110. John Cotton, “Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven” (Weston Rhyn: Quinta Press, 2017), p.  36. http://quintapress.webmate.me/PDF_Books/ John_Cotton/The_Keys_2017_v3.pdf. 111. Cotton, “Keys,” p. 14. 112. Carl Degler, Out of Our Past (NY: Harper, 1984), pp. 24–25. 113. For general discussions of the legal system’s backgrounds, see George Lee Haskins, Law and Authority in Early Massachusetts (NY: Anchor Books, 1968). On the relative leniency of Puritan law, see David Flaherty, Privacy in Colonial New England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,

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1972). Everett Emerson notes the leniency of New England Law compared to contemporary English law, p. 148, also discussed by Bozeman, p.  174. Cf. Edgar McManus, Law and Liberty in Early New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993). 114. John Cotton, Correspondence, p. 244. 115. This account of Taylor’s refusal to publish has been challenged; Francis Murphy, “Edward Taylor’s Attitude toward Publication: A Question Concerning Authority,” American Literature 34 (Nov. 1962), 393–394. 116. Karl Keller, The Example of Edward Taylor (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1975), describes Taylor’s as essentially a private poetry, p. 55. Cf. Lowance, who also sees Taylor’s poetry as personalized, pp. 96, 105–6, 101. 117. Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969). The tripartite meditation structure as applied to Taylor was elaborated by Martz and forms the starting point of a continuing discourse on Taylor. Martz charts its structure, pp.  163ff. Cf. Martz “Forward” to The Poems of Edward Taylor, ed. Donald Stanford (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), p. xxvi. All poems are cited from this edition as ETP followed by page number. There are many variations for describing Taylor’s poetic structure. Barbara Lewalski and others have pointed out that the poems do not strictly follow meditation and distinguish Taylor’s “Protestant” meditation from Catholic forms in that they pursue ongoing processes without achieving final resolution, Protestant Poetics and the 17th Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p.  397. The question of Taylor’s mysticism continues to be debated. 118. Perkins cited by Hambrick-Stowe, 166–167, 127. Cf. p. 163, that “meditation involved the successive application of the passage or topic to each of the faculties, from cogitation and memory to conscience, affections, and will.” As a conversion pattern, see Norman Grabo, Edward Taylor (NY: Twayne, 196), 43–44; Keller, Example, p. 6, cf. note 147. Wilson Brissat, “Edward Taylor’s Public Devotions,” Early American Literature 44(3), 457–487, Jan. 2009, focuses on conversion as the core structure of Taylor’s poetics as “affectional” preparation toward “personal readiness to receive the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper,” pp. 466, 459–460. 119. Cited in Hambricke-Stowe, p. 165, cf. note 82. 120. Kathleen Blake calls Taylor’s a “Non-substantiating Metaphor” that “conceives and expresses a key metaphysical relationship, namely, the link between concrete and abstract, physical and spiritual, vehicle and tenor, what he calls Signe and Signatum,” “Edward Taylor’s Protestant Poetic: Non-transubstantiating Metaphor,” American Literature 43:1 (Mar. 1971), 1–24, pp. 1–2, 5, 18.

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121. Thomas and Virginia Davis argue for a Psalmic rather than meditation model for the poems, “Edward Taylor’s Metrical Paraphrases of the Psalms,” American Literature 48:4, Jan. 1977, 455–70, as does Rosemary Fithian Guruswamy, who sees the poems’ tripartite structure as Psalmic patterns of “lament,” “supplication,” “praise.” “Words of My Mouth, Meditations of My Heart: Edward Taylor’s Preparatory Meditations and the book of Psalms,” Early American Literature 20 (1985), 89–119. Jeffrey Hammond argues that the Preparatory Meditations are Taylor’s own version of the psalms, p. 225. 122. For typological interpretations, see Ursula Brumm, “Edward Taylor and the Poetic Use of Religious Imagery,” Typology and Early American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972); Karl Keller “The World Slickt Up in Types,” Typology and Early American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch, 175–190, p. 175; also Karl Keller Example, where he adopts the meditation structure of memory, understanding, will, p. 175, cf. note 147. Karen Rowe’s Saint and Singer offers a book length study on typology, cf. note 70. 123. Most readings of Taylor focus on his interiority. Thomas and Virginia Davis, “Introduction,” Edward Taylor’s Minor Poetry Vol 3: the Unpublished Writings of Edward Taylor, eds. Thomas M. and Virginia L.  Davis (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981), see the Meditations as a “turning inward” and “internaliz[ing] of Edward’s “deepest and most personal responses to the encroachment of the secular world,” p. xviii, “focusing almost exclusively on the celebration of the embosomed soul in the womblike bower of Solomon’s hortus conclusis,” p. xix. Cf. Thomas M. Davis, A Reading of Edward Taylor (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), who sees Taylor’s poetry as “less and less concerned with this world,” p. 31. 124. For discussion of the relationship and order of composition between poems and sermons, see Norman Grabo in his edition of the Christographia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962). 125. Martz, Poetry of Meditation, p. 27, cf. note 148. As one instruction puts it, “Christ crucified appears unto him in everie place and at all times,” Martz, p. 72. Although Linda Haims claims that Taylor shows a “strong personal need to visualize God in corporeal form,” this is not supported by the poems she cites, “Puritan Iconography,” Puritan Poets and Poetics, ed. Peter White (Penn State University Press, 1985), 84–97, pp. 85, 97. “Passion” is mentioned in a number of poems, but always as a personal emotion: for example, Meditations 1: 40, 43; 2: 45, 97, A Concordance to the Poems of Edward Taylor, ed. Gene Russel (Washington, DC: Microcard Editions, 1973). Protestant iconoclasm was of course also directed against crucifixes.

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126. John Cotton, The Way of Life (London: printed by M.F. for L.  Fawn, 1641), p. 381. Hambricke-Stowe, pp. 157–8, cf. note 82. 127. Printed Catalogues of The Harvard College Library 1723–1790, ed. W.H. Bond & High Amory, Boston: The Colonial Society of Massachusetts 1996, Vol. 68. See Golda Werman, Milton and Midrash (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995), regarding the sorts of Hebrew knowledge characteristic among Puritans. Even if direct reading of Hebrew midrash was beyond the normal skill of Puritans, many translations and commentaries incorporating this material were available, pp. 28–31. Cf. Jeffrey Shoulson, Milton and the Rabbis (NY: Columbia University Press, 2001). 128. For Taylor’s knowledge and uses of Hebrew, see Charles Mignon, “Introduction” to Taylor’s Upon the Types of the Old Testament (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), xxvii–xxix. Taylor, in, for example, his paraphrases of the Psalms, includes brackets when he adds a word or phrase not in the Hebrew text and creates elaborate English letters for the Hebrew alphabet, Davis, Minor Poetry, pp. 296–7, cf. note 154. Also Thomas and Virginia Davis, “Edward Taylor’s Metrical Paraphrases of the Psalm,” American Literature 48:4, Jan. 1977, 455–70, on Taylor’s bracketing of added words for clarity or metrical and rhyming purposes, pp. 459–460. Taylor’s zeal for Hebrew may have been unusual, Thomas Siegel, “Professor Stephen Sewall and the transformation of Hebrew at Harvard,” Hebrew and the Bible in America, ed. Shalom Goldman (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1993), 228–246, p.  229. One example of an intimate knowledge of Hebrew appears in Meditation 2: 22. Taylor follows a commentary from the Mishne Psachim 1:1, which elaborates the practices of “searching for the leavened” bread, instructing to pass through the house by candlelight to search out crumbs in every “corner” and then burn it the next day, in fulfillment of the verse commandment from Exodus 12:19 : “For seven days no yeast is to be found in your houses.” 129. Taylor’s verse is seen as a kind of “indecorum” in Charles Mignon, “Edward Taylor’s Preparatory Meditations: A Decorum of Imperfection,” PMLA 83, 1968, 1423–1428. Barbara Lewalski describes Taylor’s homely language as fallen, and as deliberately enacting “failure as a means to glorify God,” pp.  399, 391. Herbert Blau, “Heaven’s Sugar Cake: Theology and Imagery in the Poetry of Edward Taylor,” New England Quarterly, 26, 1953, 337–360, calls Taylor’s “magnification out of proportion of the commonest object” the “most salient feature of his poetic,” as a case of “bungling ingenuity and lapses of taste” which do not meet “the demands of poetic decorum,” pp. 355, 359. This criticism is echoed by Michael Reed, “Edward Taylor’s Poetry: Puritan Structure and Form,” American Literature 46: 3, 304–12.

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130. Martz in his original “Forward” more or less decries Taylor’s “rough phrasing” along with his “unseemly use of common imagery” (xv, xxviii). Karl Keller too is irritated by Taylor’s “annoying” and “disruptive scholastic rhetorical devices,” p. 96. Thomas Davis concludes A Reading with the need to “put up with his word games, his atrocious punning,” p. 204. 131. John Cotton, Singing of Psalms, p.  32. Hambricke-Stowe, p.  100, cf. note 82. Wilson Brissat, “Edward Taylor’s Public Devotions,” importantly argues for the “overlap between material and religious traditions” in the communal poetic expression of congregational singing of psalms, as a mode of “social cohesion,” underscoring that “the unity of public and private devotion was indeed characteristic of Puritan spirituality,” p. 458. Brissat emphasizes Taylor’s public implications although he still presents Taylor’s as an “aesthetic of subjectivity,” p. 460, and a “pilgrim journey of his own soul,” albeit one that “fueled the administration of a very public ritual at the communion table,” p. 474, note 49. 132. Morgan, Puritan Family, p.  9: “It was called a family covenant or a church covenant or a state covenant,” cf. note 87. 133. Hambrick-Stowe, p. 156, cf. note 82. 134. Michael Colacurcio points out that Taylor in this text is not eschatological, that the coach that claims the saints is the church. “The interest saints take in the spiritual lives of one another within the covenant of a particular church is more glorious than beatitude itself.” He concludes with a preference for “Taylor the pastoral-rhetorician” as more convincing than “Taylor the would-be mystic,” “God’s Determinations Touching HalfWay Membership,” American Literature 39:3, 1967, 298–314, p. 313. 135. John Cotton, “Preface,” Bay Psalm Book, pp. 22, 24. 136. John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” p. 195. 137. Hambricke-Stowe, citing John White, pp. 159; p. 69, cf. note 82. 138. Hambricke-Stowe, p. 123, 130, 128–9. “New Englanders were brought into the order of redemption by virtue of the covenant, and that covenant, with God and with one another, supported the ordinances of mutual communion. The making of the church covenant was the primary ordinance upon which the others were built,” p. 127. 139. Hambrick-Stowe, pp. 129–130, 131, cf. note 82. 140. Robert Blaire St. George, Conversing by Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), extensively investigates house imagery in Puritan culture, including examples from Taylor. “The house is a metaphor of the body of the spiritually elect community,” p. 141. He notes that this materiality as characteristic of the ancient Hebrews, p. 123. 141. Miller, New England Mind, p. 400, cites Taylor as example.

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142. Martz in his “Forward” claims that except for an “occasional canoe or rattlesnake” the American scene is absent from Taylor’s work, xxxv. Cf. Michael Clark, “The Crucified Phrase: Sign and Desire in Puritan semiology,” Early American Literature, Vol. XIII, No. 3, Winter 1978/9, 278–293, p. 285. Even Keller calls Taylor’s “details of frontier life curiously artificial” and allegorized (p.  57), as well as questioning how “American” Taylor’s language is, as opposed to a near private idiom, Example, p. 87. 143. Miller, New England Mind, p. 398. As the “theoretical foundation of the state as well as salvation,” covenant succeeded “for a time in uniting a whole thought upon a single concept.” 144. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (NY: Oxford University Press, 2009). H.  Richard Niebuhr, Kingdom, criticizes Max Weber’s claim that Protestantism generates capitalism, underscoring the Puritan suspicion against sheer economic gain, p. 86. 145. John Cotton, “Christ the Fountain of Life,” p.  119. Sermon 8, p.  93. http://www.digitalpuritan.net/Digital%20Puritan%20Resources/ Cotton,%20John/Christ%20the%20Fountain%20of%20Life.pdf. Cf. John Cotton, Way of Life, warning “not to be carried away with the world,” 455–457. Robert S.  Michaelsen, “Changes in the Puritan Concept of Calling or Vocation,” The New England Quarterly, Sep. 1953, Vol. 26, No. 3, pp. 315–336. 146. Strout, p. 17, cf. note 80. 147. Miller, Errand, p. 90. 148. Wolin, “Calvin sees the church as a fellowship bound together by ties of faith and united in a common quest for salvation,” p. 166, cf. note 62. 149. Strout, p. 75, cf. note 80. 150. Michael Wigglesworth, “God’s Controversy with New England,” Merisole, 42–53. The poem remained unpublished, although Wigglesworth’s “Day of Doom” was hugely popular. The “Controversy” takes as its epigraph Isaiah 5:4, “when I looked that it should bring forth grapes, brought it forth wilde grapes?” 151. Bercovitch, American Jeremiad. 152. David Shields, ed. American Poetry of the 17th and 18th Centuries (NY: Library of America, 2007), pp.  20, 19. Johnson was the author of “Wonder-­Working Providence of Zion’s Saviour in New England.” 153. David L. Parker, “Edward Taylor’s Preparationism: A New Perspective on the Taylor–Stoddard Controversy,” Early American Literature, Winter, 1976/1977, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Winter, 1976/1977), pp.  259–278, pp. 260–261. 154. Gordis, Opening Scripture, p. 202. Gordis emphasizes that the Half-Way Covenant controversy nonetheless marked an acknowledgment that “dif-

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ferences inhered in the interpretive process,” p. 210, leaving the decision about baptism to each church according to its own membership, cf. note 88. 155. Calvin’s views of typology are variously debated. All agree that he underscored the “literal” and “historical” text, resisting pure spiritualized allegory. G. Sujin Pak, Judaizing Calvin (NY: Oxford UP, 2010), p. 79. 156. Bercovitch, “Typology,” p. 169. 157. Karl Keller presents Taylor, in pursuing the courses of typology, as maneuvering to insert himself into its schema so as to make them “ ­ personally relevant,” opening “room for the individual within the closed system of thought that typology represents,” thereby “sneaking himself into the plan of salvation by means of the vehicle of language” “World Slickt Up in Types,” pp. 175, 182, cf. note 153. 158. Mignon, cf. note 158. 159. William Bradford, dedication to “Of Plymouth Plantation” (NY: Random House, 1981), p. 1. 160. Miller, New England Mind, p.  349. Miller points out that being plain became itself a topic and effort. As to poetry, “it was always in grave danger of overstepping its limits and becoming pleasing for its own sake,” p. 361. 161. Edward Taylor, Christographia, p.  253. Taylor cites Psalm 45: 2  in Hebrew, “fairer than Adam” (yefefia mibnei adam), as his biblical text for the precedence of truth before beauty. 162. Keller, Example, pp.  119, 181, 121, 94, 276, 122–123, 76, 280. Cf. Clark Griffith, “Edward Taylor and the Momentum of Metaphor,” English Language History, 33 Dec. 1966, who sees Taylor as “paying lavish tribute to his own creative powers” in celebration of “human inventiveness,” pp.  457–458. Cf. Norman Grabo, “The Veiled Vision: The Role of Aesthetics in Early American Intellectual History,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., XIX 4 (i962), 493–510, on the contradictions between Taylor’s “comments on poetic theory” as against his poems which “betray another quite sophisticated symbolic sense,” p. 500. 163. Larzer Ziff, Puritanism in America (NY: Viking Press, 1973), “Every man was encouraged to read his Bible with his own eyes, but he was equally required then to bring his understanding into line with the judgments of the ministry as they were expounded from the pulpit,” p. 112. Gordis, Opening Scripture, traces the tensions between the ideal of a plain biblical text that can “interpret itself” to all readers and the claim to interpretive authority by ministers, for example, pp. 5–6, note 88. 164. Quoted Jesper Rosenmeier, “Clearing the Medium”: A Reevaluation of the Puritan Plain Style in Light of John Cotton’s “A Practicall Commentary upon the First Epistle Generall of John,”” William and

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Mary Quarterly, Oct. 1980, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Oct. 1980), pp. 577–591, p.  578. Cf. Larzer Ziff, “The Literary Consequences of Puritanism,” ELH, Sep. 1963, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Sep. 1963), pp. 293–305, that the plain style observed “a sense that the words themselves are artificial vehicles but that the truth they are intended to carry is absolute and independent of them,” p. 298. 165. Robert Daly, God’s Altar, pp.  28, 38, 175–176, pp.  28, 38, 175–176; Rowe, who sees Taylor’s types as ensuring that the Old Testament’s “literal text yield up spiritual truths” as revealed in a “disparate” and “antithetical New Testament,” ultimately “resolving the antitheses” between the two, pp. 234–5. Albert Gelpi concurs, but in Emersonian terms: “the poet’s task [is] to apprehend the types in his own experience in order to say how Nature reflects Spirit,” The Tenth Muse (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp.  48, 50. Cf. Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), “there is no occasion for dramatic conflict” in Taylor, but only “discovered evidence, felt to be ready-­made, God made,” pp. 45, 51–2. 166. Michael Clark, “The Crucified Phrase,” Early American Literature xiii 3 winter 1978/9 278–293, pp.  288, 286, 290, sees Taylor’s imagery as ensuing “from the inevitable spiritual disappointment in this world as a representation of God’s image and will as known by faith,” p. 289. Cf. Michael Clark, “The Honeyed Knot of Puritan Aesthetics,” that similitude dissolved into “words that contained hidden gaps that separated the visible and invisible worlds as ontologically distinct and epistemologically antithetical,” p.  75. Puritan Poets and Poetics: Seventeenth-Century American Poetry in Theory and Practice, ed. Peter White, and Harrison T.  Meserole (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1985), 67–83. 167. Robert Daly, p. 185, 188, cf. note 84. 168. Ann Kibbey, The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism: A Study of Rhetoric, Prejudice, and Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 49. 169. Stevenson, p. 76, note 10. 170. Bercovitch, “Bibliographical Preface,” p.  252. Raymond Craig, “The ‘Peculiar Elegance’ of Edward Taylor’s Poetics,” The Tayloring Shop, ed. Michael Schuldiner (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997), 68–101, rightly points out that Taylor’s biblical poetics extends into an intertextuality among biblical references as both method and model: “the Word interprets the Word and the Word interprets Taylor’s experiences,” p. 82. Cf. Jeffrey Hammond describes the Bible as Taylor’s “underlying metatext,” p. 19. Keller notes that meditative structure doesn’t explain Taylor’s language, p. 171. 171. Cotton, “Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven,” p. 11.

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172. Baldwin, p. 19. Cf. Cushing Strout, “scrutiny gave every believer potential argument against the authority of the clergy,” p. 17, cf. note 80. 173. Wolin, pp.  173, 176. Cf. David Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm and the Great Awakening (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969), on the Puritan attempt to “balance between a driving thirst for the Holy Spirit and a rational and responsible regard for the role of Scripture and the law,” p. 62. 174. Bercovitch, American Jeremiad, p. 108. 175. Perry Miller, Nature’s Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 88.

CHAPTER 3

Biblical Poetic Wars: Covenant, Millennium, Apocalypse

The Bible has been wielded as a weapon of war perhaps since its earliest compositions and certainly in American history.1 War is the most extreme field of intersection between the Bible and public events. The prominent place taken by Scripture in debates about American society and its self-­ definition, about relationships between individual and community, parts and wholes, past and future, made the Bible itself a party to division when these competing claims sharpened into conflict. The complex intersection between religion and American warfare emerges as national scene in the War of Independence. That there are deep connections between the Revolution and the First Great Awakening earlier in the century is generally acknowledged, although there remains ongoing debate as to just what those connections are. Disagreement continues as well regarding what role religion played in the Revolutionary period and the forms it took during the religious fervor of the Second Great Awakening that followed the Revolution and lasted until the Civil War.2 Linking the eighteenth century to the Puritan past, the First Great Awakening transformed religious experience and organization. Dispersing religious authority from trained ministers to inspired preachers who appealed to mass gatherings in unstructured camp meetings, the Awakening multiplied denominations, consolidated ties between colonies

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and provided terms for American nationality and purpose that persisted through the Revolutionary period and into the nineteenth century.3 The Bible remains pivotal throughout this period and its events: in how they were discussed and understood and in the formation of community as well as of individuals within it. Yet it did so alongside other emerging public discourses that rivaled but also combined with religious ones. Religion retained its framing power within American historical and political self-understandings, but was transformed by republican, Enlightenment, and economic terms newly entering and shaping American public life. It is this combination of discourses that the poetries of the war display. Poetry, circulating in journals and featured at public events, took part in the interplay between religious and political, social, and economic terms that characterized newspaper articles and political speeches as well as sermons.4 Poetry offers language scenes in which these core cultural discourses encounter each other, opening them to investigation. Terms that circulate in surrounding discourses find place in poetry’s frame, where their variety of meanings are activated in combinations with other words. Like a laboratory of language, poetry is a rich arena for discourse analysis, as well as a unique form of address and participation. Poetry telescopes language, intensifies images and verbal events, juxtaposes and recombines terms. It enacts a discourse drama in which diverse idioms, their trajectories and claims, come into contact and conflict. This is the case from the Revolutionary to the Civil War, where poetry mobilized the terms of conflict in complex cultural ways. The Bible looms large in both social discourses and poetry. Examining the verse from the Revolutionary period through the Civil War makes visible the Bible’s place and role within larger schema at issue and in dispute in America. As American identity became increasingly contested in the approach to each war, the Bible too begins to fray as a common discourse. It becomes instead itself a scene of discord and dispute, participant in the clashes over identity which it also played a powerful role in shaping. Lincoln, in his Lyceum speech in Springfield in 1838, called America’s “political religion” its faith in the republican “undecided experiment,” of people to “govern themselves” despite differences and without a coercive authority.5 As a shared text of diverse interpretations, the Bible is integral to that experiment. The biblical poetry of war enacts both common and contesting voices, as they marshaled the Bible toward building the nation and also tearing it asunder.

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Covenant, Millennium, Apocalypse Religious and biblical discourses were the dominant ones in the early colonial period, transformed but also extended by the First Great Awakening. In the Revolutionary period, rival discourses emerged, of Enlightenment rationalism, civic republicanism, and liberal individualism.6 What J.G.A. Pocock calls “the language of republicanism” entered public circulation, through vocabularies of “natural liberties, legal statutes, royal charters, and constitutional rights.”7 Yet these did not simply push religious terms to the side. Rather, each co-resided with the others in mutual as well as contesting ways. Each engaged, overlapped, and shaped as well as competed with the other.8 In the earlier colonial period, the Bible provided what Philip Gorski calls a “shared vocabulary,” which made possible a “civility” in which “the Puritans debated its meaning, but they agreed on its significance.” The result was a “web of meaning strong enough to hold the Bay Colony together during its formative years and elastic enough to encompass the nation as a whole during later years.”9 According to Emory Elliot, such religious rhetoric in the time of Revolution similarly conjoined with, rather than rivaling republican discourses, forging a sense of unity of purpose.10 Debates over the priorities of religion, rationalism, and republicanism register how much their terms were shared, but thereby also shifted in their religious and political meanings. Distinctions between them often blurred.11 Religious terms became political, and political terms religious. The Revolution itself was like “a political Great Awakening in which the people were reconverted to their national mission, expressed in an amalgam of religious and political terms.”12 According to Pocock, it is such overlap that allows public discourse “to reconcile men pursuing different activities and diversity of goals and values.” This is made possible by the “inherent ambiguity” of language, where terms “transform each other as they interact.”13 Such ambiguity allowed and invited religious and republican trends to enforce each other during the Revolutionary period. Expressions could be embraced by a range of people and purposes, where the “common use of a single term masked varied understandings.” In this way “religious believers could become full participants” in America and America could be “incorporated into the history of redemption.”14 Certain key words emerge as pivotal in carrying divergent yet overlapping senses. Among the most notable are liberty, virtue, tyranny, and

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slavery. All belong to both Christian and republican lexicons, but in different yet also at times converging senses.15 In republican discourses, virtue meant putting common good before private interest. But this shares meanings with Christian virtue, which likewise asserts community and guards against unmitigated self-interest.16 Liberty in both politics and religion stands in opposition against tyranny: in Whig republican discourses freedom from tyranny and enslavement; in Calvinist terms, as liberty from sin and also resistance to authority when it betrays religion.17 Both Ruth Bloch and Mark Noll underscore the ambiguous meanings of liberty as both “salvation and legal rights in the political order,” while virtue was likewise “ambiguous both as Christian moral duties and patriotism of the public spirited citizen.”18 Such ambiguities could unify public discourse, but also could conceal inconsistencies. How these values fit together in the course of events was itself profoundly framed by biblical structure, alongside appeal to Enlightenment principles. One of the core powers of biblical discourse is the shaping of time as interpretation of history. Three patterns that stand out are covenant, millennialism, and apocalypse. These are distinct from each other, although the boundaries between them are not always clear or stable. Covenant calls for a society in which “the inhabitants voluntarily established public support,”19 a model for republican civic life that reflected and could still draw upon earlier religious formations. As Philip Gorski writes, there was a “convergence of covenant theology and classic republicanism,” joining “virtues and liberty and elect community with secular history under providence.”20 Covenant shared with civic life location within the world of history, “reflect[ing] spiritual interests and secular activities of everyday life, both temporal and spiritual benefits.”21 Its notion of community bound together by “consent” and “promise” through common venture, as R. Niebuhr writes, could be translated into republican terms.22 Its norm of “mutual engagement by free consent,” where citizens enter the compact “by willing consent and active participation” entered “American political doctrine,” with covenant “the cord that binds [community] together,” taking place already “in this world and not the next.”23 Thus, the “covenanting model was extended to the civil polity as well.”24 Covenant’s civic orientation allowed ambiguity as between individual and community commitments. Covenant’s sense that “individual interests are subordinated to the common good” is not identical to the purely individualist “contract of market society of private interest.”25 Liberty then means economic freedom, whereas in covenant it signals consent to

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common projects. But both senses can be understood within the terms of republican discourses. Both religious and civic senses of covenant worked “as a form of socialization to identify personal goals with community.” Individual and community were linked to each other in a “communal historical prospective” made up of a “community of individuals and a succession of such communities.”26 Covenant became foundational to what Harry Stout describes as “shared worlds [that] require the willing incorporation of speaker and audience in a common script.” It was in this way that the colonies became “integrated in a larger union” as a “democratic republic.”27 Covenant is in this sense not only binding, but expansive, so that the “New England Way … enlarged its constituency,” extending covenant from “New England to nation.”28 It served in an “ongoing effort to [forge] a stable republic out of a large and diverse citizenry.”29 Even as civic community gained greater emphasis, sacred forms were less abandoned than historicized, to be realized within history itself. Covenant was one mode in which historical understanding continued to be shaped by biblical forms of time. Also powerful, indeed increasingly so in contexts of war, were millennialism and apocalypse. Where covenant’s focus was on religious-social conduct and goals within immediate history as between past and future, both millennialism and apocalypse shift focus from the present into the future. They can do so, however, in different ways. Millennialism and apocalypse are often grouped together and referred to as if they are indistinguishable. Yet distinctions can be drawn. Millennialism tends to remain within the terms of time, directing history to a goal, albeit taking different forms as it situates those goals differently in terms of processes and ends. Apocalypse, however, points beyond time, a vision of history’s ending, classically as its destruction and rebirth into a different order altogether. Its focus on Last Things in fact entails a number of specific features. First, End times impose final judgments. Time, events, persons all meet their ultimate fate. This fate, second, is dualist, dividing into either absolute good or absolute evil. The confrontation is Manichean. There are the righteous or condemned, saved or damned, all humanity finally assigned into these opposing, exclusive camps. Apocalypse therefore fundamentally takes shape as battle. Third, apocalypse is immediate: time is ending now, final choices must be made at once, to be with or against, as the end arrives now. Fourth, apocalypse is not local but cosmic. The conflict at hand impacts everywhere, its battles are ultimate and universal, marking time’s final abolition and closure into the endless reign of eternity.

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Millennialism itself has several modes. “Postmillennialism” places the Second Coming of Christ after a millennial period, keeping it within historical time and shaped through human action. “Premillennialism” sees Christ’s Second Coming as inaugurating the final thousand years, a supernatural intervention of apocalyptic judgment, battle, and the abolition of history. These two sorts are not clearly demarcated nor consistently defined.30 What is significant here is the status of history. Millennialism can veer into apocalypse, where supernatural intervention divides humanity into opposing forces, in battle that brings history to a cataclysmic end. There is rebirth but only into another, new existence, at the cost of the death of ordinary history. This form of premillennialism can be called apocalyptic millennialism. The postmillennialist view, however, remains more within the frame of history, a kind of historicist millennialism or covenantal millennialism, or what has been called “civil millennialism.” Such millennialism is more this-worldly and historical. As with covenantal vision, it remains situated within history.31 “Christ’s thousand-year reign on earth” is seen as an “extension of the civil and religious liberty established in America.” Apocalypse ends history. But civil or covenantal millennialism extends covenantal commitments in ways that accord with republican visions of “an essentially voluntaristic kingdom … bound together by allegiance freely given and expanding its domain by its persuasive powers.” It allowed “Protestants to make the republic itself the object of eschatological fulfilment.”32 Such millennialism marks a “profound shift” from traditional end-visions, socializing them as conjoined with “and often subordinate to, the commitment to America as a new seat of liberty.”33 Such a shift to history can be traced back to the Protestant reformers own shift of religious meaning to community life within history. Re-readings of the Hebrew Bible showed God to have promised “an actual historical kingdom with people in it,” at once “historical and political as well as spiritual.” This “was not the view of traditional eschatology.”34 Jonathan Edwards is a main figure in reorienting eschatology into the American venture, adopting (at least in some writings) a “this worldly emphasis” that, rather than bringing “secular history to an end, made millennialism the motivating force of their errand” which would lead “not from earth to heaven but to greater American glories.”35 The lines dividing this more historicist, covenantal millennialism from a supra- and counter historical apocalypse that ends time—not only as goal but as history’s abolishment—are far from solid ones. “The two

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crossover.” Still there is a distinction between rhetoric that, drawing on Puritan covenant, focused on “civic virtues of republicanism,” as against a “style of opposition rhetoric” that was more apocalyptic.36 Millennialism here projects not a “final battle or heavenly order” nor the “destruction of all civil order.”37 Rather, millennial prospects become tied to “lawful obedience to government” that “would come through a gradual process of diffusion rather than through a climactic struggle with the Antichrist.”38 By the end of the eighteenth century, this trend of “historicizing Daniel and Revelation to their own age” brought millennialism closer to covenant, “removing it from meaningful relation to biblical apocalyptic.”39 “Millennial thought took numerous forms,” writes Ruth Bloch, with “each of these visions of the End long part of American religious tradition,” at various times “in tandem.” Still, there is a “difference between the millennium … on earth and within history,” as against an “end of the world” apocalyptic. In the Revolutionary period, threads going back to Puritan “covenant theology” were rewoven “to incorporate the millennial theme.” The crisis with Britain prompted the “reshaping of time… from New England’s past to the millennial future” as “steps to the realization of God’s kingdom on earth.” America would now be the “seat of the millennial kingdom.”40 Yet war tests all discourses. Its urgency and oppositions pose an ultimacy and totalism that accords with apocalyptic visions. War hardens lines and stretches ambiguity to the breaking point. Under pressure of war, as sides are taken in stark opposition, civil millennialism veers into apocalypse. “The few millennial statements issued by patriots before the mid-1770’s,” Ruth Bloch writes, “were not especially militant in tone.” But with the war “millennial zeal of the 1770s turns into apocalyptic doom.” Although a “thin line separated catastrophic from millennial eschatologies,” during war there was a shift of “emphasis on doomsday and not on the millennial age.” Yet within the Revolutionary context a millennialist civility also was maintained.41 As the Civil War approached, however, civil millennialism was increasingly displaced by apocalyptic absolutes in total confrontation.

Revolutionary Poetry’s Mixed Discourses Recent discussions have emphasized the Bible as a “war story,” a record of “divine violence,” “the original battlefield manual,” the “sword of God.”42 This, however, answers mainly to apocalyptic models. The Bible has other

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exegetical and also political implications in historicist millennialism as civil and covenantal. The striking support of the clergy for the Revolution—the so-called black regiment—dramatized the convergence of religious with republican voices.43 Nathan Hatch notes that the “clergy across different churches agreed on republican politics,” reading “republican liberty and political forms into Hebrew experience.”44 John Adams famously wrote to Benjamin Rush: “The Bible is the most republican book in the world.”45 The Old Testament as a “civil and political tract” was reread through “Enlightenment principles of toleration,” with “no need of miracles or theocracy to be chosen,” working instead “through natural means and human agency.” Covenant as “Israel’s constitution” provided “civil laws and human instruments that God used to uphold his people without miraculous intervention.”46 And yet, in Ruth Bloch’s words, if the notion of covenant and sacred community was “part of the formation of American national identity, giving it meaning and solidarity,” it nevertheless “left open questions of religion and individual liberty, the separation of church and state, institutions and individuals”47—questions that shaped the emerging conflict between the colonies and England. Yet the confrontation was never entirely Manichean. Even as they supported resistance to England, the “majority of the ministers still hoped that bloody conflict could be avoided and some form of peaceful agreement achieved,” with covenant a continuing reference.48 “Blood rhetoric was rare in political theology,” writes Gorski. “The dominant note [was] Christian theories of just war and republican arguments of duty and virtue.”49 This position of republicanism directs biblical language in the poetry of the Revolution. Eighteenth century verse comes to readers today as something of a dumb show: its words do not reach us. After the turn of the nineteenth century, poetry becomes more focused, more imagistic, more fluid formally than are the eighteenth century’s stiff couplets, Neoclassical allusions, and attempts at high address. Yet poetry of the Revolution displays the multiplicity of meanings of the competing but also overlapping and intensifying cultural languages of the period. In this it acts as an arena of core public discourses, in which it participates.50 And, as with other public discourses, the Bible is prominent as reference and map charting social, political, and religious understanding. But whereas sermons and speeches tend to be hortatory, poetry, even when didactic, does not simply reduce to instruction or message.

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Biblical imagery in Revolutionary verse does not deploy the “hatred of the enemy” and “biblical violence” that has been ascribed to “wartime preachers.”51 The poetry, especially that which has been canonized and anthologized, aligns biblical imagery with the other emerging discourses of Revolution and republic, such as liberty and virtue, in complex configurations. The discourses do not fall into exclusive categories, nor do their positions consolidate into totalized camps. Through poetry’s different voices, colliding views emerge, authorities are variously distributed, while the hermeneutic works of interpretation and reinterpretation are performed in ways that confirm their roles in biblical as well as public discourse. These interplays of discourse can be seen in the more recognized poets associated with the Revolutionary period, notably Joel Barlow (1754–1812), Philip Freneau (1752–1832), Hugh Brackenridge (1748–1816), and Timothy Dwight (1752–1817). All were educated at elite institutions (Yale and Princeton), all were white men associated with the New England Congregational Church, all intended to become ministers, although Barlow and Freneau did not finally do so. All supported the Revolution, with Dwight and Brackenridge serving as chaplains in the Revolutionary army. All were dedicated to the vision of independence as launching America forward to fulfill its destiny, taking their roles as poets and writers as modes of public leadership in a time of profound transition. Their sense of “special American destiny” was one that drew on “distinctively millennial terms,” projecting not only political “glory” but “America’s material and cultural progress and commerce into a still more magnificent millennial future.”52 In each poet, then, older religious discourses intercross with emerging revolutionary and civic ones, in a variety of imbalances, but bound together. They, however, no less register anxiety about America’s changing terms and ability to realize such promise.53 Philip Freneau was born in New York City of Scottish Calvinist parents. He grew up in New Jersey and attended the College of New Jersey at Princeton, where he became friends with James Madison, joining his American Whig Society. Through Madison’s influence, he later became editor of the National Gazette, a paper opposing the Federalists. While at college he wrote a paraphrase in verse of “The History of the Prophet Jonah.” This poem identifies his role as poet with that of prophet. The poem’s opening casting of “bards,” who “In ages past … foretold the dark events of time,” is a calling Freneau sees also as his own, telling and

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foretelling America’s events. In doing so, his voice at once admonishes and guides an audience he seeks to assemble in his very words. This task is announced in the commencement poem “The Rising Glory of America” that he wrote in collaboration with Hugh Henry Brackenridge, who read it at the Princeton graduation ceremony of 1771.54 The poem opens with the poetic role: “Now … the adventurous muse” will, “through the veil of ancient days,” retell the origins of America and its unfolding. The poem is constructed as three speakers, each loosely associated with the emerging revolutionary discourses and their contesting trends. Rome is evoked as classical republican model, although in the image of a Jeffersonian agrarian pastoral, where independent selves live in quiet harmony. Into that idyll comes the discordant forces of commerce. The individualism that fueled religious calling, but as constrained by the framework of covenantal community, carried also the energies of self-interest. These were becoming newly embraced in the name of liberty in economic senses in tension with  civic ones.55 “The Rising Glory of America” promises the harmony of variant meanings of “virtue” as well. Thus, in the poem, “Fair agriculture” is rescued from the “royal hand” of “unworthy kings” of England to become “virtue rais’d … to the rank of gods.” Alongside Jeffersonian agriculture, however, American glory also flows as Hamiltonian “golden commerce,” in “streams / Of riches plenty on our smiling land.” The two together are lastly swept into a concluding prophetic vision of America as the “new Jerusalem” anticipating “Millennium.” Here also Freneau’s own vocation of poet is enacted as prophetic vision, wherein he participates in and indeed takes on his own civic role in the “rising” of America. Together with “immortal virtue” of “sons of science,” … The muse Forbids the men to slumber in the grave Who well deserve the praise that virtue gives. And when a train of rolling years are past, (So sang the exil’d seer in Patmos isle,) A new Jerusalem sent down from heav’n Shall grace our happy earth, perhaps this land, Whose virgin bosom shall then receive, tho’ late, Myriads of saints with their almighty king, To live and reign on earth a thousand years Thence call’d Millennium. Paradise anew Shall flourish, by no second Adam lost

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No dangerous tree with deadly fruit shall grow … A Canaan here, Another Canaan shall excel the old And from a fairer Pisgah’s top be seen…. Earth’s curse before: the lion and the lamb In mutual friendship linked… And Siloah’s brook in circling eddies flow… And all subside in universal peace.56

As did John the “exil’d seer in Patmos isle” in the Book of Revelation, so the poet prophesizes America, as it moves through “rolling years” toward a “new Jerusalem sent down from heaven” into the world. The figure of the “virgin” is transferred to the American “land,” where the Puritan “myriad of saints” will “reign on earth a thousand years.” “Millennium” here has moved from a state beyond into history itself. Yet it is history transfigured by religious promise, a “paradise anew” that will “flourish” as America. The Fall, “Earth’s curse” is itself undone as “Siloah’s brook” circles in this new “Canaan,” where the lion will lay down with the lamb (Isaiah 11:6) in “universal peace.” As Nathan Hatch writes, “Puritan religious forms are translated … according to the grammars of republican values,” with a “reconstruction of typology depicting Israel as a republic [and of] millennium envisioning a kingdom of civil and religious liberty.”57 Freneau’s later poetry comes to waver regarding each of the strands that the “Rising” interweaves, even while he retains, or desires to, a prophetic poethood that will call America to fulfill its promise. But within Revolutionary times he casts “American Liberty,” as he entitles another poem, under the “mighty arm” and “saving power” of “the sword of Gideon.” Even “commerce shall extend her shorten’d wing,” and “towns shall flourish free and great / vast their dominion / Opulent their state.” The conclusion offers the prophetic promise that “each enjoys his vineyard’s peaceful shade” (Micah 4:4).58 Joel Barlow, like Freneau, offers an early poetic vision of America, likewise delivered as a Commencement Poem, “The Prospect of Peace,” at Yale in 1778. Barlow, too, studied theology, enlisting as a chaplain for the Third Massachusetts Brigade in 1780 until the conclusion of the war. His career included journalism, law, business, and government, serving as minister to France and diplomatic agent to the Barbary States. He, too, saw the poet’s role as a public one, helping to shape the nation in his act of addressing it. But in Barlow the several strands of the Revolution become unraveled, with religious terms ultimately abandoned. Moving

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sharply away from the conservatism of Yale as especially represented by Timothy Dwight, Barlow came to identify with Tom Paine and revolutionary France. Nonetheless, the vision of new world rebirth and his own poetic role of announcing it persisted. In Joel Barlow’s early, revolutionary poem “The Prospect of Peace” (1778),59 American religious promise entwines with republican and Enlightenment commitments, which he as poet will unveil.60 “Unnumber’d bards shall string the heavenly lyre, / To those blest strains which heavenly themes inspire.” His verse unrolls in something like a hymn. These bards “Sing the rich Grace on mortal Man bestow’d,” in which Christian “love descends from heaven when Jesus dies” and then also “attend him rising thro’ the skies.” Science and civic life unite with religion: THESE are the views that Freedom’s cause attend; THESE shall endure ‘till Time and Nature end. With Science crown’d, shall Peace and Virtue shine, And blest Religion beam a light divine. Here the pure Church, descending from her God Shall fix on earth her long and last abode; Zion arise, in radiant splendors dress’d, By Saints admir’d, by Infidels confess’d;

Here a keyword of civic republicanism, “Virtue,” is set into the same couplet with Enlightenment “Science” and religion’s “light divine,” followed by the specifically biblical typology of America as “Zion.” The poem opens toward a beatific vision at once rationalist, civic, and religious. Opponents of “Freedom’s cause” are “infidels” and its supporters “Saints.” Significantly, the emphasis moves from eternity into history. The “pure Church” descends to make her “long and last abode” on “earth.” The Puritan venture’s vision of a kingdom on earth in the New World is naturalized by Barlow “’till Time and Nature end,” and put into concrete terms of republican politics and its situation in the earthly rather than the heavenly world. It is not least as civic that America will “blaze” with the stars that “o’er Bethl’em stood / Which mark’d the birth-place of th’incarnate God,” inaugurating “his long and glorious reign on earth!” where “Tyrants be no more.” The challenge of keeping all these trends mutually aligned is one Barlow does not sustain. Barlow comes to tilt away from political religion. As the United States diplomatic agent to the Barbary States, Barlow authored the

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Treaty of Tripoli (1796) in which he declared “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” Even in “The Prospect of Peace” he daringly and jarringly inserts what will become the most severe biblical as well as political controversy of the next century, slavery. After reassuringly invoking heaven in a republican rejection of hierarchy— These are the blessings of impartial Heaven, … No grasping lord shall grind the neighbouring poor;

Barlow extends it where others dare not go. Freneau’s “Rising of America” named slavery only as American subjection to British tyranny: “Should we, just heaven, our blood and labour spent/ Be slaves and minions to a parliament?” Barlow departs from this characteristic Revolutionary usage to denounce slavery as American betrayal of its own Revolutionary claims: No cringing slave shall at his presence bend, Shrink at his frown, and at his nod attend; Afric’s unhappy children, now no more Shall feel the cruel chains they felt before, But every State in this just mean agree, To bless mankind, and set th’ oppressed free.

The contradiction between republican freedom and American slavery here intrudes. For Barlow, the Revolution will only be fulfilled when civic life is extended to “each exulting slave” who “fir’d with virtue, join the common cause, / Protect our freedom and enjoy our laws.” This stain in the calling of America Freneau also addresses in other poems. “To Sir Toby,” opens accusing: “If there exists a hell—the case is clear / Sir Toby’s slaves enjoy that portion here.” The poem then pursues an extended graphic description of slavery’s inferno.61 The poem’s confrontation with increasingly conflicting strands of American culture is visible in its form, in which morally hideous scenes of torture are presented in Neoclassical, Enlightenment couplets.62 The American attempt to enlist prosperity as an emblem of liberty is here exposed as abusive greed. And the opening setting of the scene as Hell transposes metaphysical space into history as moral sin.

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These poets continued to be committed to America even as their verse registered anxiety over America’s path and their place within it. This anxiety came to extend to their poetic authority, which, modeled on religious calling, became uncertain as religion itself was both challenged and transposed in relation to other revolutionary trends.63 The contradictions of American political religion are both more quietly and more intensely visible in the case of Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753–1784). Born in West Africa, she was captured at age six and sold as a slave to the Wheatley family of Boston, where she received an education and began to write. Her poetic talent caused sensation and consternation, requiring a “letter of authenticity” in its 1771 publication to assure the work was really hers, a black woman.64 Her poem “On Being Brought From Africa to America” inscribes her own contradictory authorization, as she speaks in the voice of Christianity about her former “Pagan land,” yet turns Christianity against its own hypocrisy in its racism against “our sable race.”65 Her work launches an African American poetry that remains deeply embedded in biblical and religious vision despite their betrayal in American slavery. Her poem “Liberty and Peace” rewrites biblical paradigms toward civic vision and civic life through biblical  language , although she makes no mention of slavery.66 Hers is on the whole a gentle voice, but still prophetic, with the text cast in the appeal of prayer. Her Neoclassical style, too, aligns religious expression with revolutionary Enlightenment discourses. Thus, in the poem, “Freedom” is allegorized as classical goddess, but one born from prophetic promise, and then identified with poetic “Muse.” “Grace” means both nobility and divine gift, and “Heaven” the source of both poetic inspiration and “Prayer.” LO! Freedom comes. Th’ prescient Muse foretold, All Eyes th’ accomplish’d Prophecy behold: … She, the bright Progeny of Heaven, descends, And every Grace her sovereign Step attends; For now kind Heaven, indulgent to our Prayer, In smiling Peace resolves the Din of War.

“Freedom” is the vision of both “Muse” and Prophecy,” a “Progeny of Heaven” whose “Grace” is also civically “sovereign.” This is a text not of the “Din of War” but of restored “smiling peace.” As the poem goes on, it will include, in accord with emerging American discourse syncretism, an economic “full commercial Tide”:

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To every Realm her Portals open’d wide, Receives from each the full commercial Tide. Each Art and Science now with rising Charms … So Freedom comes array’d with Charms divine, And in her Train Commerce and Plenty shine … Auspicious Heaven shall fill with fav’ring Gales, Where e’er Columbia spreads her swelling Sails: To every Realm shall Peace her Charms display, And Heavenly Freedom spread her golden Ray.

“Art and Science,” “Commerce and Plenty,” all flourish together in a religious republican “Heavenly Freedom.” The omission of slavery from this commercial paradise is jarring, as is the hint of imperialism in Columbia’s spreading “her swelling Sails.” And a note of vengeance enters in as the poet rebukes England’s “Thirst of boundless Power,” calling down “On Albion’s Head the Curse to Tyrants due” in prophetic fashion. But conflict is quickly “appeas’d” through “Heaven’s decree”: Perish that Thirst of boundless Power, that drew On Albion’s Head the Curse to Tyrants due. But thou appeas’d submit to Heaven’s decree, That bids this Realm of Freedom rival thee!

Wheatley’s peacemaking here rather papers over the war with Britain. She projects a Whig commitment against tyranny with shared religious references. The sense of shared terms was characteristic before the outbreak of war, the colonists regarding themselves as British subjects claiming British rights and membership in a common religious destiny. American Broadside verses in the French and Indian War speak of “our English nation” against “our Enemies,” the Canadian “French at Lake George.” There, the English/American troops fight and escape together as a common Providence our Fate prevents, and frustrates their Design, Too soon their Signal it was given, Thanks to the Power Divine… Then let our Hearts encourag’d be, and let us not surrender Our Rights, Religion, Liberty unto a false Pretender.67

Before the Revolution, Americans spoke of “God’s British Israel” and “included Britons among God’s covenanted people.”68 This “union,”

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however, comes undone as the destinies clash. Philip Freneau’s “American Independence” declares it painfully broken: Britain and we no more in union join, No more, as once, in bloody wars combine, Fled are our loves that once did mutual burn, Fled is the scepter never to return; Lost is Columbia to Britannia’s sway; Dire was the contest, terrible the fray; Our hearts are ravish’d from our former Queen Far as the ocean God hath plac’d between.

The Revolution had its aspect of civil war, with common traditions and common terms set against each other. What before had been seen as part of a British world had now detached into an independent American one. This meant claiming similar virtues and liberties, but now for separate states. In Freneau, there is a continued sense of past commonality, mourned as it is coming apart. This is in some sense the first American hermeneutic contest, loyalist against patriot readings of culture, including the Bible, which later becomes explosive hermeneutic battles in the Civil War period.69 What Freneau registers with dismay—“Our hearts are ravish’d”—Timothy Dwight hardens into more dogmatic and oppositional positions. Grandson to Jonathan Edwards, Dwight was born in 1752 and entered Yale at age 13. He served as chaplain in the Revolutionary war and then minister at Greenfield, Connecticut, among other positions. Appointed President of Yale College in 1795, he held this position until his death in 1817. From his self-conscious vantage point as minister and educator, Dwight aspired to a commanding voice in the shaping of Revolutionary America. His imagined community was an America of religious mission framing civic destiny, which he envisioned as recasting Puritan forms in Revolutionary directions.70 His writings restated “older themes of providence, covenant, and the theocratic mission,” making them “relevant to the new nation’s destiny.”71 America, however, disappointed his vision of it. He saw it as failing in Christian morality and in civic unity, which defined his ideal of America. As his valedictory address on graduating from Yale proclaimed, America is one people “who have the same religion, the same manners, the same interests, the same language, and the same essential forms and principles of civic government.”72 He especially deplored America’s increasing commercial individualism and materialism.

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Dwight was not comfortable with the divergence of discourses unfolding in America and attempted to keep them consolidated. “The Conquest of Canaan,” his epic poem in eleven books, is his most overt Revolutionary poetic attempt to incorporate the new politics into older biblical typology.73 Written in 1771, but published only in 1785, the poem re-narrates in verse the Israelite victory over the Canaanites recounted in the book of Joshua. Dwight insisted the poem was not an “allegory” of the war, yet it was taken to be one, and he did first write to Washington hinting him to be the contemporary antitype of Joshua as type.74 As conquest of Canaan, America’s battle for Independence is cast as accession to the promised land: “Thy chosen hand/ shall guide my sons, and rule that promis’d land/ that land where peace and every pleasure reigns /… that land is thine” (II 739-45). Hanniel, the poem’s villain, is portrayed as a loyalist urging the Israelites to return to Egypt/England. Book I features Hanniel’s debate with Joshua in defense of monarchy, which Joshua answers in the contemporary language of the Revolution. He bids the Israelites not to be “vile slaves” and dares them to be fearless in the name of virtue: “Does no kind breath with patriot virtue glow” (I.255-260). Joshua’s rally of the Israelites enacts the time loops of Americanized biblical typology, referring back to covenant and forward, presumably, to Washington and America’s future destiny: For this dire end, were such bright scenes bestow’d? for this the eternal covenant sealed by God?… To fairer bliss he led the chosen train thro’ the dark wave, and oe’r the howling plain Ordain’d when you proud towers in dust are hurl’d to found an empire and to rule a world. O’er earth’s far realms bid truth and virtue thine And spread to nature’s bounds the Name divine. … By friendship’s ties religion’s bands combin’d By birth united, and by interest join’d (I: 695-700, 725-6)

“Chosen,” “Ordain’d,” “Name divine” fall into perfect metrical and prosodic place with “truth and virtue,” the keywords of republicanism and religion, both taken to claim fulfillment here in “empire” and “rule.” “By interest join’d” adds the language of liberal individualism, all “combin’d” in republican “friendship,” as a national “birth” that unites in “religious bands.” But notably, the final vision is millennialist more than apocalyptic. As Ruth Bloch comments, Dwight “enlarged upon the millennial

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possibilities of the American Revolution in universalistic language” calling others “to act, not like inhabitants of a village … but like citizens of the world.”75 I saw the promis’d land in vision rise. I saw sweet peace exalted joys unfold; Fair towers ascend, and temples beam in gold; Kings, sprung from Jacob’s lineage, mount the throne, And stretch their sway to years and realms unknown; … On this great day his earthly kingdom stand, Reach thro’ all times, and flow to every land; To bliss, in distant ages, nations rise, The world ennoble, and expand the skies.

Dwight’s vision reaches forward “from Jacob’s lineage” within a repaired history. Perhaps above all, “The Conquest of Canaan” assumes the familiarity of readers with the biblical sources Dwight so fluently and thickly cites. Dwight’s Master’s Oration at Yale of 1772 was devoted to “the History, Eloquence, and Poetry of the Bible.” In “Conquest” he attempts poetically to demonstrate both history and eloquence in a community of discourse he wishes to enforce.76 That he does so in heroic couplets of metrical and prosodic regimentation may assert this consolidation too coercively. Yet despite his stylistic uniformity, Dwight registers strains between discourses, including misgivings about the very variety of terms Dwight welds together. Seeing America as a “Christian Nation,” he yet fears it to be a “godless republic,” revealing “in graphic fashion the tensions between Christian religion and republican government that lay at the heart of the new republic.”77 These anxieties come to the fore in his post-Revolutionary war poem, “The Triumph of Infidelity” of 1788. This poem blares alarm at the centrifugal forces unleashed by Revolution, emblematized in France’s reign of terror. Dwight’s “Triumph of Infidelity” represents theological and philosophical history as regress and betrayal. The poem speaks in the voice of Satanic Infidelity, in an inversive rhetoric whose positions can be hard to assign. Praise is a mode of condemnation and condemnation, praise. In this ironic rhetoric, America’s millennial promise is denounced, as a way of undermining what Dwight sees as its betrayal by the forces of Jeffersonianism and liberalism.

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At the opening of the poem, the Satanic speaker witnesses an Edenic America blessed with republicanism, which spreads …full before him, dress’d in beauteous day, The realms of freedom, peace, and virtue lay; The realms, where heav’n, ere Time’s great empire fall, Shall bid new Edens dress this dreary ball.

This vision of heavenly freedom, peace, and virtue pointing toward millennium dismays the infidel speaker as the defeat of his own Satanic project: He frown’d; the world grew dark; the mountains shook, And nature shudder’d as the spirit spoke. What wasted years, with angry voice he cries. I wage vain wars with yonder hated skies?

These inversions tend to be confusing, where infidelity is ironically praised and faithfulness condemned.78 What is of special interest here is the anxiety the poem displays over the very multiplicity of discourses it launches. Enlightenment philosophers, Deists, and individualists are all condemned. The clergy too are become forces of infidelity, in their “new-­found doctrines” betraying the word of the Bible they purport to disseminate: In their bless’d hands the gospel I conceal’d, And new-found doctrines, in it’s stead, reveal’d; Of gloomy visions drew a fearful round, Names of dire look, and words of killing sound, Where, meaning lost, terrific doctrines lay, Maz’d the dim soul, and frighten’d truth away; Where noise for truth, for virtue pomp was given, O’er bold Inquiry bade all horrors roll. And to its native nothing shrunk the soul.

The speaker here exposes infidelity in the ironically “bless’d hands” of the clergy who in fact conceal the gospel, whose “meaning lost” gives way to “terrific doctrines.” Is this the voice of Satan or Dwight’s own? Not a pluralist, to Dwight dissent confuses the “dim soul” and “frighten[s] truth away.” “Bold Inquiry” unleashes dismay. “Virtue” is lost in “pomp” of public display. Without authority the biblical message drowns in a cacophony of interpretive claims. Thus, the speaker (Dwight or Satan?) laments:

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Enough, the Bible is by wits arraign’d, Genteel men doubt it, smart men say it’s feign’d, And prov’d all things at option, false or true. The gospel’s truths he saw were airy dreams, … Or know the right from left, the first from last; … Or find, if Jordan had a bank, or flood. … But always (when they proved the gospel) lied.

The greatest infidelity, beyond the many specific ones catalogued in the poem, seems to be the very possibility of contrary voices. Fear of loss of common voice spinning out of control leads Dwight to invest in elite guidance such as his own. But his is in fact just one voice among many, in a plurality of discourses Dwight cannot control.

Poetic Apocalypse in Civil War Revolutionary poetry largely directed millennialism into the terms of history and the republic. The Civil War’s public language moves into a much more full-fledged apocalyptic, in ultimate judgments as history’s end. Revolutionary eschatology, Jon Butler writes, was a “millennialism without apocalypse,” a “millennialist incorporation of secular optimism” making “progress part of Christian teleology.” “Apocalyptic thinking declined in the Revolutionary period”; history was not measured or concluded through the “destruction of the world.”79 Nathan Hatch charts how “republican thought reshaped New England’s vision of future,” thus giving “new form to the ‘last days’” in the understanding of history. There arose what he calls a “republican eschatology” committed to “America as the seat of liberty.” Typology itself was reconstructed toward “Israel as a republic” and the “millennium as a kingdom of civil and religious liberty.”80 Harry Stout speaks of a “civil millennialism” as “inheriting the New England colonial covenant” so that the “Founders cited the Bible for support,” now in the name of a national covenant.”81 Such core American words “mean multiply,” working to “reshape politics in terms of millennial destiny, the people of Providence now seen in new egalitarian and individualist ways.” This took place within “communities of discourse … shared realities that are as binding on the speaker as they are on the audience.” As interpretive paradigms, they “represent the master assumptions” that all accepted and which were at once “religious, republican, and liberal.”82

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The approach to Civil War and its conduct marks a totalization, collectivization, and dehistoricizing of claims. These become not interpretations but intransigent truths denouncing falsehoods, subordinating historical complexity to ultimate assertions. The Civil War has been described as a “battle for the possession of the basic covenant.”83 But covenant itself became absolutized and ultimate, the political transformed into eschatology rather than eschatology temporalized into ongoing history. This occurs on both the Northern and Southern sides, at least in the huge volumes of popular poetry published in newspapers and war collections. The major poets, in contrast, strikingly resist apocalyptism. Whitman’s, Melville’s, and Dickinson’s are poetic voices that press back against the flattening of language and of issues into violent claims and their violent denials. These midcentury poets approach the war as caught in the dilemmas of contrary truth-claims and their implications for, or rather against, absolutes. Theirs is an approach to the Bible through a hermeneutic self-consciousness that transforms its status within their work, in ways that at once refute and renew biblical meanings and its poetics. In popular poetry, however, the enactment of war enlisted the Bible into battle. The poster child of Northern biblical verse is Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Born in 1819 into the very elite New York Ward family, Howe was an activist in abolition and women’s suffrage. Although raised a Calvinist, she became Unitarian and often preached in Unitarian and other liberal churches. Her war poetry, however, gets caught up in biblical apocalyptic to support the Northern cause. Motifs from Revelation 19 become powerfully interwoven in the biblical typologies of the “Battle Hymn.” The “Hymn” collects and correlates texts from Daniel, Joel, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Micah, re-organized through Revelation 14, 19, and 20.84 These texts reverberate as an eschatology of American history, politics, and culture. Emphasis is on total confrontation between the righteous and the damned in punishing judgment. The Second “Coming of the Lord” unleashes Revelation’s vengeful “Grapes of Wrath” (Joel 3:1 / Revelation 14:19) and “lightning” and “Swift Sword” (Revelation 19: 12-15). Eternity devours time. In this hermeneutic of apocalypse in history, the divine is revealed precisely in war: in “watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,” the “righteous sentence” written in the “dim and flaring lamps,” the “gospel” as “fiery …writ in burnished rows of steel” guns. The “trumpet” of apocalypse announces the “sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment

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seat.” Ultimate evil as satanic “serpent” is to be finally “crushed” by Christ the “Hero.” Grace verges into wrath in this sifting: “As ye deal with My contemners, so with you My grace shall deal.” All the apocalyptic markers are summoned: total conflict between collectivist opposing camps as good versus evil; local conflict as cosmic and everywhere; final battle as judgment consigning all to be saved or damned. And apocalypse is now, immediate in this very war scene. The “Battle Hymn” offers personal witness and individual testimony, asserted in the repeated “Mine eyes have seen,” “I have seen,” “I have seen,” a bold testimony to woman’s ability to claim prophetic and poetic voice, but as the speaker for an adamant camp. Howe’s ultimate vision may be civic, where she equates holiness with democratic purposes: as Christ “died to make men holy/ let us die to make men free.” The scriptural vision is a promise to be fulfilled in democratic life. Yet in the agony of war, individual can be swallowed into collective. As another “Battle Hymn” (a widely circulated genre of the period) proclaims: Who rides in heaven to battle, a flame of fire His sword? Behind him march the Army of Martyrs to the Word The wine-press of His wrath is trodden by the Lord His soul is marching on.85

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “The Holy War” of 1861, also in this genre, likewise unleashes all the apocalyptic missiles of Revelation 19: 11-4: To the last battle set throughout the earth… A King rides forth … in white raiment,”… O’er all the earth resounds his trumpet call. The nations, waking from their dreary night, Are mustering in their ranks, and throning on To hail the brightness of his rising light. And all the armies that behind him ride, Come in white raiment, spotless as the snow; Freedom and Justice, is their battle-cry, And all the earth rejoices as they go…86

Immediately before her unfolds the “last battle,” cosmically felt “throughout the earth.” The messianic “king” in “white raiment” sounds the “trumpet,” calling all to final confrontation. Biblical scene carries

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republican values of “Freedom and Justice,” but as final “battle-cry” across the earth. New England genteel poets variously took up their pens for the Northern cause.87 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Senior, turned his versifying hand from occasional poetry celebrating Harvard and Boston Brahmins to the urgency of war. This he couched in the terms of his Puritan fathers, as in “To Canaan: A Puritan War Song:” We ‘re marching South to Canaan To battle for the Lord What Captain leads your armies Along the rebel coasts? The Mighty One of Israel, His name is Lord of Hosts! To Canaan, to Canaan The Lord has led us forth, To blow before the heathen walls The trumpets of the North! … What song is this you’re singing? The same that Israel sung When Moses led the mighty choir, And Miriam’s timbrel rung! To Canaan! To Canaan!88

America is itself become Canaan, with the North as Israel led into battle by the “Lord of Hosts” against the “rebel” and “heathen” South. Present time is collapsed into typological past now made apocalyptically ultimate. Holmes’s poem “Never or Now” similarly launches an urgent “Appeal” to “young heroes” whose “country is calling!” to act “Never or Now.” He does so in the name of the Revolutionary “fathers” who “made free and defended” their “heritage spotless” of republican rights, but these are interwoven with apocalyptic finality: Never or now! cries the blood of a nation, Poured on the turf where the red rose should bloom; Now is the day and the hour of salvation,— Never or now! peals the trumpet of doom! … Comes the loud summons; too long you have slumbered, Hear the last Angel-trump,—Never or Now!89

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The nation’s blood is poured out not only in political contest but as an “hour of salvation.” Now is sounded “the trumpet of doom” and “the last Angel-Trump,” the final moment of history. Sin and salvation, destruction and rebirth, never or now: these are the ultimate judgements between uncompromising choices and destinies. As Holmes follows up in “God Save The Flag,” the southern “prophets of Baal” will be defied by the Northern Noah’s “Ark” against the southern flood, “Bearing the rainbow of hope the nations,” of which the North carries the beacon.90 His “Hymn: After the Emancipation Proclamation” declares “Our promised land at last we see,” while “The sons of Belial curse in vain.” Thou God of vengeance! Israel’s Lord! Break in their grasp the shield and sword, And make thy righteous judgments known, Till all thy foes are overthrown.91

It is a telling part of Civil War history that the churches broke apart before the Union did. The same denominations professing the same doctrines and church principles each cited and interpreted the same biblical texts against each other, defending slavery or denouncing it. Drew Gilpin Faust points out that both of “the two touchstones of nineteenth century America: evangelism and republicanism” could be “reactionary or progressive, elitist or democratic.” In the South, reactionary politics appealed to both a “lost republic of virtue” and “the churches’ ministerial authority.”92 These make up the discourses of Southern war poetry. Henry Timrod (1828–1867) had devoted himself to founding a distinctive Southern literature as editor, journalist and poet. Prevented by tuberculosis from going to war, he enlisted through his writing, and was eventually crowned “The Laureate of the South” for his Civil War poems. These interweave the two strands of Revolutionary and biblical heritage. In the poem “Spring,” Timrod deploys the Revolutionary call “to fall and crush the tyrants” now of the North, while the South are the “slaves,” in the Revolutionary rhetoric against submission to tyranny. Timrod’s poem “Ethnogenesis,” hailed as the anthem of the new South, combines American political mission with biblical typology. In civic terms, the South opposes the North’s materialism to “scorn sordid gain.” It is they who uphold

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Unblemished honor, truth without a stain, Faith, justice, reverence, charitable wealth, And, for the poor and humble, laws which give, Not the mean right to buy the right to live, But life, and home, and health!93

The poem appeals to “Truth,” “justice,” and “laws” as civic virtues. Here, however, they are modes of the “honor” and “reverence” of hierarchy. Indeed, Southern religion directly urged “reverence” for “authoritarian hierarchy” and “social and political deference,” through submission and obedience to both God and God’s representatives.94 The “Charitable wealth … for the poor and humble” marks deference. The “life and home and health” Timrod lauds are in fact founded on racial subordination. “Not the mean right to buy the right to live,” intended as a salvo against Northern market values, is astonishing as it ignores the bought lives of Southern slaves. This civic passage is followed by religious claim in full biblical invocation. Timrod launches the familiar call to “the Lord of Hosts,” now against “the North,” who, in cosmic apocalyptic rebellion, has “set up his evil throne, and warred with God.” In contrast, it is the South that emerges as ultimate “type” in a last battle extending to “distant peoples” who “we shall bless” on a cosmic level against “a world’s distress.” The South is now born as a “nation among nations … under God,” where To doubt the end were want of trust in God, Who, if he has decreed That we must pass a redder sea Than that which rang to Miriam’s holy glee, Will surely raise at need A Moses with his rod!

Moses, so indelibly a figure of exodus from slavery, here guides the South as Israel through the “redder sea” of bloody battle. Now it is the North that is Egypt, whom the South smites “with his rod.” Theirs is the “trust in God.” And Timrod, like Miriam, is a prophet who sees destruction with “glee.” Chattel slavery itself is rarely mentioned in Southern verse. Instead, if slavery is referred to, what is intended is the threat to Southern liberty by tyrants of the North, echoing Revolutionary rhetoric.95 Without any sense

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of the irony that the South itself keeps slaves, “slave” is taken to mean only the betrayal of Revolutionary “liberty,” whose senses have narrowed to mean states’ rights, property without interference, and freedom from government in a more libertarian than republican sense. Characteristically, this liberty against Southern enslavement is framed through some religious claim. Timrod’s “Ethnogenesis” takes up the Bible defense of slavery as permitted in Scripture. The North, he writes, falsely spreads anti-slavery “creeds that dare to teach / What Christ and Paul refrained to preach.” Such partisan religion is characteristic of Southern popular poetry. War Lyrics and Songs of the South, collected by Abram Joseph Ryan in 1866, includes many examples.96 “Morgan’s War Song” summons “youth” to … make his choice now tamely submit like a coward and slave or rise and resist like the free and the brave Gather fast ‘neath our flag for ‘tis God’s own decree that its folds shall still float o’er a land that is free. (p. 5)

The choice is stark and final. To “submit like a coward and slave” as betraying Southern liberty or to “rise and resist” the North. This is to be “free and brave” in Revolutionary terms, as it is also to answer “God’s own decree” in religious faith. Under this divine banner the South will be defended as “a land that is free”—that is, “free” from the tyranny that would impose Federal government, prevent secession, and steal rightful property in slaves. Another verse in the anthology, “The Faith of the South,” combines various senses of slavery with awareness of religious schism and counterclaim. It asserts for the Southern side That God is surely where He’s trusted to the most. Not of our power we boast, But hope, O God! Thou art The leader of our host.

The poem then calls for: A Thanksgiving for Victory When with fast, in faith we prayed They’d deride; Boasted God would never aid Slavery’s side.

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Puritans! they little thought God could see They had set their haughty heart Slaves to free Only that they might enslave Millions more; Bury in fair freedom’s grave Steeped in gore. (p. 186)

Thanksgiving and fasts of course are Puritan inheritances. Widely adopted in the conduct of the Civil War in both the North and the South, here they are aimed against the Northern “haughty heart / Slaves to free.” The Puritan North is trying to “enslave / Millions more” of Southerners in the Revolutionary meaning of enslavement to tyranny, which here is their liberty to own humans. God’s aid is then claimed for their own “Slavery’s side.” It is the South that is threatened by godless tyranny that would enslave them by denying them their slaves. In the name of such enslavement they invoke an apocalyptic “freedom’s grave / Steeped in gore.” Just so, the poem “A Litany of 1861” prays: Good Lord deliver us From rapine and from blood. Preserve to us Our heritage of liberty… If our foes triumph, Lord, freedom must die. Let us not ‘fall into the hands of men Whom demons spirit on to work their will. (p. 139)

Here divine aid is summoned to preserve the Southern Revolutionary “heritage of liberty.” At stake is whether (white Southern) freedom shall live or “must die,” defended in dire battle against the “men / whom demon spirit on to work their will.” The contest is cosmic between absolute opposing forces. William Gilmore Simms (1806–1870), a leading figure in Southern literature and journalism, edited a collection of War Poetry of the South, published in 1866. A prominent spokesman for the Confederate cause, his History of South Carolina was an established textbook throughout the twentieth century. There has been some effort to challenge the view of him as Southern apologist, claiming he also criticizes the South and offers portraits of a range of Southern characters.97 What he criticizes, however,

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is directed against the lack of Southern literary independence, the South’s poor agricultural practices, and its absence of industry. As one defender writes, Simms “separated his literary from his political views.”98 His politics remains proslavery, pro-secession, and pro-Confederacy.99 The poems Simms anthologized are resolutely republican, civic, and biblical, in defense of the South. As is summed up in a “Hymn to the National Flag”—meaning the Confederate flag with its “Southern Crosse”—“Shelter freedom’s holy cause—Liberty and sacred laws.”100 A “Battle-Cry of the South” takes as its epigraph Maccabees I: “For it is better for us to die in battle than to behold the calamities of our people and our sanctuary.” Against the “vampires of the North,” it summons its “Brothers” in a refrain: “To arms! To arms!… For ye have the sword of the Lion’s Whelp [Judah] / And the God of the Macabbees” (p. 37). “Reddato Gladium” announces “A voice is heard in Ramah!” as “Notes to wake buried patriots!” led by “chief among ten thousands” (pp. 42–43). The poem “The Voice of the South” claims the sanction of the Pilgrim fathers and of God. The South inherits both the founder’s freedom against political slavery: T’was a goodly boon that our fathers gave, And fits but ill to be held by the slave; … The oath that [our] sires brought over the sea, When they pledged their swords to Liberty!

and divine authority itself: In Heaven’s own sight, They battled and bled in behalf of the right; ‘Twas hallowed by God with the holiest sign, And seal’d with the blood of your sires and mine… (p. 31)

The Pilgrim fathers were “hallowed by God with the holiest sign” in “liberty.” Now, however, “the hope of so fair a land” has been split apart by the North as “proud transgressor” who would “Usurp [our] blessing.” The poem then drives toward an apocalyptic call: Oh, sound, to awaken the dead from their graves, The will that would thrust us from place for our slaves…

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How goodly and bright were its links at the first! How loathly and foul, in their usage accurst! We had worn it in pride while it honor’d the brave, But we rend it, when only grown fit for the slave.

The “links” that “first” were “goodly and bright,” once binding the union together, now would enchain in ways that open into the double meanings of “slave.” There is outrage against “those that would thrust us from place for our slaves,” dispossessing them of their human chattel. The ties to the North which once “honor’d the brave” now have “only grown fit for the slave,” where slavery is the South succumbing to Northern tyranny. This battle between the two senses of slavery is final and ultimate, sounding “to awaken the dead from their graves.” Thus sounds the apocalyptic tone of the Civil War. In a time scheme distinct from covenant or covenantal millennialism, biblical pattern was pushed to ultimate ends in severe and total confrontation.

Notes 1. The Bible and violence is a much debated topic. See, for example, Princeton Readings in Religion and Violence, eds. Mark Juergensmeyer, Margo Kitts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); “Violence and the Bible,” The Cambridge World History of Violence, ed. Garrett G.  Fagan (NY: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Scripture and Violence, eds. Dr Julia Snyder, Dr. Daniel H.  Weiss (NY: Cambridge University Press, 2020); The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence, eds. Michael Jerryson, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Margo Kitts (NY: Oxford University Press, 2013). In the American context, there is James Byrd’s Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: The Bible and the American Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2013). Mark Noll has written extensively on the Civil War and the Bible. 2. Ruth Bloch, “Religion and Ideological Change in the American Revolution,” Religion and American Politics, eds. Mark Noll, Luke E. Harlow (NY: Oxford University Press, 2007) 47–63, notes there has been “endless debate” about the relative roles and power of religious, Enlightenment, republican, liberal, and other discourses in the Revolutionary period, pp. 47–48. 3. Nathan Hatch, Democratization; Bercovitch, Rites, pp. 153–4. 4. Emory Elliot, “Puritan Roots of American Whig Rhetoric,” Puritan Influences in American Literature, ed. Emory Elliott (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979) 108–125. p. 123.

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5. Abraham Lincoln, “The Perpetuation of our Political Institutions,” Springfield, Illinois Jan. 27, 1838 http://www.abrahamlincolnonline. org/lincoln/speeches/lyceum.htm. Cf. Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985). 6. James Murrin, “Religion and Politics in America from the First Settlements to the Civil War,” Religion and American Politics, eds. Mark A.  Noll, Luke E. Harlow (NY: Oxford University Press, 2007), 23–46: “By the eighteenth century the churches were no longer the only official representatives for public values. They had rivals,” p. 30. Murrin lists “Calvinist orthodoxy, Anglican moralism, civic humanism, classical liberalism, Tom Paine radicalism, and Scottish moral sense and common sense philosophy,” pp. 30–31. 7. J.G.A. Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time, p. 13. 8. Noll, America’s God, pp. 83–85. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), on how sectarian uses of republican concepts made them familiar, and republican uses of religious language gave them appeal and energy. Eldon J.  Eisenach, Sacred Discourse and American Nationality (NY: Oxford University Press, 2012), describes the “relationship between religious discourse and mobilizing politics” and the combination of liberal, legal, religious, democratic, and civic republican discourses, pp. xii–xiv. 9. Gorski, American Covenant, pp. 59, 50–51. 10. Emory Elliot, “Puritan Roots,” pp. 112–113. Cf. Emory Elliott, Power and the Pulpit in Puritan New England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). 11. Bonomi, Cope, p. 3: “In Eighteenth century America the idiom of religion penetrated all discourses … marked all observances, gave meaning to every public and private crisis,” note 22. Cf. Ruth Bloch, “Religion and Ideological Change,” that it was “almost impossible to distinguish between them,” p. 53. Nathan Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), writes: “Instead of removing political culture from religion, religion extended into political culture,” p. 3. 12. Emory Elliott, “Puritan Roots,” p.  109. Donald Weber, Rhetoric and History in Revolutionary New England (NY: Oxford University Press, 1988). Cf. Alan Heimert Religion and the American Mind, how colonial language “politicized the language of the Bible and sacralized the language of Whig politics,” pp. 19, 20. 13. Pocock, Politics, Language, Time, pp. 17, 19–20, 23. 14. Noll, America’s God, pp. 90–91. 15. Bloch, “Ideological Change,” pp. 53; Looby, Voicing America: “Liberty was among the key terms that functioned interchangeably” in “both registers,” an ambivalence where users “probably did not consciously dis-

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criminate between them,” p. 228. Sidney Mead, The Lively Experiment (NY: Harper and Row, 1963), “Religious liberty emerged in a strange alliance between Protestant radical dissent and Enlightenment turns to reason—another instance of overlap despite differences,” pp. 53–54. 16. Noll, America’s God: “Ambiguities” allowed virtue to embrace both “disinterested service to the common good” in its republican sense and also its sense in “biblical terms as life guided by God’s will,” p. 90. Cf. Bloch, “Ideological Change” “widespread resonance of virtue, corruption, liberty depended on multivalent civil and spiritual reference,” p. 51. 17. Bloch, Visionary Republic, pp. 59, 62. 18. Mark Noll, In the Beginning, p. 54, cf. note 1. Ruth Bloch, “Ideological Change,” pp. 42, 47, 53–54. 19. Harry Stout, “Rhetoric and Reality in the Early Republic: The Case of the Federalist Clergy,” Religion and American Politics, eds. Mark Noll, Luke Harlow (NY: Oxford University Press 1990), 62–76, p. 68. 20. Philip Gorski, American Covenant, pp. 73, 69. 21. Zaret, pp. 129–130, note 11. 22. Richard Niehbuhr, “Covenant and American Democracy,” Church History Vol 23 no 2, June 1954, 126–135, pp. 130–131. 23. Perry Miller Nature’s Nation, p.  17. Cf. Miller, New England Mind, pp. 414–15, 417, 432–3, 453; Miller, Errand, p. 148. 24. Gorski, American Covenant, 42–43. 25. Gorski, American Covenant, pp. 42–43. 26. Bercovitch, “Biblical Basis,” p. 227; Bercovitch, “How the Puritans won the Revolution,” p. 599. 27. Stout, “Rhetoric and Reality,” pp. 68–69, note 226. 28. Bloch, “Ideological Change,” p.  52; Bercovitch, Rites, p.  153. Hilton Obenzinger’s American Palestine: Melville Twain and the Holy Land Mania (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) portrays typology and covenant as exclusionary forms of “colonial domination” (p. 7) and “settler-­colonialism” (p. 9) to establish an “exclusivist enterprise” (p. 24). 29. Gorski, American Covenant, discusses the “notion that Godly community shaped American nationalism” and especially the “language of covenant,” invoking “elect community and protection by providence,” p. 106. 30. For the distinction between pre- and postmillennialism regarding the Second Coming, see Ernst Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 34; Daniel Howe, What Hath God Wrought (NY: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp.  285–7. In practice, however, the two mixed together, James Moorhead, American Apocalypse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), p.  9. Cf. Bercovitch, Rites, “the distinction is questionable,” p.  148. Cf. Bercovitch, “Typology, p. 137. Cf. Bloch, Visionary Republic, p. 42.

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31. John Wilson, Public Religion in American Culture (Phil: Temple University Press, 1979): “The Hebraic sense of historical destiny allied with the Christian image of millennium to become the basic form of national identity,” p. 33. 32. James H.  Moorhead, “Between Progress and the Apocalypse: A Reassessment of Millennialism in American Religious Thought, 1800–1880,” Journal of American History Vol. 71, No. 3 (Dec., 1984), 524–542, pp. 528–530. 33. Nathan Hatch, “The Origins of Civil Millennialism in America: New England Clergymen, War with France, and the Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, Jul., 1974, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Jul., 1974), 407–430, pp. 407–409. 34. Tuveson, pp. 17, 26–27, 29. 35. Bercovitch, “Typology,” pp. 135, 138, 149; Gorski, American Covenant, p.  74. Cf. Tuveson, pp. viii–x; 27–28; 33, 58, 54, 80; also James Moorhead, American Apocalypse, on the shift to the millennium as a temporal Kingdom of God, making the Puritans a “covenanted people, a new Israel,” which becomes in the nineteenth century the view of the church as winning a “victory in the world,” pp. 2, 8–9. 36. Hatch, Sacred Cause, pp. 68–9. 37. Tuveson 56, 43, 32. Gorski, American Covenant, pp. 73–74. 38. Bloch, Visionary Republic, 49–50. 39. J. F. Maclear, “The Republic and the Millennium,” The Religion of the Republic, ed. Elwyn A.  Smith (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971), 183–216, pp. 189, 203. 40. Bloch, Visionary Republic, pp. 90, 67, 130, 70, 64, 54, 70, 54, 56, 77. 41. Bloch, Visionary Republic, pp. 74, 58, 65, 88. 42. James Byrd, Sacred Scripture describes the Bible as a “violent” text, pp. 7, 51, note 208. Byrd also records Christian concern with war deaths but claims that “just war became sacred war, endowed by God and defended by the Bible,” p.  166. Even “at the center of the Exodus narrative of liberation was a violent God,” p. 72. Cf. Susan Juster, Sacred Violence in Early America (Phil: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), p. 78. Cf. Karen Armstrong, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (New York: Knopf, 2014); William Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 43. C. H. Van Tyne, “Influence of the Clergy, and of Religious and Sectarian Forces, on the American Revolution,” The American Historical Review, Oct., 1913, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Oct., 1913), pp. 44–64, p. 56. 44. Hatch, Sacred Cause, pp. 5, 16. 45. Cited Byrd, p.  10, note 208. John Adams to Benjamin Rush, Feb. 2, 1807.

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46. Stout, New England Soul, pp. 166–7. 47. Bloch, Visionary Republic, p. 61. 48. Emory Elliott, “The Dove and the Serpent: The Clergy in the American Revolution,” American Quarterly, Summer 1979, 31: 2, 187–203, p. 190. 49. Gorski, American Covenant, p. 74. 50. Discussions of Revolutionary poetry have underscored its public address: most fully in Christopher Grasso, A Speaking Aristocracy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Gordon E. Bigelow, Rhetoric and Poetry of the Early National Period (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1960). William Dowling, Poetry and Ideology in Revolutionary Connecticut (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990). 51. Byrd, pp. 5, 73, 81, emphasizes “prophetic violence” and “Godly wrath,” note 208. 52. Bloch, Visionary Republic, pp. 71–2. 53. Emory Elliott, Revolutionary Writers: Literature and Authority in the New Republic (NY: Oxford University Press, 1986), traces the shift in poetry from religious to national vision but sees the continued “great emotional power” of religion as needed to enlist the public in the revolutionary project, pp. 19–21. 54. This poem was revised and republished in 1786. For discussions of its authorship and revisions, see Stephen Adams, “Philip Freneau’s Summa of American Exceptionalism: ‘The Rising Glory of America,’” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Winter 2013, Vol. 55, No. 4, 390–405, who comments on the earlier discussion by Susan Castillo, “Imperial Pasts and Dark Futurities: Freneau and Brackenridge’s ‘The Rising Glory of America,’” Symbiosis 6:1 (April 2002) 27–43. Eric Wertheimer, “Commencement Ceremonies: History and Identity in ‘The Rising Glory of America,’” 1771 and 1786,” Early American Literature, 1994, Vol. 29, No. 1 (1994), pp.  35–58. Note that in later revision, “Britain’s sons” was replaced by a general “we,” though retaining a claim to “Dominion to the north and south and west.” 55. As Murrin writes, “transform[ing] the Christian sin of greed into a civic virtue,” p. 31. 56. Philip Freneau, Poems of Philip Freneau, Vol I, ed. Fred Lewis Pattee (Princeton: Princeton University Library 1902), pp.  49–83, Project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/files/38475/38475-­h/38475­h.htm. 57. Hatch, Sacred Cause, p. 12. 58. Freneau, Poems, Vol. I, p. 142. 59. Joel Barlow, “The Prospect of Peace,” cited from https://quod.lib. umich.edu/e/evans/N12454.0001.001?view=toc.

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60. Tuveson, p. 66. 61. Freneau, Poems Vol. II, p. 258, written out of his experiences in the West Indies in 1776. 62. Alexander Kidd, From Neoclassicism to Romanticism, An Examination of Philip Freneau’s Writing Style and his Philosophical Influences (Munich: Grin Verlag, 2018). 63. Emory Elliott notes the “bond between poetry and religion” in Puritan New England, where “poets were often ministers,” Revolutionary Writers, p. 23, note 260. 64. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The Signifying Monkey (NY: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 130. 65. Phyllis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral 1771, Project Gutenberg. All citations are from this edition. Sandra O’Neale reads this poem as deploying biblical references to challenge and contest contemporary views of slavery, “A Slave’s Subtle War: Phillis Wheatley’s Use of Biblical Myth and Symbol,” African American Poets, ed. Harold Bloom (NY: Chelsea House, 2002), 69–94, pp. 72–78. The poem will be further discussed below. 66. https://digital.librar y.upenn.edu/women/wheatley/liberty/liberty.html. 67. “Ballad Concerning the Fight between the English and French at Lake George, 1755,” American Broadside Verse, ed. Ola Elizabeth Winslow (New Haven: Yale University Memorial Publication AMS Press facsimile of Imprints, 1930), p. 121. 68. Hatch, Sacred Cause, pp. 60, 84. 69. Byrd, p. 146, note 208. Eric Nelson, The Royalist Revolution (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press), discusses how “the Old Testament suspicion of kingship became suddenly central” in the Revolutionary turn against Britain, p. 112, whereas “British Whigs wanted to “leave Scripture out of the institution of modern Governments,” p. 114. 70. K. Alan Snyder, “Foundations of Liberty: The Christian Republicanism of Timothy Dwight and Jedidiah Morse,” New England Quarterly 56, no. 3 (1983), notes that Dwight “could see no distinction between Christianity and republican government that promoted freedom,” 382–397, p. 382. Cf. Peter Kafer, “The Making of Timothy Dwight: A Connecticut Morality Tale,” William and Mary Quarterly, April 1990 Vol 4, 189–209.   Bercovitch, Rites, p. 166. 71. J. F. Maclear, “The Republic and the Millennium,” 183–116, note 246. 72. Timothy Dwight, “Valedictory Address” of 1776, Evans Early American Imprint https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/evans/N11665.0001.001?rgn= main;view=fulltext.

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73. Timothy Dwight, The Conquest of Canaan (Hartford, Conn: Elisha Babcock, 1785) https://archive.org/details/cocana00dwig/page/6/ mode/2up. 74. Kenneth Silverman, Timothy Dwight (NY: Twayne, 1969), pp. 30–31, 37. 75. Bloch, Visionary Republic, p. 85. Grasso, “The challenge was—absent the integrating function of the public covenant—getting the two idioms to intersect” of politics, with its “increasingly technical disputes over natural liberties, legal statutes, royal charters, and constitutional rights,” but as “still connected in vital ways to the work of the church,” p. 76. Poetry took part in working out “this new relationship between religion, politics, literature, and intellectual life, and the continuity or change in the rhetoric of moral order and corporate identity,” p. 284. 76. Timothy Dwight, “On a Dissertation on the History Eloquence and Poetry,” see Kafer, “Making,” pp. 199, 202. 77. Stout, “Rhetoric and Reality,” p. 63. 78. For discussions of the poem, see Peter Kafer, “Timothy Dwight’s American ‘Dunciad:’ ‘The Triumph of Infidelity’ and the Universalist Controversy,” Early American Literature 33: 1998, 173–182. Colin Wells, The Devil and Doctor Dwight (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Jack Stillinger, “Dwight’s ‘Triumph of Infidelity’: Text and Interpretation,” Studies in Bibliography, 1962, Vol. 15 (1962), pp. 259–266. 79. Butler, Awash, p. 217. 80. Hatch, Sacred Cause, pp. 5, 12; Bonomi, Cope, that the focus was “not on the millennium but religious institutions and networks,” p. 9. 81. Hatch, “Civil Millennialism,” “Christ’s thousand-year reign on earth was an extension of the civil and religious liberty established in America,” p. 407. Cf. Harry Stout, “Rhetoric and Religion,” pp. 63, 66. 82. Stout, “Rhetoric and Reality,” p. 64. 83. John Wilson, Public Religion, p. 39, note 238. 84. Tuveson, pp. 196–202. 85. L. Holbrook, “The Massachusetts John Brown Song,” Rebellion Record, ed. Frank Moore (NY: G. P. Putnam, 1861), p. 832. 86. Harriet Beecher Stowe, “The Holy War,” Rebellion Record, p.  732. https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_Xi8OAAAAIAAJ/page/n731/ mode/2up. 87. For a fuller discussion of these poets see Shira Wolosky, Poetry and Public Discourse (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 201), pp. 74–94. 88. Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Vol II. (Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1891), p. 62. Gutenberg project https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7400. 89. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Never or Now,” Poetical Works, p. 66.

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90. Holmes, Poetical Works, pp. 68–69. 91. Holmes, Poetical Works, pp. 70–71. 92. Catherine Drew Gilpin Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), pp. 32–33. 93. Henry Timrod, Poems of Henry Timrod, Project Gutenberg. All citations are from this digital text. 94. Catherine Drew Gilpin Faust, Creation, pp. 32–33. 95. Kenneth S.  Greenberg, Masters and Statesmen: The Political Culture of American Slavery (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). 96. War Lyrics and Songs of the South, ed. Abram Joseph Ryan (London: Ottiswood and Co, 1866), Internet Archive. The following poems are cited from this text by page number. 97. John Welsh, “William Gilmore Simms, Critic of the South,” The Journal of Southern History, May, 1960, Vol. 26, No. 2 (May, 1960), 201–214, pp. 201–4. 98. John Caldwell Guilds, William Gilmore Simbms: A Literary Life (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1992), pp.  201, 131. Note: Matthew Brennan, The Poet’s Holy Craft: W G Simms and Romantic Verse Theory (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010) mentions nothing on slavery or the Bible. 99. Masahiro Nakamura, Visions of Order in W.  G. Simms (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), pp. 7–8. 100. Mrs. M.  J. Preston, “Hymn to the National Flag,” War Poetry of the South, ed. William Gilmore Simms, (NY: Richardson and Company, 1867), p. 55, Internet Archive. The following poems are cited from here by page number. Timrod’s “Ethnognesis” is the first poem in the collection. One perhaps astonishing poem, “The War-Christian’s Thanksgiving” by S. Teackle Wallis, opens “Oh God of battles” but offers what can, must? be a litany of sarcasm and accusation that inverts the biblical injunction to feed the widow and child: “We thank Thee for the sabre’s gush / The cannon’s havoc wild; / We bless Thee for the widow’s tears, /The want that starves the child,” p. 75. On the compilation of this anthology see Coleman Hutchison, “Surplus Patriotism: William Gilmore Simm’s War Poetry of the South,” Literary Cultures of the Civil War, ed. Timothy Sweet (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016).

CHAPTER 4

The Bible Divided Against Itself: Abolition, Slave Spirituals

Slavery marks the most extreme scene of American biblical controversy. The struggle over slavery began with the editing of the Declaration of Independence to remove Jefferson’s accusation, in a rhetoric both religious and republican, that Britain has “waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty” in “captivating & carrying… a distant people into slavery” to “incur miserable death in their transportation thither.” The Constitution then permitted slavery’s continuation, although the “importation of slaves” was forbidden from 1808. Hopes or expectations that slavery would fade of itself were soon defeated by new technologies of cotton production. The social, political, religious, as well as economic orders to emerge through the nineteenth century then intensified the battle over slavery. All anti-slavery poetry exposes the contradictions between slavery and republican Enlightenment values of equality and rights, aligning these with religious, biblical terms. Yet proslavery poetry uses these same discourses. Long before it came to Civil War, slavery was a battleground, often of biblical words. The early republic did not witness the decline in religion which some feared and for which some hoped. There was instead a double movement of separation of church and state alongside entanglement of nation and religion.1 Disestablishment, seen as a threat by Timothy Dwight, instead

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launched an unexpected strengthening of biblical culture in politics, religion, and poetry. The very loosening from government spurred religion into voluntarist activism.2 Denominations and associations multiplied, relying on voluntary memberships. This is the America de Tocqueville describes as defined by voluntary associations, which he sees as the outstanding feature and also safeguard of American individualism, democracy, and freedom. “Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions,” he writes, “constantly form associations,” “proposing a common object to the exertions of a great many men, and in getting them voluntarily to pursue it.”3 The origins of this voluntarism he attributes to the original “settlers of New England” as both “ardent sectarians and daring innovators,” in contrast with Europe where “the religionists are the enemy of liberty and the friends of liberty attack religion.”4 Voluntarism brings individuals together in joint activity, as a “congressive” combination of communitarian and liberal individualism. In this voluntarist mode, the advent of new printing and transportation technologies, and the emergence of religious associations such as the American Bible Society, enabled the Bible to achieve mass distribution. Over one million Bibles and six million tracts were printed and distributed by 1830, a vital part of the Second Great Awakening. 5 Debates continue over how much American democratic practices developed or even were spearheaded under the Awakening. Jon Butler underscores that revivalism has a “pro-authoritarian” side, embracing conservative rather than radical or egalitarian approaches to authority.6 Yet, often despite itself, democratizing tendencies surfaced in revivals. Witnessing one’s own individual call opened testifying and preaching to lay people without clerical training.7 This extended to women and African Americans, who through testimony and even preaching entered the public sphere in speech and religious initiative. The intensification of religion in the revivals ushered in diversity, pluralism, multiplication of denominations, and also contention. Scripture, too, emerges not as univocal, but as interpreted more and more by individuals as they moved among new and fluid group formations. These included the country’s sections, in whose intensifying arguments biblical interpretation had a central role. Slavery above all put the possibility of pluralist interpretation under extreme pressure. 8 Religious-historical-­ political terms came to be arrayed against each other in a way that denied the very pluralism that these variant and opposing views attested. Church schisms into Northern and Southern orders were regarded, both at the time and since, as significant ruptures heralding and indeed

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inflaming Civil War.9 The Southern churches took up the biblical defense of slavery, hinging on a few core arguments.10 The passage in Genesis assigning Ham to serve his brothers was one Southern prooftext. Frederick Douglass skewers this argument in his autobiography: If the lineal descendants of Ham are alone to be scripturally enslaved, it is certain that slavery at the south must soon become unscriptural; for thousands are ushered into the world, annually, who, like myself, owe their existence to white fathers, and those fathers most frequently their own masters.11

Other sanctions for slavery were found in the existence of slavery in the Bible itself, although there, as others pointed out, the Bible’s was not chattel slavery, and was countered  by the Jubilee, the horrors of Egyptian slavery, and other legal constraints.12 Pauline texts figured large, especially Ephesians 6:5 and Colossians 3:22, which call on slaves to obey their masters. In contrast, anti-slavery forces saw the core biblical precedents in the Genesis texts declaring humans to be the image of God, and above all, the Exodus story of liberation from slavery. But these prooftexts already relied on, and assumed, hermeneutic orientations. The very choice of these texts reflected interpretive views as to the core biblical message and teaching. Proslavery exegesis regarded the Bible as  an authoritarian text, establishing hierarchies where an all-­ powerful God ruled through his appointed representatives. This “subordinationist” reading saw the Bible as teaching servants to obey their masters, women to obey men, blacks to obey whites. In contrast, anti-slavery activists gave the Bible liberal readings, as teaching the dignity and equal value of each individual rather than hierarchical structure.13 Two contrary interpretive frames thus confronted each other. In each, the fundamental approach in turn directed the choice of texts, to illustrate each interpretive understanding, and the figures and events which best exemplified the reading each proposed. Not least, each approach dictated who had the right to do the interpreting—white male ministers or all Christians equally. Poetry actively participated in these controversies, deploying each interpretation in popular newspapers, journals, and other print culture.

The Abolition Campaign in Poetry Slavery strained the early republic’s shared discourses of both religious and civic life. Anti-slavery poetry marshaled the republican Enlightenment language of equality and rights and also religious and biblical discourses of

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individual equality before God. Both were seen to be gravely contradicted by the fact of American slavery. Arguments against tyranny and enslavement, launched against Britain in the name of Independence, increasingly were taken to implicate and condemn America itself. As one poem written in commemoration of Bunker Hill declares: Would thou obtain thy liberty, Then break all bands of slavery, And do thou liberty proclaim To all that have a human frame. But if oppression here is found Can you with victory be crown’d No, no, be sure this cannot be, While thou thy neighbors do not free.14

Slavery here is first an accusation against the British, calling on Americans to obtain “liberty” by breaking the “bands of slavery” England imposes. But the indictment spills over to America itself, if it does not extend the same liberty to slaves with “all that have a human frame,” undermining the Revolutionary crown of “victory” while “thou thy neighbors do not free.” Philip Freneau in “American Independence” (1778) similarly writes: When God from chaos gave this world to be, Man then he form’d, and form’d him to be free; In his own image stampt the favourite race— How dar’st thou tyrant the fair stamp deface? When on mankind you fix your galling chains, No more the image of that God remains.

Freneau’s claim for the divine image is at first ambiguous as to the meaning of “the favourite race.” Does he mean his own? But the verse moves to include all humankind, with only the “tyrant” defacing their divine “fair stamp” by fixing “on mankind … your galling chains.” The republican accusation of tyranny is now applied to slaveholders, as distorting the biblical divine image. In defacing “the image of God” in others, theirs also “no more … remains.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) enlisted his talent for reaching wide audiences in the anti-slavery cause. “Christmas Bells,” sung as a popular Christmas Carol, was written in response to his son’s Civil

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War wounding. Inside its apparently serene refrain “Of peace on earth” lurks an apocalyptic wail that threatens and disturbs peace and good-will: Then from each black, accursed mouth The cannon thundered in the South,    And with the sound    The carols drowned Of peace on earth, good-will to men! It was as if an earthquake rent The hearth-stones of a continent,    And made forlorn    The households born Of peace on earth, good-will to men!15

The South is figured as an accursed black  monster spewing cannon in thunder, with “earthquake” shaking the “continent” in cosmic proportions. This cosmic imagery appears as well as “earthquake’s arm of might” in his poem “The Slave Singing at Midnight,” as a “Negro enslaved” sings in biblical appeal and also vengeance: Loud he sang the psalm of David! He, a Negro and enslaved, Sang of Israel’s victory, Sang of Zion, bright and free. In that hour, when night is calmest, Sang he from the Hebrew Psalmist, In a voice so sweet and clear. That I could not choose but hear. Songs of triumph, and ascriptions, Such as reached the swart Egyptians, When upon the Red Sea coast Perished Pharaoh and his host.

Putting the biblical words of Exodus in the mouth of a slave declares the poet’s shared language with him. But the “Songs of triumph” and the perishing of “Pharoah” is a prophecy that has not yet been fulfilled. The poem still awaits justice. It ends with the apocalyptic question to the slave: “And what earthquake’s arm of might / Breaks his dungeon-gates at night?” John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892) was the most activist of anti-­ slavery biblical poets. Whittier was editor for Garrison’s temperance weekly as well as other journals, and was prominent in Garrison’s abolitionist

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movement. He was a founding member of the American Anti-Slavery society in 1833, edited the anti-slavery Pennsylvania Freeman, and also helped found the Liberty Party in 1839, which was dedicated to legislative action against slavery. Whittier’s poetry resides alongside his pamphlets, prose writings, newspaper editing, lobbying, and political campaigns in the anti-slavery cause. Poetry becomes itself a participant and test of republican principles, as a mode of the liberty of free speech.16 Whittier accuses the churches of guilt in the slavery controversy in the poem “Clerical Oppressors.” There, church “Men who / their hands with prayer and blessing lay / On Israel’s Ark of light,” then “preach, and kidnap men.” Against such church betrayal, Whittier draws on the hymnal tradition. Many of his poems are called hymns and adopt hymn patterns in their pacing, phrasing, and diction. His poem “Hymn,” written for the meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society in 1834, opens with Exodus, as typologically foretelling the Puritan landing: O THOU, whose presence went before Our fathers in their weary way, As with Thy chosen moved of yore The fire by night, the cloud by day!17

The American “chosen” people are guided, as were the Israelites in the desert, by fire and cloud. The biblical becomes republican as the “temple of the free” is transferred to the American “nation,” offering “our humble prayer.” “Our” then importantly includes: Thy children all, though hue and form Are varied in Thine own good will, With Thy own holy breathings warm, And fashioned in Thine image still…

“Our” embraces “Thy children all,” with whatever variation of “hue and form.” All are fashioned in “Thine image.” This reading of the Bible insists on the value not only of each individual but of diversity itself. But the equality here grounded in both religious and Enlightenment traditions is contradicted by actual American religion and politics. There remain those unsheltered in “Freedom’s Wing”:

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For those who, under Freedom’s wing, Are bound in Slavery’s fetters still: For those to whom Thy written word Of light and love is never given.

“Under Freedom’s wings” is both promise and accusation, since “Slavery’s fetters” are harbored there. “Thy written word” invokes both Revolutionary documents and biblical text, both denied to slaves in the draconian Black Code laws against reading, writing, and assembly, as well as in the immorality of slavery itself. In Whitter’s poem “Democracy” (with an epigraph from Matthew 7: 12), religion and freedom are likewise inextricable: BEARER of Freedom’s holy light, Breaker of Slavery’s chain and rod, … In holy words which cannot die, In thoughts which angels leaned to know, Proclaimed thy message from on high, Thy mission to a world of woe. That voice’s echo hath not died! From the blue lake of Galilee, And Tabor’s lonely mountain-side, It calls a struggling world to thee.

Biblical place-names are spread across America, making it seem of a piece with “Galilee” and “Tabor” of Palestine. The biblical “message from on high… which angels leaned to know” is now delivered to break “Slavery’s chain and rod.” This mixture of republicanism and biblicism is similarly prominent in the work of James Whitfield (1822–1871), an African American abolitionist who published America and Other Poems in 1853.18 Born in New Hampshire to freed slaves, his writing is formal and learned, with his anti-­ slavery poems drawing on both biblical and American foundational democratic texts. The title poem “America” opens recalling, and confuting, “My Country ‘tis of Thee”: America, it is to thee, Thou boasted land of liberty,— It is to thee I raise my song, Thou land of blood, and crime, and wrong.

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The “black man … Cringing beneath a tyrant’s rod” betrays the Declaration of Independence’s “rights which Nature’s God / Bequeathed to all the human race.” The poem challenges the republican heritage: …they fought, as they believed,   For the inherent rights of man; But mark, how they have been deceived   By slavery’s accursed plan … The founders “never thought” that The rights for which they fought and fell, Could be the framers of a code,   That would disgrace the fiends of hell!

The betrayal of the republic is no less a betrayal of Christianity: Here Christian writhes in bondage still,   Beneath his brother Christian’s rod, And pastors trample down at will,   The image of the living God.

What unfolds is a vision of American slavery as read through a typology not of a Promised Land but of “Babylon or Egypt”: Almighty God! It is this they call   The land of liberty and law; Part of its sons in baser thrall   Than Babylon or Egypt saw— Worse scenes of rapine, lust and shame,   Than Babylonian ever knew, Are perpetrated in the name   Of God, the holy, just, and true; And darker doom than Egypt felt, May yet repay this nation’s guilt.

To those who can see, biblical pattern unveils a slave America among the worst oppressors of history. What this history foreshadows are plagues even “worse” than Egypt’s:

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Yet to the eye of him who reads The fate of nations past and gone, And marks with care the wrongful deeds By which their power was overthrown, Worse plagues than Egypt ever felt Are seen wide-spreading through the land, Announcing that the heinous guilt On which the nation proudly stands, Has risen to Jehovah’s throne And kindled his avenging ire, And broad-cast through the land has sown The seeds of a devouring fire.

The Bible’s events provide the pattern for reading the events of today, now negatively against America. The End will be in “devouring fire” of apocalypse, avenging national guilt. What is striking is that these poems do not repudiate American discourses, either biblical or republican, but use them to rebuke their betrayal. The interpreter here is the African American, wielding all the authority of those American claims. The frame, however, as apocalyptic, also exceeds American and all history. It is difficult to find an exit from the current oppression within the terms of the history that executes it. But this interwoven republicanism with religion is claimed by the South as well. Recent attention to Southern poetry notes that there are relatively few proslavery verses.19 Bible defenses against slavery filled prose writings, both in church and in general, both in the United States and trans-­ Atlantically in Britain. But it is not a central poetic topic.20 In general, the South produced fewer writings or poetry than the North did. With almost no publishing venues in a region poor in urban culture, Southern writers ironically relied on Northern publishers. In the strongly hierarchized society in which Blacks were forbidden to read on pain of severe penalties, and the broad white reading public was small, there was little market for books. As William Gilmore Simms complains: “We have struggled to provoke the South into intellectual and literary exertions of her own,” but have been defeated by “neglect of educational institutions, want of taste, indifference of leaders to literature and history, and widespread ignorance.”21 He of course fails even to take into account the active laws enforcing slave illiteracy.

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Most poems of the South avoid mentioning slavery altogether, except in its appropriated sense as a danger to their own liberty. Using Enlightenment and republican language of virtue and freedom, Southern writers lay claim to themselves as the true heritors of the Revolution. It is theirs to defend their constitutional rights to own property, including humans. And, as in the North, such republican language, now carrying specifically Southern meanings, interfuses with claims to religious blessing and American mission. Some texts explicitly recognize that what had been common senses have now become contested. A “Song of the South” begins: In brotherhood they once had dwelt, Beneath the fig tree’s shade, Together at God’s shrine they knelt, And at His altars prayed By every wind ‘twas tost, The “liberty our father’s won Shall not by us be lost.” To arms! To arms! Arise! Arise!22

This poem was collected in War Songs of the South, which was issued in order to ensure that the South’s “songs of our own revolution” not be lost.23 Here, the “fig tree’s shade,” emblem of millennial peace (Micah 4:4), is now a failed nostalgia of the past. Once there was shared religious worship at “God’s shrine” and “altars” and a common interpretation as to what these meant and where they were located. Now, this comity has been “tost” by a “wind” from the North. The South is left to inherit the “liberty our father’s won” as well as the American divine mission, summoned through the biblical call from Isaiah “Arise! Arise!” As the refrain of one poem goes: Lord of the Cross, our banner bless Oe’rthrow the foe who would oppress And strangle liberty.

A footnote adds that this “banner” refers to the “battle flag of the C.S.A.,” which featured a blue cross on a red field.24 The poem “What the Bugles Say” hears apocalyptic trumpets summon the “champions of the South”

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By the God who rules above! By the beings whom we love, By the rights your fathers won, By the name of Washington.

God, the founding fathers, and Washington himself, all urge the South onward against a “grim and impious foe” come “to lay your altars low,” a force of Antichrist against the southern soldiers of the Lord.25 Shared biblical heritage now becomes a staging ground for mutual attack, weaponized to demonize the enemy. “My Native Land” in William Gilmore Simms collection War Poetry of the South accuses the North of assaulting the South with false religion: Instead of God the despot reigns … And use religion’s awful might To crush in men the sense of right Thank God it is not here.26

The North makes God into a “despot,” in whose name the North uses “religion’s awful might” against them, the South, who are the “men” with “sense of right.” It is the North, in “The Guerillas: A Southern War Song,” who are the evil fiends inciting against the sanctioned order of slavery: …turning the slave upon us, And, with more than the fiend’s worst art, Have uncovered the fires of the savage That slept in his untaught heart. “The ties to our hearths that bound him, They have rent, with curses, away, And maddened him, with their madness, To be almost as brutal as they. With halter and torch and Bible, And hymns to the sound of the drum, They preach the gospel of Murder, And pray for Lust’s kingdom to come.

Slaves, who had, before abolitionist interference, strong “ties to our hearths that bound him,” now “turn upon us” under the baleful influence of demonic Northern forces. They thus unleash diabolic “fires of the savage” slaves, who need whites to constrain their primitive nature. This

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betrayal the brutal North has accomplished through the “Bible” itself and “hymns,” whose meanings are inverted to a “gospel of Murder,” unleashing “Lust’s kingdom to come” instead of Christ’s. Poetic defenses of slavery at times place that defense in the mouths of the slaves themselves, as if representing their own faith and prayers. “Battle Cry of the South” declares From mother, and wife, and child— From faithful and happy slave Prayers for your sakes ascend to Him Whose arm is strong to save.27

Here, the “faithful and happy slave” of Southern construction joins with the women and children of the masters to pray for the whole happy family’s “sakes.” The very consciousness and spiritual life of the enslaved are in this way appropriated. Other poems ventriloquize. “A Scene from the South” claims biblical sanction for slavery by putting the argument for racial inferiority in the mouth of a Black Mammy. The “Southern child” in her care, with “white an’ red” face and “yaller ringlets,” comes with news of the war, and the Mammy responds with divine justification for racial difference: My chile, who makes dis diff’rence ‘Twixt Mammy and ‘twixt you? You reads dear Lord’s blessed Book, An’ you kin tell me true. De good God says it mus’ be so, An’ honey, I, for one, Wid tankful heart will always say His holy will be done!28

In this text, it is the Mammy herself who insists that God, in his “blessed Book” that she cannot read, “makes this diff’rence” and “says it must be so,” which she is said to embrace “Wid tankful heart.” “The Old Negro at Calhoun’s Grave,” in another collection, is written in the voice of a Northerner rehearsing the voice of a freed slave, who chastises himself nostalgically as he lays flowers on his ex-master’s grave:

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“Master was always good to me” Says the poor slave we came to free. And we reply, that ‘Whence we came Are some who curse your master’s name.’ They never knew him, then’ he said ‘Why he gave us our daily bread And everything we had beside Would he had lived and I had died!’29

Here a Southern poet writes a Northerner’s account of a slave’s voice which portrays the master as God—“he gave us our daily bread.” Berating the Northerners for maligning his master, the slave refuses their offer of freedom and rededicates himself to defend his former master as a religious devotion and even self-sacrifice. Astonishingly, the slave refuses freedom and denounces these men from “the bad land” of the North, while defending his master from what echoes as a biblical injunction against blaspheming God’s name: Old man, we’ve come to set you free; Oh no! I’ll never go with ye; Ye told me that some cursed his name In the bad land from whence you came.

The slave finally defends his master with “in God we trust.” The very voice of the slave is taken possession of.

Frances Harper Frances Harper (1825–1911) was born a free Black American in Baltimore and was educated at her uncle’s African Episcopal Methodist school. Her poetry was written before, during, and after the Civil War, as an integral part of her activism. Serving in the Underground Railroad, she broke through formidable barriers to speak publicly as a woman for abolition, for women’s rights, and then after the war, for Freedman’s rights and education, to which she dedicated herself. Her poems, which she read at rallies alongside her speeches, were written to be publicly accessible not only in its steady rhymes, syntax, and meters, but in the biblical resonances with which it powerfully engaged terms easily recognized and in wide circulation.

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Harper’s poem “Bible Defense of Slavery,” written in response to a book of that title by Josiah Priest published in 1851, directly confronts and denounces this betrayal of Scripture. Harper’s poem registers the reality of multiple interpretations, but in doing so she does not relinquish her own. She takes her stand regarding the two competing approaches to religion and the Bible enlisted in the battle over slavery: the egalitarian one in which the image of God invests each person with equal value in ways that matched Enlightenment republicanism; as against the conservative “subordinationist” hermeneutic which saw God as ultimate power, authorizing in turn ministerial, political, and economic masters in hierarchical control of social order.30 Eugene Genovese makes the claim that proslavery conservatives went so far as to view slavery as the very “model for the Christian world.”31 Harper does not legitimate these different biblical interpretations. She declares one wrong, one right. Perhaps one can say that she would support pluralist readings that themselves support pluralism. In regard to slavery, she firmly holds to her sense of religious truth, in the name of which she denounces the false, oppressive religion that belies and betrays its own religious principles in defending the debasement of humans as chattel. What Harper’s “Bible Defense of Slavery” does is summon to this witness: Take sackcloth of the darkest dye, and shroud the pulpits round Servants of Him that cannot lie Sit mourning on the ground… A reverend man, whose light should be The guide of age and youth, Brings to the shrine of slavery The sacrifice of truth! For the direst wrong by man imposed, Since Sodom’s fearful cry, The word of life has been unclos’d To give your God the lie.32

Harper’s is an art of reversals. The pulpits are themselves shrouded, and shroud with death what should be messages of life. True “Servants” of God are not those ministers performing Southern services, but slaves who, degraded by them, “sit mourning on the ground”—an interesting reference to Hebrew mourning rites reflecting Harper’s Old Testament

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learning. “That cannot lie” applies to both Christ as the voice of truth and also to his true Black “Servants” witnessing “Him.” This makes the preacher who defends slavery into a liar. The second stanza continues the pattern of reversals. “Light” becomes darkness in the mouth of the (white) reverend, who should be a “guide” but instead misleads. Slavery is itself the altar on which truth is “sacrificed” instead of being attested. Harper, however, knows what is true: that slavery is “the direst wrong by man,” indeed is a type of Sodom. Against the “reverend,” itself an hierarchical term as if the minister himself commands reverence, she knows the true “word of life”—an assertion against hierarchy of her own interpretive rights, extending to herself as both Black and woman—which she will “unclose.” Hers is a prophetic vocation which will “give your (white) God the lie”—distinguishing a separate false white, versus true Black, religion, and Bible. Harper’s remains a deep faith in the Bible, as a moral light and guide to justice and equality. In a prophet-like role, she takes upon herself the defense of the Bible against Bible defenses of slavery, which is to say also her own right to interpret as both Black and woman. Her religion combines with republicanism, conjuring its own vision of America. “Bury Me in a Free Land” challenges the 1814 Star-Spangled Banner’s claim of America as “the land of the free and the home of the brave:” Make me a grave where’er you will, In a lowly plain, or a lofty hill, Make it among earth’s humblest graves, But not in a land where men are slaves. (FHP 177)

Harper’s poetic reversal makes hers a voice of the dead addressing the living. Her grave on “lowly plain” or “lofty hill” is at once “humblest” but also prophetic, as Moses was buried in an unknown grave on a hilltop. She too is prophetess in serving truth. And her most humble grave is on higher moral ground than is America, which is not the land of the free but the “land where men are slaves.” Harper’s poem “The Freedom Bell” (1871) similarly shares poetic territory with the national hymn “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” written in 1831 by a Baptist minister. Her title recalls its concluding line “Let Freedom ring.” Written after the end of the Civil War, “The Freedom Bell” is at once more overtly sacral and more sadly ironic than the national hymn:

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Ring, aye, ring the freedom bell, And let its tones be loud and clear; With glad hosannas let it swell Until it reach the Bondman’s ear. Through pain that wrings the life apart, And spasms full of deadly strife, And throes that shake the nation’s heart, The fainting land renews her life. (FHP 178)

“Glad hosannas” celebrate freedom with prayer. But “Until it reach the Bondman’s ear” is both invitation and ironic. Harper was active in the Underground Railroad before the Civil War, and in Freedman’s rights after it. As she well knew, freedom had not yet come to Black Americans in Reconstruction, despite the “pain” and “spasms of deadly strife” of war. Yet she still casts the “nation” itself in the terms of a Christian conversion experience. “The fainting land renews her life” through the travails of war and of slavery itself. America is itself born again. Or is it? In another characteristic Harper poetic strategy, time sequences are unclear in this text. In something like a stream of time running opposite to prophecy, Harper suspends what should be present time, but is not. Although the war has ended, it is only in a future that “the ransom’d slave shall kneel in prayer.” Freedom is yet to be attained, it has not yet arrived. This unfulfilled future that should be past marks the time grammars of the poem’s remaining stanzas. In a grammatical tense that is both future and conditional imperative, the “Freeman’s joyful song” “shall rise” but has not yet done so. As to the freedom bell, it is unclear just when the poem’s “then” is meant to take place: Then ring, aye, ring the freedom bell, Proclaiming all the nation free; Let earth with sweet thanksgiving swell And heaven catch up the melody.

Alas, “all” the nation is not yet “free.” The republican promise should join with the religious “thanksgiving” but has not yet done so. “Ring” is an imperative directed at a future state, the present not yet fulfilling what should already have come to pass. “Freedom” is one of the pivotal terms that stretch across both political and religious discourses. In this, it plays on ambiguities that allows it to

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bridge the two discourses, while at the same time carrying and indeed concealing different senses that may augment each other but may clash.33 The concluding lines of “The Freedom Bell” resolves one such ambiguity of immense political consequence: freedom as an inner spiritual liberty or as outward, concrete political rights. Southern Christianity insisted that freedom for slaves can mean only in spiritual terms, if at all. Harper’s “Let earth with sweet thanksgiving swell / And heaven catch up the melody” seems to summon the Lord’s Prayer—“on earth as it is in heaven”—in the name of both sorts of freedom. Harper’s prophetic vocation is vividly demonstrated in her Exodus poem “Deliverance.” Here she moves into a broad interpretation of history itself, its patterns, its trajectory, its values and meanings. These unfold in an intricate typology of time-relations: Rise up! rise up! Oh Israel, Let a spotless lamb be slain; The angel of death will o’er you bend And rend your galling chain. Sprinkle its blood upon the posts And lintels of your door; When the angel sees the crimson spots Unharmed he will pass you o’er. Gather your flocks and herds to-night, Your children by your side; A leader from Arabia comes To be your friend and your guide. (FHP 335)

The poem’s opening lines echo Isaiah’s call to Israel to “Rise up!” (60:1), here transported back to Exodus. Exodus in turn is moved forward into the present of the slave South’s “galling chain.” “A leader from Arabia” underscores Moses’s location in Africa, as is also the case in Harper’s long poem Moses: A Story of the Nile.34 Here Moses’s role is emphatically not hierarchical, but as “friend” and “guide.” The poem takes place in the urgent moment of decision, escape or doom, faith or doubt, the biblical threshold “lintel” of the Passover, when those with faith marked their doorposts with the blood of the Paschal lamb. Harper calls this in the next stanza “the hour of dread.” But the poem then leaps from this past crisis to a future that looks back at it:

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And ye shall hold in unborn years A feast to mark this day, When joyfully the fathers rose And cast their chains away.

The poem jumps forward to look at slavery as past, “when” the slave “fathers”—also America’s political fathers?—“cast their chains away.” The “feast” is Passover, where past, present, and future times intersect. And yet, the biblical slave’s and the liberated slave’s “this day” of liberation is unclearly located. Christ is typologized as the “spotless lamb” whose blood the Passover lamb prefigures and whose blood sacrifice the Civil War reenacts. Yet the time marker “then” points only to “distant years” of this post-slavery future: Then ye shall to your children teach the meaning of this feast How from the proud oppressor’s hand Their fathers were released. And ye shall hold through distant years This feast with glad accord.

The Passover, a typological time-corollary of the Last Supper and Christ’s sacrifice, has taken on new meaning as it extends to the plight of the American slave. Yet its time settings are never fully aligned. It predicts the slave’s liberation from “the proud oppressor’s hand,” but looks back on it from a remote future that in fact has not yet come to pass: “Ages have passed since Israel trod / In triumph through the sea.” This “first great jubilee” is—or will be?—reenacted in emancipation, but it has not yet fully taken place. The poem, written in 1871, moves back toward oppression that still lives in memory and also reality: Shall Israel thro’ long varied years These memories cherish yet, And we who lately stood redeemed Our broken chains forget?

Black emancipation is a jubilee, in the image of the Bible’s prophetic pattern and spoken by a Black poet-prophetess. However, the poem’s elaborate biblical typology, structured through multiple temporal references,

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leaves unclear just when and how such prophetic fulfillment will take place. In her time of writing, during Reconstruction, it has not yet done so. “Deliverance” is Harper’s own original spiritual song, her own claim to biblical interpretation and asserting her right to do so, both as Black and as woman. As occurs so centrally in the slave spirituals, the Exodus story is reassigned so its promise of redemption is claimed by African Americans— whose prophet, here, is a freewoman. Notably, this poem is not apocalyptic. Earlier it speaks of the Passover time-to-be as one “when crimson tints of morning flush / The golden gates of day.” Despite the sacrificial resonance of “crimson tints,” these “golden gates of day” do not end time, but redeem it. Just so the poem’s final verses bid: “Go forth, but not in crimson fields / With fratricidal strife.” Harper does not arraign enemy against enemy in implacable and ultimate opposition. Her Christ does not come in wrath and judgment, but to lead “forth / For freedom, love and life.” Yet the text is cast into an as yet unaccomplished future. Although written after the war, the poem shows emancipation has yet to come. Equality remains unfulfilled prophecy. Harper, however, and the slave spirituals themselves, speak in hope of Exodus and redemption, claiming these American discourses for themselves and in doing so both reinterpret texts and declare their right to interpret.35

Slave Spirituals The biblical words of the slave spirituals are so prominent as to be almost taken for granted. Critical attention has focused mainly on their musical forms and rhythms and their importance as cultural performance.36 First published in the 1860s as “Songs of the Contraband,” which marked the unclear legal status of slaves who escaped to Union army lines, the spirituals stretch back into the years of slavery from long before the Civil War. Many features have been hotly debated: their origins; their African sources against or alongside Anglo-American ones37; their collective authorship; their role in distinctive African American worship, with dance and ring shout38; their reflection of the conditions of slavery; the challenges of collecting, editing, publishing them39; and whether they form part of a Black Christianity separate from white Christianity.40 Studies center, on the whole, on the culture, historical contexts, and performance of the spirituals, rather than on their texts. The specifics of the spirituals’ biblical language thus have not been the focus of attention. John Work warns that it is a “fatal error” in the

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“analysis of these songs to rely altogether upon the verse rather than upon the music” and stresses “the importance of music over words.”41Albert Raboteau, rightly insisting on the emergence of the spirituals as “communal songs, felt, sung, danced in performance,” likewise moves the emphasis away from seeing the spirituals “simply as words and notes printed on a page.”42 The Bible is of course recognized as a religious resource in Black American experience and culture. James Lovell’s discussion of “Literary Aspects of the Spirituals” cites the Bible as a model of narrative, drama, and epic, but sees the songs as having a “limited vocabulary, oversimplified rhymes, and few themes although with variation.”43 The song’s texts have been generally treated as secondary—“dictated,” as one commentator puts it, “more by a logic of rhythm and sound than of verbal meaning.”44 Biblical references, so central to the spirituals’ structure and experience, have been described in textual terms as “lack[ing] of logical coherence,… a patchwork, scissors-and-paste quality” with little “continuity of thought between the various lines of a stanza, between stanza and refrain, or between the various stanzas.”45 Even James Weldon Johnson speaks of the “misconstruction or misapprehension of the facts of [the] source of material, generally the Bible.”46 This apparent inconsistency extends to what Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in one of the earliest discussions of the spirituals he overheard as Colonel of the first Black regiment fighting for the Union, notes the spirituals’ apparently illogical assembly of biblical references. With a strong preference for Old Testament figures and the book of Revelation “with no Jesus narrative in between,” the texts appear as “a vast bewildered chaos of Jewish history and biography” in which “most of the great events of the past, down to the period of the American Revolution, they instinctively attribute to Moses.”47 Others similarly describes the spirituals as drawing “without regard for Biblical chronology or even accuracy on the whole Bible story, conflating the New Testament with the Old, and the Old with the New.”48 Yet this very montage brings the spirituals toward central traditions of exegesis within American biblical traditions, not least typological ones, to which they give unique directions and also deeply challenge. Their textual engagement takes place on many levels. The Bible provides imagery and structure to the texts. It further constructs their time frames, pursues and projects core values, and displays interpretive commitments. Through the Bible, the spirituals participate in traditions that have defined America, at once sharing, critiquing, and transposing them. They confront and transmute, yet also confirm American biblical experience. The spirituals

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embrace biblical authority, but in a contest of readings that represents the slave world and asserts their own interpretive modes. They are a scene of intense debate over the American biblical heritage, national destiny, the meaning of America itself. The spirituals share many features of biblical text and exegesis and of poetics itself. All work through multiple meanings, productive ambiguities, complex temporal schema, and widening implications. Such multiplicity and ambiguity are evident in the much noted coded meanings that constitute the spiritual language. Regarding the question as to whether the spirituals intend earthly or heavenly salvation, Frederick Douglass explains that in singing “I am bound for the land of Canaan,” there was “something more than a hope of reaching heaven … The North was our Canaan.”49 Thomas Wentworth Higginson in his Army Life in a Black Regiment provides an early description of spiritual encoding. His soldiers explained to him: “Dey tink de Lord mean for say de Yankees.” Higginson is told that “Ride on King Jesus, No man can hinder Thee,” refers to the “padderollers [patrollers] who told them to stop or they would show him whether they could be hindered or not.”50 “Steal away to Jesus” signaled “bush” or “hush harbor” meetings forbidden by white masters as unlawful assembly, taking place away from white eyes.51 Harriet Tubman tells that the songs meant “Heaven as freedom; devil as slaveowners; Jordan River as Ohio; sweet chariot the Underground Railroad.”52 Such codes were intentional equivocations, self-censorship, and self-masking. Higginson notes that the men would stop singing when he came near.53 Images of freedom were purposely “ambiguous,” to be taken by whites as only religious, but meaning to the slaves both “freedom from physical as well as spiritual bondage.” The spirituals “were capable of communicating on more than one level of meaning”—ambiguities which the whites feared.54 As one commentator explains, “The God spoken about in the black songs is not the same as in the white songs. Although the words might look the same (they are not even pronounced alike). But it is a different quality of energy they summon.”55 Such coded meanings echo the Bible’s own multiple levels of meaning, as these in turn took part in the ambiguities of religious and republican terms prevalent in American public discourses. Indeed, the multiple meanings are “not just code,” as Albert Raboteau clarifies, being “more ambiguous and more profound.”56 Among the most complex and contested words were “freedom” and “slavery.” The religious meaning of freedom as freedom from sin is not abandoned. But freedom in the songs intend

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freedom from slavery, in ways that reflect but also redirect republican senses from the accusation of tyranny first aimed against Britain, where rebellion against slavery meant political rule but not actual economic ownership by others. Republicans themselves had been uncomfortably aware of the contradictions between their political uses of “slavery” and the fact of enslavement in the land they were claiming for freedom.57 Both senses stood in contest against Southern claims of freedom precisely to own property in slaves. Black Americans added further senses to “freedom” and “slavery.” Their first meanings would be freedom from chattel slavery itself. But this transformed religious meanings as well. If slavery to sin was common religious parlance, to Black Americans, the sin was slavery itself. This extended to the sins committed under slavery, notoriously sexual sins of masters against female slaves but also beatings, systemic violence, break-up of families, torture, and murder. But reduction of persons to property itself was a sinful betrayal of all Christian principles. As Higginson reports, “sin” meant the “pain and suffering” of slavery.58 “Whites may have felt their only bondage to be sin, and freedom to be religious salvation,” writes Sterling Brown, but to slaves it was “not figurative.” They thus refused to be “imprisoned by white definitions of God’s liberating work.”59 The meaning of the spirituals have themselves been contested as to whether and how much they are religious or political, other-worldly or this-worldly, sacred or secular. The spirituals have been described as “compensatory” in  nature, seeking justice and reward in an other world.60 However, others reject this view of the “slave songs as simply religious and other-worldly projects towards a transcendent reality unrelated to slave experiences… .as if the religion of the slave was an isolated phenomenon unrelated to the desire for social and political freedom.”61 James Lovell warns against placing “other worldly emphasis in the context of historical striving for earthly freedom.” But as Raboteau argues, the categories of sacred and secular are themselves “not useful.” In African, but also “biblical tradition,” there is an infusion or reflection of the sacred in the historical.62 Indeed, one central role of the biblical text and its interpretations is precisely to link historical experiences to meaningful patterns. This can be seen as one definition of religion itself. In this sense, all exegesis to some degree sees the Bible as encoded, not as a mechanical substitution of one meaning for another, but as extending meanings over different dimensions of experience. Each exegetical level always points beyond itself to another, with the balance between them kept in relational play. The Bible

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mediates between an immediate history and a pattern encompassing and directing it. Its multiple structures assert connections between secular venture and sacred vision, communal destiny and individual salvation, history and ultimacy, the present and a meaningful interpretation of it, extending into past and future. This the Bible very much does in the spirituals, whose “codes” remain mutually referring. They can finally be resolved neither into a purely political and this worldly meaning nor into an exclusively other-worldly longing.63 Rather, multivalent meanings operate throughout, in an American biblical tradition of both-worldliness embedded in exegetical practices. On the level of hermeneutics, the spirituals strongly represent the liberal and emancipatory reading of the Bible against the hermeneutic of authority and subordination. In them the Bible’s “theme” and “goal” is “deliverance.”64 There was need to take a strong stand against Bible defenses of slavery, against the claim that slavery was not condemned in Scripture but was permitted and even endorsed by it. The Pauline injunctions for the servant to obey the master, what has been called the “Slave Beatitudes,” were prooftexts taken to teach “Blessed are the patient, the faithful, the cheerful, submissive, hardworking, and above all, the obedient.”65 Under white supervision what was preached was to “obey masters.” Only when all whites were absent could one speak his heart: “’iffen they keeps prayin’ the Lord will set them free.”66 Such hermeneutical interplay structures Black poetry outside the spirituals as well. In “A Dialogue; Entitled, the Kind Master and the Dutiful Servant” published in 1760 by the devout poet Jupiter Hammon, the master’s voice summons God and grace to confirm that the servant obey and keep his “place.” Come my servant, follow me, According to thy place; And surely God will be with thee, And send thee heav’nly grace.

Hammon as servant responds with subtle dissent in the form of consent, posing against the master’s obedience his own interpretation of the Bible: Dear Master now I’ll follow thee, And trust upon the Lord; The only safety that I see, Is Jesus’ holy word…

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Now glory be unto our God, Let ev’ry nation sing; Strive to obey his holy word, The Christ may take them in…

The servant cites the Bible’s “holy word,” not the master’s, as his true authority. This is his “only safety,” only this will he “obey.” “Let ev’ry nation sing” in fact proclaims what this white American nation does not. It is the Black Americans who truly sing God’s glory. It is they whom Christ will take in. Like the abolitionists, but presumably with only indirect knowledge of their writings—the planters systematically destroyed all pamphlets and materials sent South in the attempt to silence the abolitionist word; Black Americans understood the Scriptures to “condemn every species of oppression.” The Bible’s core message is to be “against oppression and injustice in every form, and surely it condemns injustice so flagrant.” The Black American hermeneutic thus stood opposed to the proslavery claims that the Bible supports society as “hierarchical by ranks and subordination,” making the Bible the reflection of “the values of inequality and hierarchy of the paternalistic relations between master and slave and planter and yeoman.”67 The spirituals’ biblical textuality shares more, however, than hermeneutic approaches and general analogies between the condition of the slaves and the biblical narratives. Theirs is more than “identification,” “parallel,” ‘correspondence,” or “literalization” between the slave present and Biblical history. Beyond the “obvious parallels” in American and biblical slave experience, they offer “a new set of symbolic constructs in the form of parables, principles, maxims, and metaphors.”68 Among these is a claiming and redesigning of American biblical hermeneutic traditions of typology.69 The apparently jumbled chronologies, the mixtures of characters from different parts of the Bible, the parallelism of events, all accord with the practices of biblical typology that had spread from New England through the colonies and then states. Not only broad identification with Old Testament Israelites, but a complex structure of intercrossing time schemes governs the biblical typologies of the spirituals. Spirituals’ texts interweave the Old and New Testaments in typological ways, further extended to their own group experience, which thus introduces an original level and also structure of meaning. As does typology in general, the hermeneutic binds individual together with community, present with past, and points forward to a redemption not yet come but present in faith.

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How, however, would the slaves have access to such elaborate biblical exegesis? Black codes stringently forbade teaching the slaves to read, not only for the concrete reason of preventing slaves from writing their own passes as Frederick Douglass recounts, but out of fear that, reading the Bible, the slaves would grasp language of their own humanity and emancipation.70 The Exodus story was particularly dreaded by slave masters. The Christianizing of the slaves, first extensively reaching them through Great Awakening revivals, had to contend against the planter’s reluctance to admit their property had souls. The economic danger that conversion would incur manumission had been early resolved in the slave laws passed in Virginia in 1662, declaring slavery to be a permanent condition inherited from the mother. Missionaries, seeking the planters’ cooperation, argued that Christianity would teach meekness. Still, planters attempted to strictly limit and control assembly for worship and access to the Bible.71 The camp meetings and preaching of the Great Awakenings, in their open venues to all comers, unstructured spaces, and appeal to each soul, welcomed Black Americans who there also encountered the Bible. Much religious culture remained oral. Yet there was yearning to read, directly inspired by the Bible, with some success. As Frances Harper’s character Aunt Chloe recounts in the poem “Learning to Read:” “Our masters always tried to hide / Book learning from our eyes; / Knowledge didn’t agree with slavery.” Yet, despite the folks telling her “there is no use trying / Oh! Chloe your too late … I longed to read the Bible / For precious words it said… And never stopped till I could read / The hymns and Testament.” But if the slaves could not read, they could sing with extraordinary beauty. Hymns accordingly became a major form of worship. The practice of “lining out” hymns, where the preacher would sing and the congregation respond line by line, recalled the antiphonal back and forth between leader and group of African song forms. The Reverend Samuel Davies, in an early Presbyterian mission to the slaves of Virginia, writes that “books were all very acceptable, but none more so than the Psalms and Hymns, which enable them to gratify their peculiar taste for hymnody.”72 And records show that the most widely disseminated hymnal for this purpose was Isaac Watts’s Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs, of such great importance to Emily Dickinson. Charles Colcock Jones, a leading figure in the mission to the slaves, recommends Watt’s first and second Catechism and above all, since they “are extravagantly fond of music … Watts will furnish a great number of suitable psalms and hymns.”73 Paul Petrovich Svinin

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records in his travel notes of 1811 how Holy Writ was disseminated in the form of “Watt’s Psalms of David Imitated” which were read out line by line (“lined-out”), allowing the congregation to sing the text they could not read.74 Watts Hymns and Spiritual Songs became “immensely popular in the colonies, especially among black folk.”75 One ex-slave named a Watts hymn to be the first text she could read: “I found a [Watts] Hymn book… and spelled out, ‘When I Can Read My Title Clear.’ I was so happy when I saw that I could really read, that I ran around telling all the other slaves.”76 An outstanding feature of the Watts hymnal is its strong biblical base and specifically typological constructions. Besides recasting the Psalms themselves, Watts hymns are deeply typological, pursuing correlations of Old and New Testament texts that bind them into one design, weaving time together. These hymns stand out as an important avenue by which Black Americans gained a sense of biblical history not only as discrete narratives or heroes or images, but as these together project the meaning of time: how each moment of history fits together into patterns of significance. The Watts hymns thus stand as a specific historical link and entry of the Black community into this peculiarly American mode of identity formation. Typology in turn clarifies the spirituals’ own textual structures, as well as the specific historical vision projected by them. Watts’s Hymns and Spiritual Songs77 in verse and notes offers parallels between Biblical heroes from Adam through Christ, in historical sweeps reaching from creation to End Time. As occurs no less in the spirituals, multiple historical and textual references appear together in single texts. But this is not due to confusion. Rather, it projects the intimate union between these different moments within a divine, overarching pattern. Christ is linked to Moses as Redeemer (Watts I:56, 188); to the first Adam as his antitype antidote (Watts I:57, 124); to Aaron as Priest (Watts I:145); to the Passover Lamb as sacrifice (Watts II:155). Babel parallels Egypt parallels Babylon; Noah’s flood parallels apocalypse (Watts I:59); the Old Testament Law prefigures the Gospel (Watts II:120, 121). Notes at the foot of pages of Watts’s Hymns point out these parallels, explaining, for example, how Moses’ law and Aaron’s priesthood project correlations such that “Joshua [is the] same as Jesus, and signifies a Saviour” (Watts II: 124). Old Testament figures are declared to be “Shadow[s] of [Christ the] Son” (Watts I: 89). Within hymns themselves Watts directly employs such terms as “types” or “shadows.” Christ appears (Watts II: 12) as “the true Messiah” before

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whom “the types are all withdrawn,” just as “fly the shadows and the stars / Before the rising dawn.” The “types and figures” of the Old Testament in Watts Select Hymn 7 are the “glass’ for viewing Jesus as the “paschal sacrifice,” the priestly “lamb and dove,” the “scape-goat”—each a “type, well understood.” Throughout, New Testament events are seen as already revealed within Israelite history. Multiple figures are incorporated, placed in careful parallels that assert together a unity of divine purpose and divine will. With Watts in mind, the composite of figures in many different spirituals become not accidental jumbles but rather significant expressions of Black American biblical-historical vision. Even under the constraints of variant or incomplete versions of songs collected through oral histories, a quite systematic and complex typological architecture is visible. “Didn’t Old Pharoah Get Los.” for example, correlates together Isaac’s ransom with Moses’s rescue by Pharoah’s daughter; his escape from and defeat of Egypt; his miraculous provision of water; Joseph’s rise; and the birth and prophecy of Samuel: Isaac a ransom while he lay upon an alter bound; Moses an infant cast away, By Pharoah’s daughter found… Joseph by his false brethren sold, God raised above them all; … To Hannah’s child the Lord foretold Eli’s house should fall. (Johnson I: 60)

Each of these Old Testament figures are types of Christ, each reenacting (before the event) Christ’s passion of suffering and his glorious redemption. The parallels are, however, remarkably articulated not only as general correlations but also as specific roles encompassed in Christ as antitype. Isaac evokes sacrifice. Moses represents both priesthood and kingship, as does Joseph, although here each is cast in his most vulnerable moments—as infant and sold slave—such that miraculous rescue is underscored, a type of Christian salvation. Samuel, Hannah’s child, foretells divine Judgment. The song then pursues a fuller course, through added verses, focused on Moses’s confrontation with Pharoah—including an again very specified type of “hidden manna,” making the biblical bread also the spiritual body of Christ. The song concludes, as the spirituals’ title and refrain promises, with how “Old Pharoah an’ his host/ Got los’ in de Red Sea.”

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It is of course no accident that Pharoah’s defeat should emerge on central stage. Of all the biblical histories, the story of Hebrew slavery and deliverance from Egypt would have deepest resonance. Nevertheless, even this almost self-evident point of similarity is sculpted distinctively in the Black American treatment of both shared symbols and distinctive historical structures and Black American relationship to them. First and foremost is reversal and redistribution of roles in the types of the Exodus.78 The Puritans had declared themselves the Israelites fleeing the Europe/ Egyptians across the Atlantic/Red Sea. Black Americans dramatically displace and transfer this covenantal relationship, not to deny it but to claim it for themselves. For them, it is they who are the Israelites, while it is white America that is Egypt and white Americans who are Pharoah. Their crossing of the Atlantic brought them into slavery not freedom. As most famously in “Go Down Moses,” the chosen people are correlated with Black Americans. Favored figures embody and promise the core biblical hermeneutic of deliverance. “Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel” constructs a sequence including “Daniel f’om de lion’s den,/ Jonah f’om de belly of de whale, an de Hebrew chillun f’om de fiery furnace.” Reassignment here not only grants the miraculous deliverance to Black Americans as the emancipated chosen, but attributes wrath, godlessness, and the fiery furnace of hell to the white Protestant masters. Singing itself marks this chosen status and overcoming in both moral and militant senses. David the singer is matched with David the underdog victor and with Joshua the warrior: Lit’le David play on yo’ harp, Hallelu-lu Lit’le David was a shepherd boy, He kill’d Golia an’ shouted fo’ joy—Hallelu-lu Joshua was de son of Nun, He never would quit Till his work was done—Hallelu (Johnson I:65)

The immeasurable odds against Moses and Daniel give way to the miraculous deliverance which overturns those in power. Beyond the specific exempla of deliverance is the revelation of time as it frames these successive yet continuous events. Each liberating moment parallels, reflects, and also links to others in the time of the bible’s typologies. This pattern is likewise at work at this very moment: “The God that lived in Moses’ times / is just the same today.” For Moses, “God raised de waters like a wall, And opened up de way.” Just so it opens today. As the

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spiritual goes on to list as parallel and also continuous miraculous redemptions, “When Daniel and Goliath met,” the apparently stronger giant “armed with human power” was laid low by David armed “with God’s might.” Just so Jonah was “swallowed by a whale,” but through his penitent “guilt and anguish” was brought by God to “dry land again.” Just so “When Daniel faithful to his God, would not bow down to men,” defying the obedience demanded by “God’s enemies”; he was “hurled into the lion’s den.” But “God locked de lion’s jaw we read / An’ robbed him of his prey, / An de God dat lived in Daniel’s time / is jus’ de same today.” On closer look, however, this string of linked events are not exactly “just de same.” Moses and David rescue the whole people in revolutionary historical events. Jonah and Daniel more closely resemble the conversion experience so central to evangelical Black American religion.79 Yet all are biblically linked as types of Christ’s own death and resurrection, prefigured in Old Testament events and heroes, then focused through and fully revealed only with Christ’s advent, to be finally fulfilled in his Second Coming. Thus the spirituals, besides their wealth of Old Testament figures, also point forward to the Book of Revelation. The Hebrew figures all foretell Jesus, and ultimately King Jesus on a “milk white horse,” coming to Final Judgment in an overturning of the world order.80 The Book of Revelation in the spirituals signals a vision of time that in fact shifts away from Old Testament historicity to incorporate it in what is ultimately an apocalyptic emphasis.81 Ernst Lee Tuveson notes that “the intensely historical nature of the Old Testament intimates that God works as much through history as through the lives of individual souls.” This, however, “was not the view in traditional eschatology shaped by the Book of Revelation.”82 The apocalypticism of the Book of Revelation directed typologies of Hebrew Scripture toward final battles, judgments, and the world’s end.83 This is the direction the spirituals often take. There is a sense that not mere human action but “only an Act of God could save” Black Americans from slavery. Like the premillennialists, the slaves lacked “confidence in history and human acts,” indeed had “little reason for loyalty to earth” in its current historical order. Slavery was seen to violate the American national covenant, calling down the wrath of God. Only radical social and political overturning could be enough to redress this violation. The spirituals thus expect “God to break into historical time.” The “theme of deliverance” is tied to a divine justice in which “God would destroy the current social order.”84 Black American biblical reading, according to Albert Raboteau, could not accept “the national myth of American

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chosenness” in its current form.85 James Lovell describes the spirituals’ “fundamental theme” as the “need for a change in the existing order,” a revolution in which a “few gradual alterations won’t do. The old current order must be abolished.” Indeed, he sees this vision of apocalypse to the “prime reason for the slave’s selecting the Bible as a main source.”86 Jordan, Canaan, Jericho, Zion, all recurrent sites throughout the spirituals, mark in them eschatological rather than historical locations. “Death,” writes Raboteau, is frequently represented “as the river Jordan, the last river to cross before reaching Canaan, the promised home for the weary.” It is in “heaven or the New Jerusalem,” as also “on Canaan’s shore,” that “all would meet again, there’s no parting there.” Justice is invoked through the “eschatology of Revelation.”87 As one spiritual says, when “de moon will turn to blood / In dat day you’ll see de stars a-fallin, world will be on fire.” Then “wheels in de fire” reveal “de earth a burnin,’ when de Heabnes fly away.” In “O Rocks Don’t Fall On Me,” “Jericho’s walls” signal the upheaval of the very rocks and mountains. In classic imagery from the Book of Revelation, the heavens go dark “when every star refuses to shine.” The final Judgment is announced when “De trumpet shall soun’ And de dead shall rise” (Johnson I: 164). The biblical Jubilee that liberates slaves every 50  years becomes a final historical interruption in Zion, whose place in time is blurred between a possible or miraculous future that suspends history itself: Arise O Zion! rise and shine, Behold thy light is come; Thy glorious conq’ring King is near To take his exiles home. His spirit now is pouring out To set poor captives free The day of wonder now is come The year of Jubilee.88

“Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel” offers a roster of biblical narratives, but then gathers time together in Christ’s incursion into history. It concludes in a crossing to Zion that may be political as well as spiritual, but announces a transformation that is radical and final: I set my foot on the gospel ship and the ship began to sail It landed me over on Canaan’s shore and I’ll never come back no more.

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The debates over whether the spirituals are interior mystical or conversion experiences; salvational as pointing to release and exaltation in the next world; or concretely political, demanding immediate justice and deliverance in the American world, all come at history from an angle that exceeds or shatters it. To bring judgment and change into this current world would require its utter overturning. Typology becomes absorbed into apocalyptic. That “Great Getting up Monin’” announces “the comin’ of the judgment/ When you see the lightnin’ flashin’, / When you hear the thunder crashin’, /When you see the stars a fallin’.” “What a morning” there will be “When the stars begin to fall,/ You will hear the trumpet sound / To wake the nations underground.” These apocalyptic emblems—lightning and thunder, stars falling, trumpets sounding to wake the nations—all announce the transformation of the  historical world to be entering its final throes. When the spiritual declares “It is just the same today,” its time frames are at once historical, typological, and eschatological. But when exactly is this “today?” It is not, alas, the here and now of the spiritual’s own singing. Daniel, Jonah, the Hebrews were delivered: “and why not every man?” Yet this deliverance has not come and will not do so without radical and divine intervention. Rather than a continuous world-time reaching from present to future by way of the past, what emerges is instead an explosive and ultimately apocalyptic appeal to the future, not only to reshape the present but to abolish it. The biblical typology, prophecy, and covenant that served as founding ethos of the Puritan mission to America had spread from New England through the colonies and then states, establishing a mode of American membership that came to include varieties of groups. As the country expanded, both in territory and in population, each emergent or arriving group in its own ways made its own claim to this American Biblical authorization. The Puritan symbols become a model for all who would be American.89 Yet there inevitably emerged divergent and historically conflicting usages, shifts in emphasis and in the basic structure of interpretation, as each group’s claims potentially rival and displace those of others. The spirituals give powerful voice to Black biblical interpretation against white exegetical readings. They thus register both difference and continuity within an American culture where biblical interpretation constitutes a major dynamic of politics and community. In the spirituals, battle is waged between the slave community and their masters over which biblical texts should be cited as models—those preaching obedience as against those preaching deliverance; what theological interpretation should be given to

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them—a purely inward and other-worldly one or redemption as immediate historical revolution, and ultimately, which community can look forward to divine reward and which to punishment and damnation. After the Civil War, emancipation was betrayed through unfulfilled Reconstruction, followed by Jim Crow. History again failed to realize promise. Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “An Ante-bellum Sermon,” written at the nineteenth century’s end, marks a tragic epitaph to the period’s biblical as well as moral and social hopes. Dunbar underscores the close relationship between the slave spirituals, African American preaching, and African American poetics.90 The poem is spoken in the dialect voice of a slave preacher to his congregation, as surveilled by white overseers. Here a multiplicity of interpretation is enacted as the preacher speaks in a double voice to his two audiences, slave and enslaver. The voices are further multiplied as Dunbar himself addresses both African American and white readers of his own Jim Crow era: An’ de lan’ shall hyeah his thundah, Lak a blas’ f’om Gab’el’s ho’n, Fu’ de Lawd of hosts is mighty When he girds his ahmor on. But fu’ feah some one mistakes me, I will pause right hyeah to say, Dat I’m still a-preachin’ ancient, I ain’t talkin’ ‘bout to-day.91

Dunbar’s antebellum preacher brings biblical promise to his immediate present, not however, as fulfillment, but as prophecy of deliverance still awaiting its future. One message is sent to the white overseers who would restrict the biblical message to a frozen past. To them the speaker assures: “I’m still a-preachin’ ancient / I ain’t talkin’ ‘bout to-day.” The black congregation, however, shares the speaker’s dialect and his counterclaim: “Fu’ de Lawd of hosts is mighty,” and he will bring at last his apocalyptic “thundah, / Lak a blas’ f’om Gab’el’s ho’n.” His congregation understands the coded message, entering with him into a biblical experience that opens into new worlds of hope, although alas not yet. Dunbar’s poem sums up the fissures in biblical language as the nineteenth century ends. The same words mean not only differently but oppositely. It seems that only an apocalypse of trumpet summons and thunderous overturning of nature can heal this linguistic and moral

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breach. The poem’s divergent meanings do not come together but instead dramatize how much each audience does not share with the other, despite the common biblical language. The Civil War itself was fought across a chasm that the Bible could not bridge and indeed helped incite. Writing of the Civil War as a theological problem, Mark Noll observes that a core difficulty is the very “belief in simplicity and easy interpretation,” which makes disagreement into “malignant falsehood.”92 Within the fierce antebellum debates of biblical claim and counterclaim, few reflected on the ironies of authority in which each elevated the Bible as morally absolute, even as each rejected the other’s reading.93 Yet Noll also suggests that the Bible as shared text helped to draw the nation back together after the Civil War.94 The “religious orientation of individuals throughout antebellum America,” writes Drew Faust, “is in one sense witness to cultural similarity of North and South.”95 Ruth Bloch similarly writes that religion was “part of the heritage and formation of American national identity, giving it meaning and solidarity,” and in this sense marks a shared culture.96 Perry Miller, too, suggests that Civil War battles were fought “on the assumption of cultural similarity of the contestants,” thus enabling them also to be able to “surmount disputes after 1865.”97 Yet the role of the Bible in shaping identity and community as common also generated dispute. Shared biblical culture did not prevent war and instead became one of its scenes. With the Bible, in a near paradox, the more absolute the truth-­ claim, the less common the good.

Notes 1. Marty, Righteous Empire, pp. 38–39, cf. note 51. 2. Martin Marty, Righteous Empire on religious reawakening through disestablishment, pp.  38–39, note 51. Cf. Daniel Howe, What Hath God Wrought, discusses Lyman Beecher as seeing disestablishment to  make “religion stronger,” p. 166. 3. Alexis de Tocqueville, “On the Use that the Americans Make of Association in Civil Life” Democracy in America, Vol. II Second Book Chapter V (NY: Vintage Books, 1945), p. 114. 4. Tocqueville, “Origin of the Anglo Americans,” Democracy in America, Vol. II Chapter II, p. 45. In Vol. II, Chapter XVII, on the “Uses which Maintain Democracy,” Tocqueville famously claims the American religion as contributing “powerfully to the maintenance of a democratic republic among Americans,” as a “form of Christianity which [is] a democratic and

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republican religion” so that “from the beginning politics and religion contracted an alliance which has never been dissolved,” 310–311. 5. Curtis Johnson, Redeeming America: Evangelicals and the Road to Civil War (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993). By 1837, the American Bible society gave away 2.2 million Bibles; by 1836 the American Tract Society printed and distributed 43 million items. The goal was “securing and augmenting our civil and political liberties” by molding public opinion through “moral and religious influence,” p. 32. Evangelicals were “pioneers in mass media” and the “latest printing technology,” p. 52. Hatch, Democratization, discusses the importance of religious print culture in its “commitment to the word” as “multiplying authors and readers.” Printing was “like preaching, divine work,” p. 605. 6. Butler, Awash, p. 180. 7. Harry Stout, “Religion, Communication and the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd Series 34: 1977, 519–541, p. 520. Cf. Hatch, Democratization. 8. Robert Calhoon, “Evangelical Persuasion,” Religion in a Revolutionary Age, eds. Ronald Hoffman, Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994), 156–183, as shared public discourse, p. 161. 9. Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholder’s Worldview (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), offer a detailed history of “War over the Good Book,” pp. 473–504. There is however no mention of poetry. Similarly, C.  C. Goen “Broken Churches, Broken Nation: Regional Religion and North-South Alienation in Antebellum America,” Church History, Mar., 1983, Vol. 52, No. 1 (Mar., 1983), pp. 21–35, p. 22. 10. Andrew Delbanco, The Abolitionist Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2012), reviews economic claims and counterclaims, including accusations against abolitionists as “instruments of Northern money interests,” promoting “a theory of capitalist morality” in the form of the free labor ideology, pp. 5–6. Oddly, Delbanco does not mention Scripture and its role in abolitionist discourses and debates. Gregg Crane, Race, Citizenship and Law in American Literature (NY: Cambridge University Press, 2002), likewise omits the Bible from his discussion of higher law. He devotes a small section to “Religion” (pp. 27–28) in which he notes the “merger of religious inspiration and Enlightenment rationalism in the founders’ rhetoric” and then conflates “Apocalyptic Whiggism” with republican “millennial advance,” p. 28. 11. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (NY: Signet Books, 1968), p. 4. 12. Mitchell Snay, Gospel in Disunion (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 57.

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13. Richard Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (New Haven: Yale University Press,1993), on the use of the Bible to support slavery, p. 155. 14. Quoted Byrd, p. 62. 15. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Complete Poetical Works (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1902), project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg. org/cache/epub/1365/pg1365-­images.html. 16. Michael Cohen, The Social Lives of Poems in 19th Century America (Phil: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), p. 72, describes how Whittier’s “commitment to communication as the agent of social change made his poems locate agency in a discourse structured by immediate publication and immediate emancipation, where freedom comes from the ability to speak and move without restrictions. Their political power is realized more through their genre and the meta-pragmatics of their circulation than by their content,” p. 66. Cf. Michael Cohen, “Contraband Singing,” American Literature 82:2 2010 271-304.  Meredith Mcgill “The Poetry of Slavery,” Cambridge Companion to Slavery in American Literature, ed. Ezra Tawil (NY: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 115–136, underscores poetry’s public circulation and impact, but without discussing the Bible, p.  117. “The strong relations poetry maintained with theater, oratory, song, and visual art and its extraordinary mobility across print formats help to explain why poetry was regarded as a potent tool in the antislavery struggle.” 17. John Greenleaf Whittier, Anti-slavery Poems: Songs of Labor and Reform, p.  273. All poems are cited from this digital edition. https://quod.lib. umich.edu/a/amverse/BAE0044.0001.001/1:5?rgn=div1;view=fulltext.  Whittier’s “Song of the Boatmen” was circulated as itself a spiritual song. 18. The Works of James M.  Whitfield: America and Other Writings by a Nineteenth-Century African American Poet, eds. Robert S.  Levine, Ivy G. Wilson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 19. James Basker, ed. Amazing Grace: Poems about Slavery (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), notes that more than nine of every ten poems on slavery denounced it. Cf. Marcus Wood, The Poetry of Slavery 1764–1865 (NY: Oxford University Press, 2003), likewise notes the “small amount of pro-slavery verse,” pp. xi–xii. 20. For transatlantic discussion, see Michael Taylor, “British Proslavery Arguments and the Bible, 1823–1833,” Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, online Oct 2015, 139–158. 21. Cited by John Welsh “William Gilmore Simms,” p. 204. 22. War Songs of the South, ed. “Bohemian” William G. Shepperson (Richmond: West & Johnston, 1862), p. 208, Google Books. 23. War Songs of the South, p. 3. 24. War Lyrics and Songs of the South, ed. Abram Joseph Ryan (London: Spottiswood ad Co., 1866), p. 153. 25. War Songs of the South, pp. 39–40.

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26. William Gilmore Simms, editor, War Poetry of the South http://www. gutenberg.org/files/8648/old/8wrpm10h.htm. 27. Simms, p. 91. 28. “A Southern Scene from Life,” War Songs of the South, ed. William G.  Shepperson, https://docsouth.unc.edu/imls/shepperson/shepperson.html https://archive.org/details/rebellionrecord03moorgoog/ page/n719/mode/2up Reb Record Vol p. 720. 29. War Lyrics and Songs of the South, ed. Abram Joseph Ryan (London: Spottiswood ad Co., 1866), p. 155. 30. Carolyn de Swarte Gifford, “American Women and the Bible: The Nature of Women as a Hermeneutical Issue,” Feminist Perspectives on Biblical Scholarship, ed. Adela Yarbro Collins (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985), 11–33, pp. 16–17. 31. Genovese, p. 85. 32. Frances Harper, Poems, Prose, Sketches (Mint Editions, 2021); A Brighter Coming Day, ed. Frances Smith Foster (NY: Feminist Press, 1990), p. 84. 33. Bloch, Visionary Republic, pp. 44–46. 34. Melba Joyce Boyd, Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics of Frances Harper, (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1994), pp. 88–91. 35. Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, cf. note 7. 36. Jon Cruz, Culture on the Margins:The Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation (Princeton University Press, 1999). Among the many studies emphasizing the musical aspects of the spirituals are George Robinson Ricks, Some Aspects of the Religious Music of the U.S. Negro (New York: Arno Press, 1977); Jon Michael Spencer, Sacred Symphony (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988); and Black Hymnody (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992). Eileen Southern, The Music of Black America (New York: Norton, 1971), especially pp. 35–43. Southern places the spirituals within her comprehensive history of black music, alongside many other forms of folk art and song, but without specifically elaborating on its distinctive relation to the Bible. Thomas Earl Hawley, Slave Tradition of Singing (1993), similarly concentrates on musical tradition, as does the Index to Negro Spirituals at the Cleveland Public Library (1991); and Mellonee Burnim, “The African American Gift Song,” African Americans and the Bible, ed. Vincent Wimbush (London: Continuum International, 2000), 603–620, as a “way of translating from Scripture to Song,” p. 605. In the face of the immense body of historical and scholarly material on slavery, the Civil War, black anthropology, black religious history, and black literature and music, I have cited in this essay only those studies that give direct attention to the textual structures of the spirituals in their relation to biblical materials.

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37. The question of cultural origins and interaction was first described by W.  E. B. Du Bois as evolving through African, Afro-American, and Americanized modes, Souls of Black Folk (NY: Bantam Books, 1989), p. 3. Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 5–6. See also Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). Most historians of slavery accept the “hybrid” character of “Afro-Christianity,” in which, as Raboteau puts it, as a result of a long “dual process … the slaves did not simply become Christian; they creatively refashioned a Christian tradition to fit their own peculiar experience of enslavement in America.” Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 126–7. Cf. also Eugene D. Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), and John W.  Blassingame, The Slave Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972). Lawrence Levine describes the spirituals’ music as “closer to the musical styles and performances of West Africa … than to the musical style of Western Europe,” Black Culture and Black Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). George Robinson Ricks carefully examines the balances between “African musical traits” and the “Euroamerican musical values” in Some Aspects of The Religious Music of The United States Negro, pp. 6–7, 27–29, also citing the earlier work of Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), p.  268. Keith Gilyard, “The Bible and African American Poetry,” African Americans and the Bible, ed. Vincent Wimbush (London: Continuum International, 2000), 205–220, describes the spirituals as a “creole form” of the lexicon of the Bible with “African syntax,” drawn from African “praise poems” and oral epic, pp. 205–6. 38. Paul Harvey, “African American Spirituals,” Religions of the United States in Practice, Volume 1, ed. Colleen McDannell (Princeton: University Press, 2018), 138–149, does not discuss the Bible. Cf. John Lovell, Jr., Black Song: The Forge and the Flame (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1972), p. 189; Cf. James H. Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues (New York: The Seabury Press, 1972), pp. 24, 29. 39. D. K. Wilgus, for example, notes that “Negro song came into wide public notice through contacts of Northern soldiers and civilians with Southern Negroes during the Civil War.” “The Negro-White Spiritual,” Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel, ed. Alan Dundes (New York: Garland Publishing, 1981), p. 69. Eileen Southern reviews the difficulties with regard to the transcription of music in its multiple variations (pp.  173, 216), as does James Weldon Johnson in the preface to his collection. Miles Mark Fisher emphasizes the textual problems inherent in the transition from essentially oral to written forms, with misunderstandings of dialect, variations from

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performance to performance, and unacknowledged editing among the many problems in their transmission, Negro Slave Songs in the United States (NY: Cornell University Press, 1953), pp. 13–15. 40. This question of Black Christianity’s difference from white is an ongoing debate. Allen Dwight Callahan, The Talking Book: African Americans and the Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press. 2006), on independent black preachers in black congregations creating a religious “island of autonomy,” p.  6. Likewise, Rennie Simson, “Afro American Women Poets of the Nineteenth-Century,” Nineteenth Century Women Writers of the English Speaking World, ed. Rhoda Nathan (NY: Greenwood Press), 181–193, “Christianity plays an important role,” but “not the version of Christianity promoted by the white man to justify himself. Black Christianity is a Christianity of Christ, not of whites,” p. 18. Cf. Sylvia Frey, “The Year of Jubilee is Come, Black Christianity in the Plantation South in Post-­ Revolutionary America,” Religion in a Revolutionary Age (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 87–124, on the “religious autonomy and separate structures” of the Black community, p. 88. Albert Raboteau, “African Americans,” “Inevitably the slaves’ Christianity contradicted that of their masters. The division was deep; it extended to the fundamental interpretation of the Bible,” p. 6. Cf. note 8. 41. John W. Work, American Negro Songs and Spirituals (NY: Bonanza Books, 1940), writes that the “Negro Slave was too handicapped by inadequate vocabulary and too absorbed in music to give much attention to the words” and concedes the “inferior and incongruous material found in many spirituals,” p. 9. 42. Raboteau, Slave Religion, p. 243. Cf. note 344. 43. Lovell, pp. 241 ff. 44. Le Roy Moore, “The Spiritual: Soul of Black Religion,” American Quarterly, 23 (1971) 658–676, p. 660. 45. Paul F. Laubenstein, “An Apocalyptic Reincarnation,” Journal of Biblical Literature, Dec. 1932, p. 245. 46. James Weldon Johnson, God’s Trombones (NY: Viking Press, 1948), p. 5. 47. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment (Detroit: Michigan State University Press, 1960), pp. 27, 205. 48. Harold Courlander, Negro Folk Music (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), p.  38. Johnson, p.  13. Nettie Fitzgerald McAdams, Folksongs of the American Negro; A Collection of Unprinted Texts Preceded by a General Survey of the Traits of Negro Song,” 1923, speaks of song narratives as “leaping and lingering” with “abrupt beginnings” and “confusion of the story,” pp. 1, 4. #7 - Folk-songs of the American Negro; a collection of unprinted … Full View | HathiTrust Digital Library.

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49. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage, My Freedom (NY: Dover Publications, 1969), p. 278. 50. Higginson, p. 217. Cf. Levine, p. 51. Cf. note 344. 51. James Cone, p. 16, cf. note 345. 52. Johnson, Redeeming America, p. 49. note 312. 53. James Cone, p. 44; Higginson, p. 212. 54. Raboteau, Slave Religion, pp. 248–249. 55. James Cone, p. 5. 56. Raboteau, Slave Religion, pp. 247, 212. 57. Eric Slauter, “Slavery and the Language of Rights,” The State as a Work of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 169–213. 58. James Cone, p. 43. 59. James Cone, p. 44. 60. Benjamin Mays, The Negro’s God as Reflected in his Literature (Chapman & Grimes, Incorporated, 1938), p.  25. Mays writes: “Most are other-­ worldly,” acting to “repudiate this world, consider it a temporary abode, and look to Heaven for realization of needs and desires denied here,” p. 24. 61. James Cone, pp. 14–15. 62. Raboteau, Slave Religion, p. 250. 63. Miles Mark Fisher, pp. 25, 45, note 346. 64. Curtis Johnson, Redeeming America, p. 175, cf. note 312. Lovell. p. 241; Cone describes “reading the Bible as divine liberation,” finding in it “the God who liberated Israelites,” p. 73. 65. Blassingame, p. 63, cf. note 344. 66. Curtis Johnson, Redeeming America, p. 45. 67. Quoted Mitchell Snay, Gospel in Disunion (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 55, 76. 68. Cruz, p. 86, note 343; Laubenstein, p. 239, cf. note 352. “Spirituals,” The Book of Negro Folklore, eds., Langston Hughs and Arna Bontemps (New York: Budd Mead and Co., 1958), p. 286. 69. Vincent Wimbush, “The Bible and African Americans: an Outline of Interpretive History,” Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation, ed. Cain Hope Felder (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 81–97, writes: “African Americans also saw themselves as antitype, applying their favorite biblical passages to an array of social issues,” p.  91. Lawrence Levine, on the reversal of meanings in typology, p.  250, cf. note 344. 70. Douglass, Narrative, p. 48. 71. Virginia’s Slave codes of 1662 declared the slave status of the child to be through the mother. Many other ordinances followed forbidding teaching slaves to read, forbidding blacks to assemble from sunset to sunrise “for the purpose of mental instruction or religious worship.” See William Goodell,

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The American Slave Code in Theory and Practice, p. 2. (New York: American & Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 1853). 72. Samuel Davies, The Duty of Masters to Their Servants (Lynchburg, Va., 1809). This is not to reclaim that the spirituals derive in white hymns and gospel songs. 73. Charles Colcock Jones, The Religious Instruction of the Negroes, pp.  37, 265. https://docsouth.unc.edu/church/jones/jones.html. 74. Jackson, p. 232. George Robinson Ricks, Some Aspects of Religious Music of the United States Negro (NY: Arno Press, 1960), p. 7. “The hymns were mostly Isaac Watts.” Sylvia Frey “Jubilee,” “songs were a major source of sermon material. with Watts hymns the general standard,” p. 112. 75. Southern, p. 35; also pp. 59, 146; Sobel, p. 222, cf. note 343. 76. Southern, pp.  35 59, 146; Sobel, p.  222. Janet Cornelius, When I Can Read My Title Clear (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1992), p. 71. 77. Isaac Watts, Psalms, Hymns and Spiritual Songs (Boston: 1866). All citations are from this edition, marked as Watts and followed by section and page number. 78. Raboteau, Slave Religion, p. 250. 79. Raboteau, Slave Religion, describes “slave religion as a journey from slavery to freedom as an archetype of Christian life,” p.  255. Paul Harvey, “African American Spirituals” on how “much evangelical imagery made its way into slave spirituals: sin, conviction, redemption, salvation and eternal life.” 80. Lovell, pp. 235, 380; Raboteau, Slave Religion, notes the prominence of judgment and eschatology referred to Patmos, p. 263. 81. Callahan notes the “tendency to conflate the biblical promised land with end-time images of the New Testament, where fulfilment of promise is in future,” p.  119. The Bible offered a “martial paradigm of liberation by divinely sanctioned violence.” Theirs is an image from Patmos in which “blood will flow,” p. 194, and of “Jesus waging war,” p. 197, cf. note 347. 82. Tuveson, pp. 17, 26–27, 29. Eran Shalev draws this distinction in claiming that the Old Testament’s historicity made it “adapted to earthly politics and especially to a nation building project,” whereas the New Testament’s focus is not on earthly life but, as Jesus says in John 18:36, “my kingdom is not of this world,” p. 154, cf. note 1. 83. As Norman Cohn writes in Pursuit of the Millennium (NY: Oxford University Press, revised 1970), the “revolutionary eschatology” of the turn of the first millennium continued in Christian circles “long after the Jews themselves had forgotten its very existence,” p. 21. Cf. Perry Miller, New England Mind, p. 417. John D. Wilsey, American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015), distinguishes a “closed exceptionalism” from an “open exceptionalism,” p. 39, associating

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the first with the Old Testament as “deeply nationalist and territorial,” p. 103, as opposed to a “Christian conception of justice as objective, universal and theistically framed that  is essential to an ethical critique of national/ethnic election.” The Old Testament is “national” but the New Testament is “salvational,” p.  113. This reproduces traditional supersessionist treatments of the two Testaments. It echoes, for example, Charles Hodge who declared the “whole theory of a splendid earthly kingdom is a relic of Judaism and out of keeping with the spirituality of the Gospel,” James Moorhead, World Without End (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 24. 84. Curtis Johnson, Redeeming America, pp. 156, 107, 135, 175. 85. Raboteau, “Exodus, Ethiopia, and Racial Messianism,” pp. 175–6. 86. Lovell, pp. 223–225. 87. Raboteau, Slave Religion, pp. 260–261, 257, 262. 88. Frey, “Jubilee,” p. 81. 89. Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, pp. 40–55, 59. 90. Marcellus Blount, “The Preacherly Text: African American Poetry and Vernacular Performance,” PMLA, May 1992, 582–594, pp. 587–8. 91. Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar (NY: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1922), p. 13. https://www.gutenberg.org/ files/18338/18338-­h/18338-­h.htm. 92. Noll, Civil War as a Theological Crisis, pp. 5–6, note 17. 93. Snay, pp. 58–59. 94. Noll, America’s God, p. 208. 95. Catherine Drew Gilpin Faust, “Evangelicalism and the Meaning of the Proslavery Argument,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 85 Jan 1977, p. 3. 96. Ruth Bloch, “Ideological Change,” 47–63, p. 61. 97. Perry Miller, Nature’s Nation, p. 115.

CHAPTER 5

Rewriting Scripture: Emerson, Whitman, Melville

The nineteenth century was the best of biblical times and the worst of biblical times. In general culture—religious, social, political, and poetic— the Bible, alongside republican discourses, provided primary terms for American self-definition and debate. Its presence in political, social, moral, gendered, racial, and other dimensions of American life was vast. Yet basic disagreements were also emerging, not only as to the teachings of the Bible, but regarding the status of the text itself. Biblical Higher Criticism called into question Scripture’s divine origin and textual integrity, with unsettling consequences for its meaning and authority. How to interpret the Bible came to include fundamental questions as to its composition, its authorships, its implications for understanding history, and indeed its own historicity: how to locate the status of its words even before construing their principles. At the center of textual biblical crisis was the meaning of the “literal.” Traditionally, the “literal” level of the Bible was a claim to it as accurate historical record. Yet in practice, the “literal” text was taken as a set of figures, that is, as types, shadows, images, and prophecy of spiritual meanings beyond it. These were revealed in the New Testament as eternally true, visible through prefiguration in the words of the Old Testament and the history it reported. All these levels together were seen as the unified revelation of God’s Word. But such traditional textual assumptions came to be challenged

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with the arrival in America of German Higher Criticism. “Historical” began to take on other senses: not the accurate record of biblical events, but increasing recognition of historical change, including in the composition of the biblical texts themselves. Scripture itself emerges as a product of history. The Higher Criticism, in almost complete contrast to the “historical” readings that claimed the Bible as a record of past events, analyzed the biblical text as a compilation at different times, reflecting different situations, by different authors in different contexts. This sense of historicism quite challenged the claim to “literal” historical biblical record, as the revelation of unchanging, eternal truth. The very term “literal” emerges as inconsistent. Not only is the “literal” level as Old Testament in fact type, a figure for the Christic level; it is far from a direct reading of the Bible in any plain, self-evident, historical sense. In these hermeneutic contexts, “sola scriptura” “did not mean people understanding the Bible apart from ministerial guidance.”1 As Paul Gutjahr points out, “God’s word is never truly alone when it reaches readers on a printed page: mediated by doctrine and clergy and by its own materiality, type, bound, comments, illustrations.”2 Bibles were in fact printed with extensive comments to guide reading, while ministers were seen as a “living commentary.”3 The very claim to self-evident record becomes a hermeneutic hypothesis that directs “literal” interpretation through complex theological approaches. “Literal” is far from literal. As it evolved in America, literalism anchored the Protestant commitment to sola scriptura both as absolute authority and as accessible to every reader, assuming a unified meaning. Yet this very accessibility yielded not one anchored meaning, but many different ones. Their senses were not plainly “literal.” They were the product of a “cultural hermeneutic as well as biblical exegesis,” where “the hermeneutic itself could not reconcile the divergent interpretations it had produced.”4 “Literal,” then, is a hermeneutic, a theological, as well as a cultural view, not a self-evident textual revelation. Literalism played a central role in the slavery controversy over the Bible as authoritarian claims and emancipatory ones confronted each other. The authoritarian view of the Bible read it as teaching “subordination in household, congregation and community” to “Christian masters and their clerical allies.” This reading was claimed to be based on “literal” biblical understanding. However, it involved a very unhistorical “ripping passages out of context to apply them to all people at all ages.”5 Such “literalist” positions hardened in reaction against Higher Critical claims, which explored the meanings of biblical verses within reconstructed historical

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contexts. The “literalist” split deepened by the century’s end and continues to define fundamentalism. Historicism and textual criticism were not the only counters against literalism. Emancipatory readings claimed to be interpreting according to the “spirit” of the text rather than the “letter.” The Bible in this hermeneutic remains the source of truth and moral anchor, but as a general teaching, beyond specific words taken as reports. A spiritual hermeneutic opens toward a figuralism with strong impact on the literature of the period. The great midcentury writers—Emerson, Whitman, and Melville, as well as Dickinson among others—each balances on the edge of these biblical interpretive currents. All reject literalism, embracing instead a biblical figuralism. In this they run against the impetus of much of the biblical politics of the century, where adamant and urgent sides were being taken. For Emerson and Whitman, figuralism ultimately unanchors the Bible from its traditional cultural and religious claims, opening toward new modes and the embrace of creativity. Melville, like Dickinson, remains more ambivalent. He raises an Ahabian fist against assurances that continue to haunt him, but ultimately he sees biblical claims to mislead and waylay rather than to act as promised guide.

Make Your Own Bible: Emerson’s Poetry and Poetics Although there are many biblical echoes in Emerson, there is little direct treatment of them, either in his writings or in discussions of them.6 An 1836 journal entry instructs: “Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”7 This essentially contradictory dictum both appeals to biblical authority and displaces it. It is equated with “all your readings,” yet the model of them. The imagery of apocalyptic “blast of a trumpet” is transferred to Emerson’s own imaginative force. Emerson invites radical change while invoking traditional structures, granting authority to the Bible as a model for the authority of the self. Emerson is perhaps the master theorist of American poetics, which he launches not least from biblical traditions of figuration. This includes the poet’s own self as prophet.8 In his own poetry, Emerson is often rather less prophet than preacher, encoding instructions or observations in verse. In his prose he is more richly biblical. Myth, Greek and Eastern, plentifully populate his poetic pages: Bacchus, Sphinx, Mithridates, Hamatreya, Maia, Merlin, Saadi, Brahma. There are, in contrast, relatively few biblical

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characters. The angel “Uriel” in the poem of that title is a figure of lore and midrash, not the biblical text itself. His role, too, is more aesthetic and cosmological than theological, even in his “lapse.” Uriel’s announcement in heaven of “Laws of form, and meter just” causes consternation and scandal by declaring that there is no “line in nature,” but rather Unit and universe are round In vain produced, all rays return; Evil will bless and ice will burn.9

Biblical linear time is rerouted into a circle that refuses clear distinctions and direction. Hyatt Waggoner sees in this poem an “antinomian” challenge against “the notion that truth is static.”10 Stephen Whicher sees reflected in it the scandal of the “Divinity School Address.”11 A passage from “Poetry and Imagination” further  places it within the orbit of Emerson’s figural theory that: In good society, nay, among the angels in heaven, is not everything spoken in fine parable, and not so servilely as it befell to the sense? All is symbolized. Facts are not foreign, as they seem, but related. Wait a little and we see the return of the remote hyperbolic curve. (CWE 8: 72)

The image of the circle, so central to Emerson, is a parable of parables, in which “all is symbolized” of all. Fact becomes figure, pointing ever onward to another figure in “hyperbolic curve.” In “Uriel,” the infinite conversion of form into form is an open and endless figural procession. But this “truth-speaking,” taken from exegetical traditions, is withdrawn from theology. It “shamed the angels’ veiling wings,” leaving the gods, who presumably prefer straight lines, shaken and perplexed: “And the gods shook, they knew not why.” The “Boston Hymn” of 1863, offers direct biblical gestures: The word of the Lord by night To the watching Pilgrims came, As they sat by the seaside, And filled their hearts with flame. God said, I am tired of kings I will suffer them no more Up to my ear the morning brings The outrage of the poor. (CWE 9:201-2)

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The divine word here, perhaps as in Luke 12:49, comes “to set the world on fire.” The message the Americans receive is in fact a political one: “God said, I am tired of kings / I will suffer them no more,” in language of Psalm 105: “He suffered no man to do them wrong: yea, he reproved kings for their sakes.” “Up to my ear the morning brings/The outrage of the poor” could echo Exodus 3:9: “The cry of Israel has come to me.” Other figures and phrases in the poem have a biblical sound, if not allowing precise sources. The “angel” of the poem’s visitation is “Freedom,” a true “king” who will reign in the figure of Christ: My angel,—his name is Freedom,— Choose him to be your king; He shall cut pathways east and west, And fend you with his wing.

In Luke 19: 8-9 it is written: “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor.” Thus in the “Hymn”: I will divide my goods; Call in the wretch and slave None shall rule but the humble

In Matthew 9:37-38 it is written: “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Therefore beseech the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into His harvest.” Thus, in the “Hymn”: Call the people together, The young men and the sires, The digger in the harvest field, Hireling, and him that hires;

The “Boston Hymn” is one case where an Emerson poem can be precisely dated, as celebrating the Emancipation Proclamation.12 Its address is against slavery, spoken in a divine voice that commands: To-day unbind the captive, So only are ye unbound; Lift up a people from the dust, Trump of their rescue, sound!

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1 Samuel 2:8 writes: “He raises the poor from the dust.” Among the various biblical trumpets, 1 Cor 15: 51-2 offers: “in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.” Rebirth here is the slave’s to freedom and the nation’s from slavery. The “Boston Hymn,” as in earlier Revolutionary verse, interweaves and mutually identifies republican with biblical discourses. Its civic instruction joins with biblical injunction echoing Jeremiah 30:8: “That I will break his yoke from your neck, And will burst your bonds; Foreigners shall no more enslave them.” And here in a pine state-house They shall choose men to rule In every needful faculty, In church, and state, and school. … I break your bonds and masterships, And I unchain the slave: Free be his heart and hand henceforth As wind and wandering wave.

“The Boston Hymn” is one open display of Emerson’s biblical learning, which he concedes to in his journal, writing that “if I had to choose one book to take into solitude, the Bible must be preferred to Shakespeare” (CWE 4: 24). The poem’s speaking in a divine voice is rare. More usually, it is Emerson’s own human voice that is spoken as divine. The poem “Self-­ Reliance” more typically recasts the poet’s inner voice as it finds “God in the bottom of my heart, / I hear continually his voice therein” (CWE 9: 395). Such a conjunction is worthy of Anne Hutchinson herself. It is in his prose essays that Emerson’s biblical engagement can be more fully traced. Several concerns stand out. The first is how he recasts what had been fundamental to the Bible’s work in American culture: correlations between different aspects of experience. Emerson embraces biblical structure in its multiple dimensions, but as a radical figuralism with its own interpretive force and grounded in imagination. Emerson radically affirms the sense of the world and also the self as figures which correlate with each other, opening ever further dimensions of meaning and possibility. But the figures unroll without rigorous constraint by Bible or doctrines taken to be based on it.13 Emerson instead adapts biblical figuralism to the worlds of nature, self, and society, still seeking the correlations invested in the Bible even while denying its, or any, institutional authority.

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Emerson’s theories of language, poetry, religion, and the Bible draw upon traditions of biblical exegesis, which in his hands undergo unexpected if also incomplete and ambiguous radicalization. For Emerson’s are above all theories of figures, extended from biblical text to all experience. Through all, Emerson stands steadfastly opposed to the “literalism” surrounding him, albeit with his characteristic contradictions.14 In the scandalous “Divinity School Address” of 1838, Emerson declares Christianity to be a poem and Christ its poet. He indicts the churches as sacrificing the figural for the literal, which, far from honoring the Bible, betrays it. What Jesus represents and teaches is the “indwelling supreme spirit” as the “divine nature” in every person (CWE 1: 128). “He saw that God incarnates himself in man and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his world” (CWE 1: 129). Emerson’s Jesus proclaims: “in this jubilee of sublime emotion I am divine. Through me God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or see thee.” But “his doctrine and memory” have suffered a distortion (CWE 1: 130). They have been taken literally, to refer to Jesus alone. “The figures of his rhetoric have usurped the place of his truth.” They become “petrified into official titles” and, as Emerson says nastily, into “a popedom of forms” (CWE 1:131). As Emerson correspondingly explicates in “The Poet,” the divine has been made “stark and solid,” wrongly taking one figure as final, to institute it in “hierarchies”: “The history of hierarchies seems to show, that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and, at last, nothing but an excess of the organ of language” (CWE 3: 36). The language of the Bible is thus misread as if it were transmitting a truth in “excess of the organ of language,” rather than offering a linguistic field of multiplying senses. “The stationariness of religion; the assumption that the age of inspiration is past, that the Bible is closed; … indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of our theology” (CWE 3: 36). In betraying poetic figuralism, the Bible and religion are betrayed. Instead, as Emerson preaches in “The Preacher:” “All that we call religion, all that saints and churches and Bibles from the beginning of the world have aimed at, is to suppress this impertinent surface-action, and animate man to central and entire action” (CWE 10: 225). What does Emerson propose instead? This he never systematically or consistently clarifies. Yet, for all the many transformations Emerson wrought in doctrinal matters, he retains assumptions that ground biblical figuralism even as he extends and also subverts them. It is here that some of the most radical contradictions in Emerson surface. For Emerson never

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fully makes the transition from a metaphysics that grounds experience, even as he also challenges traditional metaphysics in his commitment to multiplicity and open figuration.15 In the “Divinity Address,” he invites to “dare to live after the infinite Law that is in you in company with the infinite,” ever multiplying as a “Beauty which heaven and earth reflect to you in all lovely forms,” never “congealing into one frozen expression” (CWE 1: 132). At the same time, he continues to refer to a grounding unity that will regulate all these different forms. He pledges faith in “laws which traverse the universe,” through which all the “infinite relations” are “many yet one” (CWE 1: 121). “Sublime creed” thus declares “the world is product not of manifold power but of one will, one mind” (CWE 1: 124). A notion of preestablished unity intrudes, which Emersonian multiplicity otherwise gainsays. When Emerson says that the spirit in man is “divine and deifying,” making him “illimitable,” it is hard to tell whether “divine” is a divine or human figure, adjective or noun. On one level, Emerson recurs to Platonist and Neoplatonist assumptions that assert “universals behind particulars” and “sees unity in variety.” Long a reader of Thomas Taylor’s translations of Plato with Neoplatonic commentary, Emerson calls Plato the “first poet” in seeing unalterable truths behind “the appearance of things … in a world characterized by flux.”16 Emerson praises the “disciples of Plato,” that “they loved analogy, were cognizant of resemblances, and climbers on the staircase of unity.”17 As Melville says of Emerson in a letter to Evert Augustus Duyckinck “But enough of this Plato who talks thro’ his nose.”18 On another level, Emerson plunges into the flux of things. In the poem “Woodnotes,” the Muse reveals to the poet The rushing metamorphosis Dissolving all that fixture is, Melts things that be to things that seem, And solid nature to a dream. (CWE 9: 52)

Although the poem then proceeds to assure “But the substances survive” (CWE 9: 57), this does not resolve or undo the “rushing metamorphosis” which melts all things. These tensions govern Emerson’s language theory. Emersonian figuralism infuses his language theory as it does his poetics, although ever with the ambiguity as to what precisely grounds meaning. His venture into language theory in the essay “Nature” begins with something that looks quite traditional:

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. Words are signs of natural facts. 1 2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts. 3. Nature is the symbol of spirit. (CWE 1: 26) If “Words are signs of natural facts,” then “natural facts” seem to precede “words,” which become secondary signifiers to nature as what is signified. In point 2, nature is in turn a “symbol of spirit,” where spirit becomes what is signified by nature as signifier. This is a quite traditional, indeed Platonic sequence: ideas precede nature; nature precedes words, as signified to which words are signifiers. Language is thus a copy of nature that copies Spirit. Indeed, Emerson opens “Nature” (1836) with an epigraph from Plotinus: “Nature is but an image or imitation of wisdom” (CWE 1: 404). The lower material world is an imitation of the higher immaterial one. This theory of signs recalls Augustine’s, himself a Neoplatonist before he became a Christian. In the earliest sign-theory, Augustine in On Christian Doctrine clarifies how what we see in the temporal world should be taken as “signs of something else,” that is, “they are signs of what they signify,” which is the “unchangeable wisdom” of “things eternal” (II.1). This general sign-theory becomes exegetical instruction, as Augustine shows how the Old Testament must be understood as signifier to the New Testament, while the New Testament signifies divine truth as signified. It is Augustine who here systematizes the usage of “literal” as signifier to “spiritual” signified figures in Christ. In his language theory, Emerson reflects the traditional priorities of meaning as corresponding to a signified that precedes and determines its signifiers. And yet he also runs counter to them. In him, the order of signified and signifier is not unidirectional. For Emerson also writes: “We are thus assisted by natural objects in the expression of particular meanings” (CWE I:33). Here, “meanings” and their expression seem to precede and be “assisted by,” not grounded in, “natural objects.” Nature is given its meaning through words at least as much as words through nature. Priorities and implications thus become entangled in ways that increase as Emerson pursues his comments in the “Language” section of “Nature.” In some statements, language seems merely to signify meanings already constituted in nature by spirit, then apprehended by humans. Yet language also accrues a priority and a role that disrupts this sequence. Emerson points toward a hermeneutics where it is human interpretation in language that shapes the world, not the world that determines human understanding. “All the facts in natural history taken by themselves have

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no value but are barren,” he writes, “but marry it to human history and it is full of life” (CWE 1: 29). Nietzsche (who read Emerson avidly) famously writes in “Truth and Lying in an Extra-moral sense” that “Truth is an army of metaphors… . a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding.”19 Just so, Emerson writes in “Language” that “man is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects. He is placed in the centre of beings, and a ray of relation passes from every other being to him” (CWE 1:28). Things come to mean in relation to humans themselves, through analogies humans construct and project onto the world. In a characteristic redirection of the Bible, Emerson cites Paul. He illustrates the “analogies in the nature of man” as the “seed of a plant … made use of,” with Paul’s image of “the human corpse [as] a seed: it is sewn a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body” (CWE 1:29). The Bible here proves Emerson’s claim to human analogy, not the Bible’s claim to revealed Truth. His model is scriptural language, not scriptural truth. Emerson has a precedent in Jonathan Edwards. Images and Shadows of Divine Things pushes typology from biblical text to nature and history.20 Edwards, however, seems not to be anxious as to whether his types originated in his imagination. He assumes their textual basis for his analogies from nature. In Emerson, the ground of correlation and analogizing takes place at least as much in his own vision and language as in preestablished orders. Words shift from being mere signifiers of a prior signified, to the source of signification itself. To “converse in figures” seems to take priority when Emerson writes: “Because of this radical correspondence between visible things and human thoughts, savages, who have only what is necessary, converse in figures” (CWE 1:30). In “this radical correspondence” it is not the world impressing and shaping the mind; but, as in the Kantian revolution Emerson was discovering, the mind shapes the world. Emerson’s is the hermeneutic move asserting the role and priority of interpretation in acts of understanding, which he in turn ties to language, where language itself comes to shape thought and therefore understanding. “Figures” are not images or signifiers of signified meanings that “preexist in necessary Ideas in the mind of God” (CWE 1: 35) he writes, but rather, are a “conversion of an outward phenomenon into a type of somewhat in human life” that comes first and determines the order of meaning (CWE 1:30). Does this “conversion” originate, then, in “outward phenomenon?” or in “human life” as it transfigures nature into human self-expression?

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Emerson remains ambivalent. Meaningful order in the world is registered in words—not least in privileged biblical ones. Yet does the “correspondence between visible things and human thoughts” occur first in “figures” that the mind itself arranges, which is to say, as “poetry” (CWE 1: 30)? Poetic figures then would no longer be a matter of language only as instrumental to a pre-existent meaning. This seems to be what Emerson means when he says that language becomes “all poetry.” Reversing Plato’s view of art as a copy of nature as it copies ideas, where passion is a dangerous distraction from philosophy; poetry in its very passion takes priority: “The moment our discourse rises above the ground line of familiar facts, and is inflamed with passion or exalted by thought, it clothes itself in images.” This “picturesque language is a commanding certificate that he who employs it is a man in alliance with truth and God” (CWE 1: 31). Truth appears in “picturesque language,” not direct reference through passive signifiers. The section in “Nature” on “Idealism” is still more radical: the poet “unfixes the land and the sea, makes them revolve around the axis of his primary thought, and disposes them anew. Possessed himself by a heroic passion, he uses matter as symbols of it. The poet conforms things to his thoughts” (CWE 1:52). Language’s symbols determine world, unfixing land and sea to revolve around one’s own imagination. Emerson balances on an edge between metaphysical priorities and human interpretive ones. As Sidney Ahlstrom observes, Emerson rejected the “historicism of the age,” retaining “much from the Platonic tradition.” Yet, significantly, Emerson likewise “rejects its emphasis on permanent forms” and instead sees “reality as a dynamic, creative process” of growth. But these two positions are ultimately antagonistic. To embrace time and change is to go against the main thrust of Platonist truth as unchanging. It is to recognize history on a new plane and to begin to raise the “relativistic implications of history,” as Ahlstrom writes, which challenge ideals of unchanging truth accessible to abstract reason.21 Emerson’s remains the problem he attributes to Plato: “to find …for all that exists conditionally, a ground unconditioned and absolute.” Yet in him meaning begins to emerge not as “unconditioned and absolute,” but as generated in language in a world of motion and multiplicity, its meanings fluid, changing with changing experience and expression. The essay “The Poet” puts it this way:

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Poets are thus liberating gods. Men have really got a new sense, and found within their world, another world, or nest of worlds; for, the metamorphosis once seen, we divine that it does not stop… The highest minds of the world have never ceased to explore the double meaning, or, shall I say, the quadruple, or the centuple, or much more manifold meaning, of every sensuous fact. (CWE 3: 31)

What poets, godlike, liberate from is eternal unchangingness itself. “Divine” here is a verb, an action poets take. They are “liberating gods” in that Emerson sees both poetry and religion as pledged to the sense of further meanings beyond any single meaning. That the world has “double,” “quadruple,” “centuple or much more manifold meaning” is Emerson’s fundamental definition of poetry, as also of religion. Poets find “within their world, another world, or nest of worlds” in that they open figural meanings for experience, representing different aspects and relationships in multiple ways. “Sensuous fact” does not determine but becomes figure for further understandings. In Emerson’s poetics, then, experience is seen to be composed of tropes, each imaging the next in ever unfolding and inexhaustible significance. Emerson writes in his late 1876 essay on “Poetry and Imagination:” “Nature is itself a vast trope, and all particular natures are tropes” (CWE 8:16). Or, as he writes earlier in “The Poet”: The world being thus put under the mind for verb and noun, the poet is he who can articulate it. For, though life is great, and fascinates, and absorbs,— and though all men are intelligent of the symbols through which it is named,—yet they cannot originally use them. We are symbols, and inhabit symbols; workman, work, and tools, words and things, birth and death, all are emblems. (CWE 3: 21)

“We are symbols and inhabit symbols”: it is this recognition and enactment that Emerson means when he says “It is not metres, but a metre-­ making argument, that makes a poem” (CWE 3:10). Poetry is not mere form, nor is it “autonomous language.”22 Poetry in Emerson is figures, as they extend and refract each other, penetrating into and shaping the world. The poet is the one who tropes with language, who can put the world “under the mind for verb and noun” and “articulate it.” Christopher Newfield sees Emerson’s language theory as Neoplatonist and “realist,” thus “allot[ing] the poet only a limited role.” The poet can

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imitate but not invent in language, whose validity inheres in the way “the name, the thing, the soul of the thing all correspond with each other in the One.” Language meaning according to Newfield remains “bound ontologically to the universal, the essential, the permanent,” unchanging and unitary, ultimately “dissolving into the One.”23 This “submissive” language structure mirrors and reproduces what Newfield sees in Emerson and in America as a false liberalism, in which the belief in individual freedom is itself an ideological product of coercive social structures disguising themselves as liberty. In language, Newfield writes, Emerson “anchors free expression in pre-existing authority.” This is not a matter of dialectic between invention and imitation, as Emerson’s has been interpreted to be, not a coexistence of the “freedom of the individual mind” with the “Original Cause in harmonious autonomy or correspondence.”24 The “moment of freedom” is instead exposed as a “moment of submission to superior, active power.” Emersonian liberalism is then like Emersonian language, a mode of “submissive individualism,” in language subordinate to “Spirit” and to an illiberal “untouchable authority” which “redefines obedience as consent.” Republican ideology disguises coercion. “Obedience to a law … takes place within a liberal social contract in which a relinquished freedom” always claims to be “relinquished freely.” But this freedom is a “myth,” as is the liberal claim “to have achieved a balance of freedom and order through consent” within “political formulations of free consent, voluntary submission, and delegated self-governance.”25 To Newfield, then, Emerson’s are self-defeating contradictions. Although he accepts “the social nature of subjectivity while insisting on the importance of individual imagination,” Emerson’s “individualism comes to include submission, and democracy to include authoritarianism.”26 This argument, however, itself makes “individual freedom and democratic group life” into steeply binary and indeed reified oppositions. Newfield proposes, and even grants to Emerson, a kind of “democratic interdependence” in which “private consciousness can never separate itself from social structures and forces.” But his description of Emerson as attempting a “union of radical self-reliance and the mutual determination of collective life” already implies selfhood as autonomously radical, against society as deterministic collective. In a reversion to the metaphysic Newfield is critiquing, he speaks of a “private interior essence” and a “visionary individuality,” in opposition against dwelling “permanently inside society where the group is … constitutive of one’s own mind.”27 An idealized abstract individuality here confronts a consolidated unified group

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that determines it, each reified in opposition to the other. This reified opposition characterizes both poetry and polity, with “poetic voice requiring the submission of the mind’s autonomy to higher authority.” Newfield brings Emerson’s discussion of quotation as evidence of contradiction within his poetics. But in doing so he misreads Emerson and offers a flawed account of quotation. He describes quotation as “imitation,” “link[ing] the later sign not to something different but to something the same.” “The quoted sign,” he writes, is predetermined and correspondent through the semiotic matching.” “The mind’s freedom is to overhear and obey.”28 But quotation does not “affirm priority of sameness to the self.” Nor is it like “imitation of a natural essence” or trading commodities that are “equivalent or interchangeable.”29 Quotation is rather precisely a model for how given material is creatively transmuted through an interplay of signifiers. This is what Emerson explores in his essay “Quotation and Imagination.” “Originality,” he writes, is “a communal tradition” that has passed “through long time” and “a multitude of authors and improvers.” “Is all literature eavesdropping,” he challenges, “and all art Chinese imitation?” No. “Original power is usually accompanied with assimilating power.” Quotation is not mechanical reproduction. It opens myriad relationships between its earlier and later interventions: agreement, disagreement, irony, confirmation, deflation, elevation. The inscription into new language contexts alters the senses of a quotation, as of any phrase. “The worth of the sentences,” writes Emerson, “consists in their radiancy and equal aptitude to all intelligence” (CWE 8: 188). The Bible in Emerson is an outstanding case of how quotation opens interchange as an ongoing social yet creative activism, and not merely, as Newfield describes the Bible itself, as “an effect of the energies of mass life, one where individuality has been lost across the ages of unceasing transmission.”30 As Emerson concludes “Quotation and Originality,” “Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor” (CWE 8:204). Emerson calls the Bible “the work of a whole communion of worshippers … played upon by the devotion of thousands of years until every word and particle is public and turnable” (CWE 8:182). It is precisely as “public and turnable” that the Bible can act as a scene of participation by individuals in a discourse in which both take shape. In doing so, it images an inter-relational “society of souls” in which the individual “receives its power of meaning from this society” (CWE 8: 198). Its figural energies, unfolding in multiple interpretations, infuses Emerson’s

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views of language and poetry. The Bible for him serves as authorizing text, rather than as authority. From the Puritan start, the Bible was a guide to—indeed a text of—not only inner religious experience but American history. Yet such exegetical correlations are difficult to sustain. There is ever a gap between interiority and exteriority, private and public, detail and design. As the Revolution unfolded into the early republic, this gap became more painful, precisely due to the promise the republic represented. This is Emerson’s dilemma. He desires to envision America as a site in which selves flourish, inwardly in integrity and also outwardly in political life, each as an extension and expression of the other. But history and politics do not obey him. America is contradictory: at once revolutionary and industrializing, republican and slave-holding, expansive and reductive. Emersonian individualism has been criticized as consecrating free market self-interest and rapacity.31 But he was also steadfast, from his earliest to latest texts, in his revulsion against sheer material reduction. He condemns property as an exteriority that does not correlate with or express true interiority, but rather entombs it. The conclusion of “Self-Reliance” declares materialism to be betrayal, not fulfillment of selfhood: “And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance.” He accuses: even “religious, learned, and civil institutions” seem to have become no more than “guards of property… . They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is” (CWE 2: 88). Or, as he puts it in a powerful image in the “Ode to William Channing,” “Things are in the saddle, And ride mankind.” Emerson’s concern is to guard against property defining the self. His pledge is that the inward will correspond with the outward, each enlivening the other, in ongoing ways. Emerson wants to affirm that the world is in motion and multiple, its meanings fluid and expressive. In “Circles” he makes this point with an equanimity that disguises its radical implications. Noting in the essay “Circles” that “St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere, and its circumference nowhere,” Emerson goes on to transfer such infinity to experience: “Every action admits of being outdone … around every circle another can be drawn; … There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees” (CWE 2: 302). But Emerson’s “No fixtures” quite turns Augustine on his head. When Emerson writes in his Journal of 1834: “Blessed is the day when the youth discovers that Within and Above are

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synonyms,” he is citing Augustine’s Confessions.32 In Augustine, however, spiritual interiority “within” must be pathway to “Above” as unchanging truth. Emerson’s vision of ongoing figural generation no longer fixes in metaphysical truth but rather resides in the self and in language itself. But he also appeals to a “universal soul within” reuniting each person’s inner meaning with a unified universal truth. Is his, then, a Kantian sense of individual as arriving at universal categorical imperatives, as Stanley Cavell proposes?33 Or is his an unleashed subjectivity, wondering, as he does in “Nature’s” section on “Idealism,” whether “nature enjoy[s] a substantial existence without, or is it only in the apocalypse of the mind.”? As Harold Bloom has shown, Emerson does court the possibility of an “apocalypse of mind” that absorbs all exteriority into itself.34 Emerson in fact never answers the question as to whether his figures are metaphysical or metaphorical, grounded in ontology or constructed in language. Such contradictions between eternity and time, fixed references and figural invention, circle back to the Bible when Emerson writes in a draft of the essay “The Preacher”: “A bible is a collection of formulas to express the inevitable moral facts. It is the record of the experience and aspiration of the wisest and most religious minds,—of the saints of each nation” (CWE 10: 556). As “collection of formulas” the Bible seems one of any number of possible expressions of “moral facts.” And these themselves seem far from fixed when Emerson adds: “Of course it will not be ended until the Creation is.” “Moral facts” themselves, although “inevitable,” seem to change in ongoing “Creation” whose “end” here appears to be an infinity away. What Barbara Packer says of Emerson’s writing can also be said of Emerson’s Bible: that the relation between one figure and another becomes “charged terminals that the reader must take the risk of connecting.”35 The Bible, then, is both open and fixed. And so is its interpretation: it can be quoted in many directions. This instability becomes an acute moral problem as Emerson comes to confront slavery. Slavery stands out as the ultimate reduction of the human to material. Emerson’s 1851 “Address on the Fugitive Slave Law” ties “the greatest calamity in the Universe, negro slavery,” to American obsession with “prosperity.” To tolerate slavery is to make “the acquisition of property” into “the end of all living” and the world into “a greasy hotel” (CWE 11: 190). Our “bellies run away with our brains” (CWE 11: 187). In this and other anti-slavery addresses, Emerson touches on, although he does not make central, the specific biblical debates partly fueling, partly enlisted by each side against the other,

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and the overriding hypocrisy of Christian America. Emerson’s first “Fugitive Slave Address” invokes the “eleventh commandment,” “Do unto others as you would have them do to you” (CWE 11: 195). His second “Fugitive Slave Address” of 1854 is dedicated largely to accusing Webster of having acted “as immoral men usually do, made very low bows to the Christian Church, [going] through all the Sunday decorums” (CWE 11: 229). Webster the statesman along with “men of letters, of the colleges, of educated men, nay, of some preachers of religion” make up “the darkest passage in the history” (CWE 11: 230). “One would have said,” he continues, “that a Christian would not keep slaves;—but the Christians keep slaves. Of course, they will not dare to read the Bible? Won’t they? They quote the Bible, quote Paul, quote Christ to justify slavery” (CWE 11: 235). But slavery shows “that our prosperity had hurt us, and that we could not be shocked by crime. It showed that the old religion and the sense of the right had faded and gone out” (CWE 11: 230). In Emerson, biblical language remains precariously balanced between a more traditional authority and radical figural transformation. Citing Saint Paul in “Nature,” he declares: “The things that are seen, are temporal; the things that are unseen, are eternal” (CWE 1: 59). But is this metaphysics or metaphorics? That “things that are seen” are “temporal” may be agreed. But are things “unseen” figures of the imagination, or are they “eternal” as unchanging or doctrinal, as they are in Paul? When Emerson pledges a religion that is “free,” he means one where “the earth moves and the mind opens,” not one fixed through eternity (“Address at Second Annual Meeting of Free Religion” CWE 11: 491). In this, his Bible straddles both eternity and time, in a duality of commitment at once reaching to gather multiplicity into unity while also scattering figures without limit. This is the challenge of Emersonian poetry, religion, and civic life. He confronts and enacts the paradoxes of creative selfhood as it transforms what is given into poetry and polity.

Walt Whitman’s Scriptural Transfigurations Walt Whitman called his work “The Great Construction of the New Bible.”36 This, as in Emerson, marks a release from biblical “literalism.” Whitman, however, commits himself and his words more whole-heartedly to figuralism even than Emerson does. He shows no nostalgia for an unchanging unity above the world of change, needs no vertical reference

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to justify, interpret, or redeem experience. Whitman, more radically than any other poet of his time, moves beyond metaphysics into an embrace of temporal, material world and words. Whitman’s is not, however, thereby a reductive materialism. His work enacts the full power of figuralism exactly in its reach through material, historical, embodied life as energies for creative expansion of meaning in time, in society, in language. It is such figuralism that Whitman intends when he complained to Horace Traubel that “people speak of the Leaves as wanting in religion,” when it was instead “the most religious book among books, crammed full of faith.”37 This faith embraces the Bible as Whitman assumes and transmutes it. Through Whitman’s work, the Bible appears in references direct and indirect, but above all as a way of seeing the world and the self through levels of figuration. Such figuralism governs Whitman’s poetics. Without rhyme, without traditional meter, rhythmic through the natural phrasing of sentences, what makes Whitman’s work poetry rather than prose is the intensity of figuration in which processions of images and tropes unfurl from each other—Emerson’s “meter-making argument.” Whitman realizes the biblical promise of multiple levels of meaning in complex point and counterpoint, stretching from self to material world and economy to nature, to sexual and to social experience. What he abandons is any sort of eternal design governing the processions of words and time. He retains biblical figural energy without metaphysical frameworks or anchors. Discussions of Whitman’s biblicism have pursued a number of avenues. Whitman’s style is recognized as recalling biblical parallelism. There are generalized gestures to biblical authority and overarching motifs, as well as lists of specific biblical references.38 One major topic linked to biblical terms is prophecy, central in Romantic Studies in general and in Whitman Studies in particular. Prophecy, however, is extremely varied in the meanings and uses associated with it, at times seeming to merge with notions of Romantic imagination and figuration as such, at least as they bear on visions of time and history.39 In the context of Whitman, prophecy is largely associated with an authoritative Romantic selfhood, as it perceives or projects temporal and historical unities and designs. Whitman’s thus also becomes a Christic poetic selfhood, a central focus of biblical discussion in Whitman.40 Some have suspected Whitman as too cheerful, too affirmative, too integrative in his prophetic vocation, especially regarding the Civil War.41 This follows more traditional views of prophecy as channeling a divine or

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inspired voice to unveil the direction, purpose, and ultimate unity of history, translated, however, from religion to secularity.42 There has, however, emerged proposals of postmodern prophetism seen as disjunctive rather than unifying. Whitman’s in this light is seen as a venture that resists unificatory drives, in either metaphysical or political senses. In this reading, his vision is disintegrative, working “less to rebuild an edifice of legitimacy than to splay out history’s fragmentation.”43 Whitman’s biblicism is not identical with prophecy. Besides specific engagement with biblical texts and figures, there is also a shift in emphasis from prophetic selfhood as it commands historical vision; to interpretation and figuration as ongoing but not consolidated in self or history. Exegetical traditions such as typology offered models and practices of multi-layered figures in ongoing relation. These were traditionally controlled by schema of eternal designs and end goals. Whitman moves figuration from vertical structures attempting to image eternity, to horizontal unfolding in open ways. Whitman’s essay “The Bible as Poetry” lays out his biblicism precisely as figuralism.44 “Meter” may be the “principal verse-requirement of our day,” he writes, but it is a formalism “the early Jewish poets knew not” (CPW 379). Theirs was a poetry of relationality among experiences. When Whitman sees the “Bible as a poetic entity, and of every portion of it,” it is as a “cumulus of associations (perfectly legitimate parts of its influence, and finally in many respects the dominant parts)” (CPW 381). The Bible contains multitudes: “the congeries also of events and struggles and surroundings, of which it has been the scene and motive—even the horrors, dreads, deaths” (CWW 381). Just so, his own poetic is not formal “edifice,” but a relational adventure among and across multiple dimensions. Biblical poetics incorporate every level of experience, from the religious to the natural to the aesthetic to the historical to the political. Thus, in the Bible poetry was naturally religious. Its subjects, God and Providence, the covenants with Israel, God in Nature, and as reveal’d, God the Creator and Governor, Nature in her majesty and beauty, inspired hymns and odes to Nature’s God. And then the checker’d history of the nation furnish’d allusions, illustrations, and subjects for epic display—the glory of the sanctuary, the offerings, the splendid ritual, the Holy City, and lov’d Palestine with its pleasant valleys and wild tracts. (CPW 379)

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Poetry and covenant, God and nature, history and nation, temple and land, divine and human, public and private all cross paths in the Bible and in Whitman. Whitman himself takes on what he names in the essay the “office of poet,” a public pursuit as “epic display” of every facet of experience in multidimensional expression (CPW 379). How, however, to configure these multitudinous relationships? Traditional exegesis of the Bible and history through it presumes correlation and closure. Indeed, it proceeds under the sign of ending, in an eschatology that determines not only history’s goal, but shapes all of history as movement toward that goal. Typology stood as the scaffolding of such correlative design. Yet in typology there is also always a double pull. Even as it attempts to link historical events to eternal pattern, it points to events in time as that pattern’s immediate experience. There is then a double focus on both immediate event, and its place in a governing design seen to be unchanging, with inevitable tensions between the two. Prophetism, too, links event and design. It has been argued that Romanticism moved away from the prophet as a “predictive clairvoyant [acting] as agent of synthesis, organization, order and discipline” to represent instead “temporal, phenomenological, and historical discord,” rendering prophecy in its “negativity, fragility, and failure.”45 Whitman’s abandonment of clairvoyant synthesis, however, does not necessarily mark failure. He instead mainly, although not always, celebrates a pluralist multiplicity, in poetry as also in polity. Whitman here is indeed revolutionary. Emerson’s has been described as still largely a “poetics of union, … its impetus is to unify, to bring all souls into participation in a single entity.”46 As Emerson puts it in the section on “Discipline” in “Nature,” there is “unity in variety which meets us everywhere … all the endless variety of things make an identical impression” (CWE 1:44). Whitman instead directs his art into multiple arenas, investigating their interrelationship, including their counter-relationship, but without aiming to fulfill a formal or unified design. His processes of revision graphically attest to his commitment to change and alteration. Whitman’s writing, even or especially in its sweep across wide geographies, events, characters, does not represent the “timeless,” nor does it attempt to do so.47 Time in Whitman is motion, change, multiply situated in material history and experience. His are never static tableaus, but flowing or glimpsed moments. His stances are never sub specie eternitas. Even gestures toward harmony work between centripetal and centrifugal forces, rather than toward governing design. His

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transmutation of biblical traditions points away from divine eternal pattern and toward its figural multiplications through different times, events, and places. Whitman’s figural biblicism, then, is non-apocalyptic. In this it can be distinguished from some descriptions which ally prophecy to apocalypse. Christopher Bundock, for example, claims the apocalyptic “Book of Revelation [as] a model” for “prophetic poetry.” Joseph Wittreich similarly claims that “in union, epic and prophecy constitute the ultimate transcendental form” and effectively “equip man to enter the heavenly Jerusalem.”48 M.H. Abrams argues for a secularized apocalypse, replacing “faith in an apocalypse by revelation, with faith in an apocalypse by revolution,” which then gives way to “faith in an apocalypse by imagination or cognition.”49 But others importantly distinguish prophecy from apocalypse. Geoffrey Hartman writes: “If apocalypse marks “at once desire for and dread of the end being hastened,” by contrast “prophecy […] would seem to be anti-apocalyptic in seeking a ‘future restoration’ taking place in time.”50 Martin Buber likewise distinguishes prophecy as call to “take part in the still uncompleted work of creation,” as against John’s apocalyptic where “everything is predetermined, the future is already present in heaven, present from the beginning.”51 Ian Balfour warns against collapsing “the distinction between Jew and Christian, between prophecy and apocalyptic,” where only the latter “presupposes the vast architectonic unity of the Bible, with Jesus as its alpha and omega.”52 Here an American Hebraism can be said to emerge in Whitman, as also in his return to Hebraic parallelism. Whitman’s vision is firmly temporal, material, and historical, albeit facing toward a future he hopes to point in creative directions. The distinction is not between religion and secularity so much as totalism and pluralism. Even in the poem “Years of the Unperform’d” of the 1866 edition (renamed “Years of the Modern” in 1871), which speaks of “a general divine war,” the temporal mode is one of incompletion, in years still “unperform’d.”53 They are “Years prophetical” but not in any comprehensive grasp. Rather we at most “vainly try to pierce it” as time stretches endlessly forward to “tremendous entrances and exits, new combinations, the solidarity of races.” Egalitarian, eliminating “the idea of caste” and “old aristocracies broken,” the poem announces “average man” as “more like a God” precisely in this ongoing effort (LG 371). “Divine” is an adjective and not a noun, not a reified or transcendent figure, but the possibilities of the human.

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Whitman’s is a release of interpretive energies into time and plural possibilities that bring differing levels of experience into a variety of configurations. Like biblical exegesis, Whitman’s levels can be schematized on multiple layers that intercross. His historical level is the unfolding of joint life in the public sphere; the “tropological” or “moral” level, as the course of each individual in his and her own social, sexual, economic life; a Christic level is something like the Emersonian sense of each self’s potential divinity, which each reader is invited to realize. All point forward to an ever unfolding America, although, after the war, Whitman became more anxious about how much America would be true to its own promise. He imagines citizenship as each person acting to read and interpret self and world, as they do the Bible. His poetry offers an education into such creative interpretation. Each citizen as reader thus becomes a poet, in an America he calls, in his Preface to Leaves of Grass, a great poem (LG 1855 vi). Here he echoes Emerson, who declared “America is a poem” (CWE 3: 38) and whose imagined polity would be that of a “nation of individuals” (“The Fortune of the Republic,” CWE 529). Biblical energies thus enter Whitman’s verse, in its rhythms and structures. But he also reworks specific biblical texts. Yosefa Raz, who sees Whitman’s as a “weak prophecy” that is “destabilizing and unsettling” rather than “an authoritative force imposing apocalyptic symmetry on psychological and historical process,” traces biblical motifs such as Ezekiel’s dry bones in the 1855 preface as well as the prophetic figure of marriage.54 Herbert Levine offers a rich array of approaches to Whitman’s as an “attempt to write an American Bible.” He locates in Whitman a “transvaluation of kinds of biblical writing”; as rebuke and “prophetic castigation against materialism and greed”; as catalogue recalling the voice out of the whirlwind in Job; and also as echoing exegetical traditions that are “contextual, allegorical, homiletic, and mystical.” Levine, however, ultimately argues for Whitman as rendering “conflicting diversity as a harmonious union,” in a Christocentric biblical interpretation of “typological fulfillment.” Although secularized, Whitman’s is then an “equivalent of biblical apocalypse” that “promises to resolve the multiple contradictions of the present, whether manifested in personal experience or in the sectional conflict of the union.” And yet, Levine also adds that “unlike biblical versions of apocalypse, Whitman does not attach ultimacy to such future reconciliation.”55

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Song of Myself 3 offers a pivotal and powerful experience of Whitman’s poetry as biblical exegesis and refiguration, in a rewriting of biblical texts, and specifically of Romans 1. I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end, But I do not talk of the beginning or the end… . There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now, And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now. Urge and urge and urge, Always the procreant urge of the world…(LG 30-31)

The “talkers” who “talk of beginning and the end” are biblical ones, here recalling John’s Revelation 1:8: “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending.” But John’s prophetic vision of that “which is, and which was, and which is to come,” collapses time into eternity. This Whitman rejects: “But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.” Pairing “inception” with its counter-rhyme “perfection,” he invests energy in the “procreant urge of the world” of time and body, against traditional metaphysical divestment from it. Whitman dismisses metaphysics. Against other worlds, he declares there is “Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.” The poem’s embrace of both “soul” and the body “that is not my soul” moves the contest to Paul. Paul had warned against substituting the visible for the invisible, the seen for the unseen: “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse” (Romans 1:18-20). Whitman counters: Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul. Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen, Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn… (LG 31)

Whitman takes up the Pauline language of the seen and the unseen, not to direct from the visible world to “invisible things” beyond it, nor from the “things that are made” to an “eternal power,” but instead emphatically to affirm the ongoing historical worlds “that become.” The “unseen”

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is a temporalized future born from the concrete present “seen.” In Whitman there is no hierarchy between the “seen” of the concrete world and some spiritual “unseen.” These are not distinct ontological dimensions, but unfolding meanings in time and reality. Each generates the other in an ongoing procession, a chain of becoming, not of being. And both seen and unseen are necessary and valuable: “Lacks one lacks both.” In Romans 1, Paul has a specific sin in mind, in which body betrays soul, a sin that Whitman might want particularly to contest. 24 Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: 25 Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. 26 For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: 27 And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.

The “recompence” of the sin of “vile affections” is hell. For Paul it is an idolatry of serving “the creature more than the Creator,” where these two are in tension if not opposition. The “lust” of “men with men” toward one another changes “the truth of God unto a lie.” But Whitman in Song 3 celebrates “the hugging and loving bed-fellow [who] sleeps at my side through the night, / and withdraws at the peep of the day with stealthy tread.” Gender is left open, or hinted at as homoerotic in the “loving bed-­ fellow.” But Whitman generally does not condemn but explicitly elevates physical life: “I am satisfied—I see, dance, laugh, sing,” a singing he performs in this very Song. Whitman’s conversion of eternity into time, his valuation of material temporality as itself a domain of meaningful action, ultimately centers in his biblical as well as democratic commitment to the image of God in the human. When Whitman names himself in Section 24 of Leaves of Grass, it is not to glorify himself above others, but to declare for others as for himself: “Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from.” This includes the “forbidden voices” of body and sexuality, all “long dumb voices,” including “prisoners and slaves.” The divine becomes “the sign of democracy: By God! I will accept nothing which all

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cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” one of Whitman’s most powerful visionary poems, bestows this halo of divine image “face to face” as he peers over the ferry’s side and sees himself reflected back in “fine centrifugal spokes of light round the shape of my head in the sunlit water” (LG 129). But this applies to everyone. In Whitman’s figural poetics no single level of meaning commandeers significance to dominate all others. Each level enters in its own integrity and force. It is the core of Whitman’s art, and also his visionary hope, that each can extend into others, in a multi-dimensionality of experience in which each is distinct from the other and yet mutually generative. The challenge is how these levels do or do not together represent an American culture that Whitman yearns to believe can sustain this very diversity. One form is a physical eroticism that refuses either to displace or to dualistically be degraded beneath other experiences. Such interdependence of soul and body opens Whitman’s great anti-slavery poem, “I Sing the Body Electric”: “And if the body were not the Soul, what is the Soul?” (LG 98). Whitman is not reversing dualist axiology to privilege the material body or to make it his primary subject. What he does is resist the dualisms that have governed Western tradition and the hierarchies, oppositions, and enmities these institute. Whitman refuses such dualist splits or hierarchies, as between mind and body, spirit and matter, man and woman, or white and Black, to which these have been correlated. Appearing as one of the sequences in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, “I Sing the Body Electric” underwent significant revisions through the course and aftermath of the Civil War, in the 1856 and 1860 editions. It reached its final form in 1867, when this title first appeared. As Betsy Erkkila has explored, the poem engages many levels of meaning, including the racial and sexual body but extending to the American body politic.56 Polity figures large. The poem’s seventh section speaks of “the start of populous states and rich republics.” Whitman wishes to celebrate both national and economic prosperity—economy being for Whitman, in his best moods, also a possibility of expansion and invention. Science, too, finds place in Whitmanian expansion as shown in the title’s “Electric.” As connection and energy, electricity is in Whitman a figure for poetry itself. In “I Sing the Body Electric” he puts the miracle of humankind in an evolutionary context, which is no enemy of what can still be called spiritual meaning: “For it the globe lay preparing quintillions of years” (LG 85). To Whitman, evolution confirms the value and parity of each person: “Limbs, red, black, or white,” who all contain the “all-baffling brain; In it

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and below it, the makings of heroes” (LG 85). The hero in Whitman is each individual. There is no lower physical nature to be renounced in the name of some higher one. The human is embodied selfhood, in an evolutionary rephrasing of the equal biblical creation of humankind. “I Sing the Body Electric” thus brings different levels of experience into interplay in a visionary oratory of multiple levels. But the poem’s core has reference to the particular text of the biblical image of God. The divine image is Whitman’s ethical ground for religious, sexual, economic, and political life, with the poem a kind of commentary on Genesis 1: 27: “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” This has been the foremost biblical proof-text of discourses of human equality. It is central to both abolitionist and feminist discourses, which favor this first account of equal creation, against the one in Genesis 2, where, as Elizabeth Cady Stanton protested, woman is fantastically born of men.57 Whitman’s “I sing the Body Electric” takes this most central of biblical texts as its own center. The poem’s Section 5 refers to the “divine nimbus” that “exhales” from the “female form … from head to foot” (man and woman were inspired or “exhale[d]” to life in Genesis by the divine breath) (LG 83). The divine breath inspires not only soul but also body, as Whitman pursues in Section 6, “The man’s body is sacred, and the woman’s body is sacred / No matter who it is, it is sacred” (LG 85). Section 8 insists again: “If any thing is sacred, the human body is sacred” (LG 85). On the one hand, this focus on the body as sacred site challenges tradition. On the other, it makes its claim in the very language of biblical textuality. And yet, Whitman is painfully aware that these correlations and expansions have been far from fulfilled. The attempts to correlate between religious, civic, and  economic equalities in Section 6 register the failure to fulfill such mutual reflections: Is it a slave? Is it one of the dull-faced immigrants just landed on the wharf? Each belongs here or anywhere, just as much as the well-off—just as much as you. (LG 1855 85)

The very inclusion of “slave” in this declaration of equality where “each belongs here or anywhere” contradicts the political, social, and economic reality in which Whitman writes. Whitman’s democratic vistas—physical, sacral, political, gendered, conceived in egalitarian ways—thus strain across

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what opens as a terrible breach in the poem. The prosperity of “rich republics” at this moment of its writing in 1855 includes an economy in which persons are not sacred, but instead reduced to owned objects. Indeed, the biblical “sacred” body of Section 6 becomes in Section 7 the auctioned body of the slave. The slave auction is the dramatic center of the poem, based in Whitman’s sojourn in New Orleans in 1848. In a powerful rhetorical inversion, Whitman takes the very scene of auction that reduces the human to property and makes it a declaration of the inestimable value of each person. He thus gainsays the auctioneer by outdoing him. “I help the auctioneer—the sloven [this is surely a word play on slave, now referring to the auctioneer] does not half know his business” (LG 86). The word “business,” like other economic terms in Whitman, takes on wider implications. Here it transforms sales-pitch into its self-defeat. The body presented as object is unveiled as a “wonder,” a miracle of divine image. Converting the very language of economic assessment, the poet turns it to a value beyond measure: “Whatever the bids of the bidders, they cannot be high enough for it” (LG 86). Earlier in the poem, in Section 2, Whitman insisted: “The love of the body of man or woman balks account, the body itself balks account” (LG 82). “Account” itself is converted from calculation to narrative and testimony, as the poet translates (another key Whitmanian term for figuration) economy from reductive price to marvelous appreciation. Whitman in this scene at once protests and registers how far America is from his visionary faith that economy can participate positively in democratic social and political life. He shows how in antebellum America, property of persons ruptures and betrays America’s other promises. In the America that this poem represents and addresses, the reduction of the human to slave is a chasmic wound that threatens both America and Whitman’s own art of figural extension. The America he celebrates is an imagined one, dissenting rather than consenting to the social economic order of America as it now exists. Whitman’s verse poses parallel aesthetic and historical questions. What is the status of multiplicity and difference? Does either art or polity require that these be subsumed into unitary projects? Whitman opens a path, he calls it a journey, where multiplicity of time, space, and persons partake in an ongoing effort in which each one participates, without appealing to a fixed design into which all must be subsumed. His poetics, which both enacts and announces this project, converts unitive language and politics to exegetical ones of multiple possibilities. He offers this as model for participation and creativity in an ongoing American project.

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Melville: Unwriting the Apocalypse The Bible looms large in all of Melville’s work. However, it has been examined in his prose much more than in his poetry, even in the more recent attention given to his verse.58 Melville’s verse long resisted readership, despite his publishing Battle Pieces in the guise of popular Civil War poetry. Basing himself on the newspaper accounts of the Rebellion Record, which juxtaposed contrasting reports from both North and South, as well as political speeches and Civil War poetry; Melville’s Battle Pieces emerge as a highly experimental poetics of history. This does not, however, reduce the poems to historical document. As poetry, Battle Pieces is necessarily figural. It is not attempting “literal” reference to historical events, as if the poetry is a report of events in more or less awkward verse form.59 And, as figural, Battle Pieces draws heavily on biblical imagery and pattern, a continuing and deep exegetical engagement on Melville’s part, probing biblical implications and implicit claims.60 Melville does not simply denounce the Bible as violent war banner, governed by what has been called “divine warrior rhetoric” reaffirming “the popular Northern faith in the divine righteousness of its cause by comparing the Union to ancient Israel during the Conquest.”61 Melville’s Bible is instead, as Ilana Pardes argues, one where exegesis “opens potentialities, to take typology beyond its limits,” including the “instability of boundaries between chosen and non-­ chosen.”62 Melville sees poetry, too, as just such an opening of potentialities of words against “discourses that legitimate violence such as glory, patriotism and religion.”63 His poetic undertaking is against such reduction. Yet this is not to renounce the possibility of solidarity and community. His poetry and its biblical engagement set out, as he writes in the “Supplement” to Battle Pieces, to reconstitute an American society that has gone to war with itself, in the name of “the infinite desirableness of Re-establishment” in which “patriotism … urges a claim overriding all literary scruples.”64 Melville’s poems expose and test how common terms with overlapping meanings came to take on antagonistic uses and senses in war. And he ventures whether there is still a way for these terms to return to a common discourse, if not with identical senses, still with shared enough ones to reconstitute the community rent apart in war. “Must,” the “Supplement” asks, “patriotism and narrowness” necessarily “go together” (BP 260)? Melville is reknown for his theological learning and investment, and the quandaries he faces are often described in terms of the problem of evil: the

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“mystery of iniquity,” as he calls it in his essay “Hawthorne and his Mosses,” where he ponders how to weigh up the world without throwing in “somewhat like Original Sin.”65 The problem of evil extends from personal fate and justice to historical interpretation, which is what Melville pursues in Battle Pieces. The Bible as an overriding presence in the poems is itself part of the history the poems trace. The shapes the Bible gave to time remained the major paradigms of temporal pattern and understanding in Melville’s America, for North and South.66 History is necessarily a joint venture, an affair of people acting together and understanding action together. In America, that understanding was foundationally biblical, although the Bible offered, as the war and Melville’s poetry shows, differing understandings that could conflict. In the period leading up to the Civil War, apocalyptic millennialism emerged as the dominant biblical time scheme framing the direction of the American republic. The eighteenth century had marked a shift to an “altered structure” in millennialism, from focusing on the end of history to millennial blessing “expected within history,” that could be realized through “progressive stages” with active human participation. “The future marked by tribulation expected by tradition was transformed into a future of hope.” Such an historicized millennium “remov[ed] it from meaningful relation to biblical apocalyptic.”67 But the approach of Civil War marked a resurgence of apocalypticism. In the face of sectional strife, oppositions hardened into stark dualism between good and evil, |the “kingdom of heaven against the kingdom of Satan.”68 Cosmic implications were attached to political and economic conflict, with ultimate judgment immediately looming. Biblical disputes over slavery threatened or defended what had become the “moral foundation of the slaveholders’ worldview.” “Disparate versions of once common faith” both launched and intensified each section’s “course of separate national development.”69 Yet the scenes of biblical confrontation did not seem to raise questions of how clashing claims were possible if biblical truth was so certain, nor what it implied about biblical authority.70 For Melville, however, and others who reflected upon the implications of such biblical combat itself, questions of authority became urgent, as did the fact of multiple interpretations, and of historical pattern and direction as based in biblical schema. Battle Pieces is thus an exploration and exposure of the pieces into which American culture, historical consciousness, and language itself were breaking. The poems accordingly propose a great variety of perspectives,

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as these direct language use and meaning within interpretive frameworks, including biblical ones, that had come to be at odds with each other. They trace what James Moorhead calls currents of “asocial disintegrative interpretation,” as people confronted each other as either good or evil, within a view of historical destiny whose terms were shared but whose judgments were opposed.71 The time patterns of Melville’s verse have been described as cyclical.72 But the major time-schemes he confronts are biblical, as these take on apocalyptic confrontation in Civil War. The book’s first poem, “The Portent” (BP 11), precisely focuses on temporal location. It warns against trying to foresee the future and of elevating a central figure as commanding all events and all times in reference to itself. Hanging from the beam,   Slowly swaying (such the law), Gaunt the shadow on your green,  Shenandoah! The cut is on the crown   (Lo, John Brown), And the stabs shall heal no more. Hidden in the cap   Is the anguish none can draw; So your future veils its face,  Shenandoah! But the streaming beard is shown   (Weird John Brown), The meteor of the war.

“Shadow on your green” recalls the 23rd Psalm’s green pastures and valley of the shadow of death. The poem, however, does not share the Psalm’s secure faith. The shadow is ominous and foreboding, on what will be the devastation of Shenandoah Valley in the final campaigns of the Civil War, when it was burned to the sea. Above all, John Brown’s body hangs in a reference to crucifixion, his “crown” cut like Christ’s. This, however, is not typological fulfillment but warning against attempts to decipher events by pre-given codes. Brown himself was a dramatic case of contrasting interpretations, political and metaphysical, as martyr or demon. But in this poem, neither is admitted. Here is no redemptive sacrifice: “the stabs shall heal no more.” Nor is there any illuminating revelation that will organize

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time. What is to be remains “Hidden in the cap” where the “future veils its face.” Biblical paradigm thus asserts itself in the poem, with Christic figure at the text’s center, but defying attempts to design history around it, and in a language as ambiguous as Brown himself. With words, interpretive procedures, and purposes at odds, how can history be deciphered or conflict resolved? One thing the poems are not is synthetic. A pressing question of Battle Pieces is: whose are the voices distributed through it?73 Melville in the “Preface” speaks of the poems as “manifold as are the moods of involuntary meditation—moods variable, and at times widely at variance” (BP 5). Giving expression to the different sides, each in defeat and victory, the poems follow even single battles as they go back and forth in retreat and advance. Yet they are not “ventriloquistic” or “mouthpieces” of the different parties addressed.74 Rather, they offer expositions of the variant positions that led to, conducted, and afterward interpreted the war. They present, that is, a hermeneutics of history. The Bible as a hermeneutic key in American self-understanding is both illustrated and undermined, as Melville places the same biblical claims, references, and projections of destiny in the opposing mouths of the two sides. The question the volume then poses is whether these differences in meaning can, first, be recognized as partial instead of absolute and, second, can be reassembled back into some shared understanding. Biblical types appear in poem after poem, less to direct history than as signs of historical havoc. “Lyon” (BP 24) is proposed as a “prophetic” figure, combining the crusader-spirit of Richard the “Lyon”-hearted with an apocalyptic “swift sharp sword.” At the last he ascends, in a flourish of hyperbole and bombast, “up to Zion, / where prophets now and armies greet brave Lyon.” “The Battle for the Mississippi (1862)” (BP 64) opens with confident correlation between the immediate and the biblical. The Union Navy is likened to “Israel camped by Migdol hoar” when “Moses sung and timbrels rung / For Pharaoh’s stranded crew” at the Red Sea. The poem, however, offers a turmoil of events that are impossible to sort. There is a “shock of ships … half ablaze” in thunder and “foundering… flame” and “wrecks.” This is no fulfillment of biblical pattern, but a disorder of unreadable events. The course of the poem thus defeats its opening appeal to biblical model. Declaring—“So God appears in apt events—The Lord is a man of war!,” what follows is not confirmation but confusion, both in action and in understanding. A warrior God may be the view of those who lead into battle; but they fail to control events to fulfill their biblical paradigm.

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“Gettysburg (1863)” (BP 84) is a palimpsest recalling both the first and second Gettysburg battles, as well as Lincoln’s dedication of the site as a “warrior-monument.” What stands out is the suffering and confusion of these engagements. The final Gettysburg victory cost the Union 23,000 casualties, more than one-quarter of its army, while the South had 28,000 men killed, wounded, or missing, more than a third of Lee’s army. The Northern Generals, moreover, failed, as was repeatedly the case, to take the opportunity to pursue and destroy Lee’s retreating army for conclusive victory. The war would continue two more years.75 Such victory Melville calls a “havoc on wreck.” It is neither mitigated nor clarified by the biblical apocalyptic cast of the North in the poem, as “the ark of our holy cause” before which the “Dagon” South falls, “foredoomed.” Analogies here become tropes of impasse, with biblical correlations among the most misleading. “Battle of Stone River, Tennessee (1863)” (BP 73) would compare the Civil War to the War of the Roses: “Yorkist and Lancastrian”; but also to Christ’s life, each side battling with “sacred fervor,” each under a “broidered cross,” and “Passion” not in the sense of Christ’s sacrificial gift but as a furious rage of accusation against vilified enemies. So here the “crossing blades profaned the sign.” “Apathy and Enthusiasm” (BP 19) would compare, as was often done in the North, the War of Secession to Milton’s War in Heaven (itself biblical commentary on Milton’s own Civil War) come down to American soil.76 The prototype is apocalypse. The angel “Michael” is duly cast against the “Arch-Fiend.” War time is measured through the Christian calendar from Lent to Easter. But this, far from illuminating history, only intensifies its “foreboding” of defeat. Which is more deadly? “Apathy” or “Enthusiasm?” Battle Pieces demonstrates how powerful apocalyptic schema are. In “On the Slain Collegians” (BP 157) the “Youth” of both “North” and “South,” both drawn by “stirring wars,” oppose the “mask of Cain” against “Truth’s sacred cause,” each against the, other. This drowns out “gentleness” of “the liberal arts.” “The Battle for the Mississippi” (BP 64) compares Admiral Farragut’s victory over New Orleans with the Israelites camping on “Migdol” before crossing the Red Sea. Quoting the biblical Song of the Sea, the poem declares “So God appears in apt events / The Lord is a man of war!” But the intense historical detail of this poem pulls away from such ultimate appeals, and in its conclusion, what is left are the dead on both sides, where “prayer /Is meet for men who mourn their slain.” “The Frenzy in the Wake” (BP 133) switches to the Southern point of view in its subtitle, “Sherman’s Advance through the Carolinas,

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(February, 1865).” The South also calls on “Time” to avenge “every woe” and claims for themselves the joy “which Israel thrilled when Sisera’s brow/ Showed gaunt and showed the clot.” This poem is followed by “The Fall of Richmond” (BP 135), specifically located as its “Tidings” are “received in the Northern Metropolis (April, 1865).” There, bells peal and cannon celebrate Richmond’s defeat as the fall of “Babylon,” the defeat of “Lucifer.” The poem’s close—“But God is in Heaven, and Grant in the Town, / and Right through might is Law—/ God’s way adore” reduces creed to cliché. This smug Northern self-congratulation equates power with righteousness. In “The Armies of the Wilderness (1862–4)” (BP 93), it is difficult to tell on whose side the poem is located. As so often in Battle Pieces, the confusion of battle and sequence itself is reproduced. The poem spans three indecisive clashes taking place from May 2, 1863, May 5, 1864, then May 9. The engagement at the “Wilderness,” a large forest south of the Rapidan River in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, was prolonged, bitter, and inconclusive. In the poem’s first lines, the site is “Like snow … on southern hills,” mixing Northern and Southern imagery. “Armies” in its pluralized form includes both North and South over several years. Above all, Melville seizes on the “wilderness” as a biblical pun. “As in ages long ago,” so here too are found the desert of “Paran” and the “plain” of “the city of Cain.” Casting back to biblical models, however, illuminates nothing and applies to both sides. Both are like Old Testament “tribes,” both see themselves as “the lily of Christ.” Thus, it is unclear in which army “faith [is] firmly clung” or which ones denounce “the zealots of the Wrong.” Indeed, in both camps, in this “strife of brothers,” each cries out: “God, hear their country call.” The biblical pillars of cloud or fire that served as guides in the original wilderness here become for both sides “the pillar of smoke” signaling “ghosts that went up /Ashy and red.” The account of both is an indecipherable ancient Semitic “Sabaean lore.” The “Armies of the Wilderness” ultimately poses the question: “Has time gone back?” What unfolds is not forward progression. Events repeat the past, as soldiers return to the mortality of Genesis, “Dust to dust.” “The Armies of the Wilderness” correlates Old Testament to New Testament to Civil War, but in ways that call such identifications into question. Instead of confirming analogies or temporal patterns, the invoked correlations work at cross-­ purposes. Melville’s battles seem to disclose nothing more than history at an impasse, in an apocalyptic paradigm that is self-destructive.

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The poem “A Canticle” (BP 138) gathers the war’s apocalyptic energy into apocalyptic doubt. The text assembles—or rather juxtaposes, often discordantly—the war’s terms and characterizations as intensely ambiguous, contested, and unstable in their meanings. This begins with the subtitle itself: “Significant of the national exaltation of enthusiasm at the close of the War.” What now defines the “national?” Does the destruction of war allow for “exaltation?” Is “enthusiasm” appropriate, or does it place us on the edge of the apocalyptic “precipice Titanic / of the congregated Fall” which opens the poem? “The Giant of the Pool” seems Evil incarnate, whose wooly “white” might recall the visions of Daniel. The text plunges into eschatological vision, but whose views does it reflect? And Humanity is growing   Toward the fullness of her fate. Thou Lord of hosts victorious,   Fulfill the end designed; By a wondrous way and glorious   A passage Thou dost find—   A passage Thou dost find; Hosanna to the Lord of Hosts,   The hosts of human kind.

The poem appropriates the psalmic “Hosanna” praising the divine, but here to draft God to human ambition. Declaring “Fulness of fate,” the poem invokes the eschatological demand to “Fulfill the end designed.” But apocalypse here is ironic, not performed. The poem does not enlist, but records and exposes the kind of rhetoric staged in the war.77 The confidence that “Humanity is growing” and in divine “passage” forward is retracted into Melvillian mystery: “The Nation, in her impulse” remains “Mysterious as the Tide.” “The Conflict of Convictions” (BP 14) is in many ways a precis for Battle Pieces as a whole. The poem focuses into one text the Civil War as a war not only of counterclaims, as war inevitably is, but of counterclaims based within a common culture, a common language, a common paradigm of interpretation and value. “Convictions” declare faith, but here they are at once shared and conflicting. Convictions shape events and their meanings, but here do so toward an ultimate apocalyptic destruction:

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On starry heights   A bugle wails the long recall; Derision stirs the deep abyss,   Heaven’s ominous silence over all. Return, return O eager Hope   And face man’s latter fall. Events, they make the dreamers quail; Satan’s old age is strong and hale, A disciplined captain, gray in skill, And Raphael, a white enthusiast still; Dashed aims, whereat Christ’s martyrs pale, Shall Mammon’s slaves fulfill?

From cosmic “starry heights” to “deep abyss,” an eschatological “bugle wails the long recall.” Apocalypse claims all history to be one story, controlled by one viewpoint in absolute possession of right against wrong. So Satan stands here against Raphael. But this betrays Christ’s martyrs. History seems in the hands of “Mammon’s slaves.” Ezekiel’s call “Return, Return” (Ezekiel 33:11), instead of summoning to spiritual and historical recovery, seems to signal entrapment in just these apocalyptic struggles. “The Conflict of Convictions” questions more than the assignment of roles within biblical patterns. Its contending images implicate the patterns themselves. Signs resist prediction: “In the cloud a sword is girded on” but this only discloses “the hid event.” A personified and teleological “wind in purpose strong” only “spins against the way it drives.” Nor does the poem assign roles of evil against good. The evil is just such reductive assignment of roles. It is difficult to sort “The terrors of truth” from the “dart of death,” both “To faith alike are vain.” The word “vain” appears twenty-three times in the collection, invoking the vanity of Ecclesiastes, as this poem shows in its concluding biblical citation: Yea, and Nay— Each hath his say; But God He keeps the middle way. None was by When He spread the sky; Wisdom is vain, and prophesy.

The poem does not propose choosing between “Yea” and “Nay,” but rather shows how that opposition is destructive. The final lines echo both the Books of Job and Ecclesiastes, ultimately warning against ultimate

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judgments and absolute claims. It is dangerous when humans claim to command or possess the infinity of time, enclosing it in eternal designs we can never fully know or foresee. Melville’s writing on conviction warns of the need to restrict conviction, absolute claims, and ultimate visions. He insists on acknowledging different interpretations and versions, rather than claiming possession of ultimate truths. This is not moral default but positive commitment. The extended poem Clarel, which followed Battle Pieces, shifts to the original biblical geography of the Holy Land. Its preoccupations are much more directly theological than historical. But one temporal schema is clearly nullified: an apocalyptic culmination of history in a New Jerusalem. In a chapter called “The Sleep Walker” (Part 2: xxxviii), the one character most invested in ultimate visions of historical closure is seduced by a dream of the “New Jerusalem.” In the “splendor” of John’s Revelation, the eschatological Jerusalem appears “clad like a bride in splendor brave / opal and pearl in pebbles strown” and descends “down out of heaven” with a “great voice” declaring “no more is death… it is Eternity.” But eternity here is deadly. Pursuing this vision, the prophetically named Nehemiah walks in his sleep into the sea, to be found the next morning drowned on the beach. He is buried with “The Book, the Bible” that had been his “friend and guide!” but has in fact guided him to death. With this sardonic exegetical scene Part 2 ends.78 As Brian Yothers reports of Melville’s notes on his copy of the New Testament, Melville crossed out the instruction in Revelation 22:19 that forbids humans to “take away from words of book of this prophecy.”79 Prophecy itself must be for Melville open to critique and alteration, away from the final judgment the Book of Revelation announces and endorses. Melville rejected apocalyptic schemata as literal event, seeing it only as a figure for time’s charted meanings. Yet as figure it remained dangerous. Melville was pledged to an open public sphere of voices in their inevitable interpretive differences, which he saw as fundamental to democracy. His own texts teem with variant viewpoints and voices, making their interpretation always provisional, cautious. But this is what makes democratic interchange possible. Thus, in the “Supplement” Melville challenges the newly reformed Congress, coming together “after a passionate duel:” “Upon the differences in debate shall acrimonious recriminations be exchanged? Shall censorious superiority assumed by one section provoke defiant self-assertion on the other?” The possibility of reconciliation that

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Melville seeks in the “Supplement” depends upon shared discourses that also allow “differences in debate” (BP 259). Was there continued basis for overlapping discourses even across difference, and would the Bible remain such a basis? Melville warningly comments: “If otherwise, it needs no prophet of Israel to foretell the end.” Melville here both invokes the Bible and limits it, needing “no prophet in Israel” even as he names such. Here the Bible may serve in ways not dogmatic but part of an ongoing conversation. To deny this possibility is to see history only as “coercive,” entrapped in an almost gnostic repetition of predetermined patterns.80 Both the performance of Battle Pieces and the reflections of the “Supplement” suggest that Melville’s instead is an attempt to reconstitute an American community of language in which discussion, dispute, and civility can go forward.81 To this end he warns against “zeal” as “not of necessity [to] religion,” as neither to “poetry or patriotism.” Hardening of positions makes exchanges across difference impossible. When Melville instead proposes that “the work of Reconstruction, if admitted to be feasible at all, demands little but common sense and Christian charity,” he is urging openness to others’ meanings as opposed to discourses of dogmatic insistence. Whitman, in the essay “The Bible as Poetry,” offers the Bible as at least one basis for a common language making civilization possible: Strange, but true, that the principal factor in cohering the nations, eras and paradoxes of the globe, by giving them a common platform of two or three great ideas, a commonalty of origin, and projecting cosmic brotherhood, the dream of all hope, all time—that the long trains, gestations, attempts and failures, resulting in the New World, and in modern solidarity and politics—are to be identified and resolv’d back into a collection of old poetic lore, which, more than any one thing else, has been the axis of civilization and history through thousands of years—and except for which this America of ours, with its polity and essentials, could not now be existing. (CPW 379)

The Bible for Whitman, despite all “eras and paradoxes,” has provided one “common platform, a commonality of origin … projecting a cosmic brotherhood, the dream of all hope.” Even, or especially, as “old poetic lore,” it has been an “axis of civilization” and “the principal factor in cohering the nations,” without which America “could not now be existing.”

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Notes 1. Nathan Hatch, “Sola Scriptura and Novus Ordo Seclorum,” The Bible in America, eds. Nathan Hatch, Mark Noll (NY: Oxford University Press, 1982), 59–77, p. 61. 2. Paul Gutjahr, An American Bible (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 178. 3. Curtis Johnson, p. 19. 4. Mark Noll, “The Bible and Slavery,” Religion and the American Civil War, eds. Stout Randall Miller, Charles Wilson (NY: Oxford UP, 1998), 43–73, pp. 45, 49, 47. 5. George Rable, God’s Almost Chosen Peoples (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), pp. 13, 16. 6. Harriet Rodgers Zink’s “Emerson’s Use of the Bible” offers an overview of Emerson’s biblical references and is one of the few discussions of Emerson’s biblicism in the critical literature, including the various recent collections of essays on Emerson, where the word “Bible” almost does not appear. Zink’s compilation includes quotations, paraphrase, allusion; she concurs with other discussions of Emerson that he uses the Bible figurally, to represent “human experience heightened” (26). DigitalCommons@ University of Nebraska—Lincoln 1935. 7. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals 1820–1872, Works Volume IV, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1910), p. 78. 8. Lawrence Buell, “Unitarian Aesthetics and Emerson’s Poet Priest,” American Quarterly 20 Spring 1968, 3–18. 9. The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Poems, Vol. 9, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903–4). University of Michigan online library, pp. 14–15. All citations will be from this edition, cited CWE followed by Volume and page number. https://quod.lib. umich.edu/e/emerson/browse.html. 10. Hyatt Waggoner, Emerson as Poet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), p.  137. Waggoner ventures a possible likeness between “The World-­Soul” and Psalm 19, with its opening “Thanks to the morning light,” but then retracts it as “sentimental as no biblical psalm would be,” p. 123. 11. Stephen E.  Whicher, Freedom and Fate (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania res, 1953), pp.  74–76. “Line” and “Round” in Emerson’s “Uriel” Author(s): Hugh H. Witemeyer Source: PMLA , Mar., 1967, Vol. 82, No. 1 (Mar., 1967), pp. 98–103, sees the imagery of line and circle as philosophical argument corresponding to various of Emerson’s abstract terms such as Reason and Understanding, p. 98 ff.

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12. Carl F.  Strauch, “The Background for Emerson’s ‘Boston Hymn,’” American Literature, Mar., 1942, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Mar., 1942), pp. 36–47. 13. This is Perry Miller’s argument in “From Edwards to Emerson,” Errand. 14. David Robinson, “Poetry, Personality, and the Divinity School Address,” The Harvard Theological Review, Apr., 1989, Vol. 82, No. 2 (Apr., 1989), argues such anti-literalism, pp. 185–199. 15. Paul Grimstad, “Emerson’s Adjacencies: Radical Empiricism in Nature” The Other Emerson, eds. Branka Arsic and Carey Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), sees such contradiction as not a failure in Emerson’s “transcendental synthesis,” but a move away from it that radically admits a “split between Scripture as the conduit of divine revelation and an empirical attention to sensuous materiality” in an “alternation without synthesis,” p. 251. I think Emerson’s hermeneutic views makes radical empiricism unlikely. 16. John Q.  Anderson, The Liberating Gods: Emerson on Poets and Poetry (Coral Gables FLA: University of Miami Press, 1971), pp. 12, 26. Emerson seems to have first encountered Plato as an undergraduate through Cudworth’s True Intellectual System of the Universe which, according to F.O. Matthiesssen, was a “precipitant for Nature,” American Renaissance (NY: Oxford UP, 1941), p. 105. 17. Cited Mathiessen, p. 103. 18. The Letters of Herman Melville, ed. Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), letter of March 3, 1849, p. 78. 19. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense,” Philosophy and Truth, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (NY: Humanity Books, 1979), 79–100, p. 84. 20. Miller, “From Edwards to Emerson.” Cf. Mason I. Lowance, Jr. “Images or Shadows of Divine Things: The Typology of Jonathan Edwards,” Early American Literature, Spring, 1970, Vol. 5, No. 1, Part 1. Special Typology Issue (Spring, 1970), pp. 141–181. This is not to say that Emerson would have read Edwards’ Images or Shadows. 21. Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), pp. 604, 772. 22. Charles Feidelson, Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953). 23. Christopher Newfield, The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, pp. 44–45, 50. 24. Newfield, 50, cites Bercovitch, Cavell, p. 67. Neal Dolan offers a recent defense of Emerson as liberal in Emerson’s Liberalism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009). 25. Newfield, pp. 59, 61, 66. 26. Newfield, 164, 6.

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27. Newfield, pp. 6, 9–10, 21, 159. 28. Newfield, 159, 166–167. 29. Newfield, 159, 10. 30. Newfield, 159. 31. Michael T. Gilmore, American Romanticism and the Marketplace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1985, pp. 1–34. 32. Augustine, Confessions, trans. E.B.  Pusey, 3.6.11: “But Thou wert more inward to me than the most inward part; and higher than my highest.” https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/Englishconfessions.html. 33. Stanley Cavell, The New Yet Unapproachable America (Albuquerque, 1989), pp. 86–87. 34. Harold Bloom, “The Central Man: Emerson, Whitman, Wallace Stevens,” The Ringers in the Tower (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 217–234. Cf. R.A.  Yoder, Emerson and the Orphic Poet in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), speaks of the “crucial ambiguity” in Nature as allowing both “catastrophic and uniformitarian interpretation,” p. 92. 35. Barbara Packer, The Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. 2, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (NY: Cambridge UP, 1995), p. 388. 36. Walt Whitman, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, ed. Edward Grier (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1:353. Whitman also calls Leaves of Grass the “Bible of the New Religion” as his “principle object – the main life work,” Walt Whitman, Notes and Fragments Left by Walt Whitman, ed. Richard Maurice Bucke [London and Ontario: A. Talbot and Co., 1899], p. 55. See W.C. Harris, “Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and the Writing of a New American Bible,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 16 (Winter 1999): 172–190, for discussion of Whitman in the context of c­ontemporary Bible translations and secularization. Also M.C. Gardner, Whitman’s Code: A New Bible (Patcheny Press, 2013) for a biographical/numerological re-reading of Leaves of Grass as metaphorically a Bible. 37. Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 1. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1906, p. 372. Whitman’s own religious backgrounds and contexts are treated in David Kuebrich, Minor Prophecy: Walt Whitman’s New American Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), which emphasizes visionary selfhood rather than language or figuralism. Debates over Whitman’s religious views continue. Cody Marrs, Nineteenth Century American Literature and the Long Civil War (NY: Cambridge University Press 2015), locates Whitman in the “transbellum” period but omits the Bible and religion from her account, pp. 26–7. Michael Warner, “Civil War Religion and Whitman’s Drum-Taps,” Walt Whitman: Where the Future

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Becomes Present, ed. David Haven Blake and Michael Robertson (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008), affirms religion as central to Civil War America, p.  81, and grants to Whitman’s Drum Taps a “religious cast”; yet as remaining as close to “secular coordinated human action in history, prophetic but untranscendent,” p. 85. 38. Gay Wilson Allen, “Biblical Echoes in Whitman’s Works,” American Literature, 6 (1934): 302–15, investigates Whitman’s parallelism, with Löwth’s lectures on Hebrew Poetry as source. 39. Ian Balfour, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), explains: “Prophecy is not a single thing, and one has to attend to the differences that are sometimes tenuously grouped together under a single word,” p.  4. His notion of prophecy, however, becomes so broad it seems to include all figurative language: The need to avoid “too great a degree of exactness” accounts for the necessity, in a word, of figuration, of a language that may be representational and referential, though not directly so,” p. 71. Ultimately in Balfour “all writing that matters may be prophetic,” p.  4. Christopher Bundock, Romantic Prophecy and the Resistance to Historicism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), is likewise broad in his definition of prophecy, as well as secularizing it: “Although prophecy is not identical to imagination, it might be thought of as a specific articulation of the creative mind as it is brought to bear on history and the prevailing political state in an effort to think the most radical possibilities of each,” p. 18. Cf. Tracy Fessenden, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2007). “The imagination is [often] assigned the responsibility,” Forest Pyle observes, “of making a linkage, an articulation” between discordant realms, The Ideology of Imagination: Subject and Society in the Discourse of Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). 40. Gay Wilson Allen, “Biblical Echoes in Whitman’s Works,” American Literature 6 (1934): 302–315, places such emphasis on Christ. Cf. Thomas Crawley, “The Christ-Symbol” in Leaves of Grass. The Structure of “Leaves of Grass.” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970), 50–79. Also eds. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings, Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), who see Christ as the “structural key to his vision—the creation of a unifying personality like the Christ of the Bible.” 41. Alicia Ostriker, Dancing at the Devil’s Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics, and the Erotic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), p. 25. George Fredrickson in the Inner Civil War (University of Illinois Press, 1965) sees Whitman as incorporating the negative into a positive whole through a “Hegelian struggle of opposites.” In “Chanting the Square” of 1864, the

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“God of wrath judging humanity and the evil of Satan are all part of a progressive divine plan as much as a Christ figure.” The “contradictions of war” are part of a “spiritual dialectic” in a “cosmic whole like Divine Providence,” p. 96. 42. M.H. Abrams in Natural Supernaturalism (NY: Norton, 1973) characterizes Whitman as the “poet of the redeemed vision and elected prophet of the party of hope,” p. 425, who anticipates the “poet-seer who will redeem all division,” n. 33 p.  509. He adds later: “Whitman had given poetic expression to the latter-day revival of American millennialism, the manifest destiny of American imperialism,” n. 30, p.  529. This accords with Bundock’s discussion of secularized prophecy, in which the “prophets appeal to divine authority” was “assimilated and reinterpreted as authority of the individual self,” but still yielding “a commanding vision over history integrating past, present, future,” p. 5. He brackets together “millennial restoration, prophecy” as designating a historical will to harmony, to stage a secular theodicy that promises a future,” p. 11. But he also speaks of a Romantic “darker side of prophecy” which “disencumbers the future from the weight of the past,” p. 7. 43. Michael Robertson, “New Born Bard[s] of the Holy Ghost: The American Bibles of Walt Whitman and Joseph Smith,” Above the American Renaissance: David S. Reynolds and the Spiritual Imagination in American Literary Studies, eds. Harold Bush, Brian Yothers (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018), 140–160, p. 142. He speaks of the “unique powers of poet-seer” but in “tension with democratic equality,” p.  153. Yosefa Raz, p. 21. 44. Walt Whitman, “The Bible as Poetry,” Complete Prose Works (Philadelphia: David Mckay, 1892) ed. David Widger, Whitman archive, p. 379. Hereafter cited as CPWW followed by page number. Project Gutenberg https:// whitmanarchive.org/published/other/CompleteProse.html. 45. Bundock, Romantic Prophecy, pp. 4, 7. 46. Cristanne Miller, “Drum-Taps: Revisions and Reconciliation,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 26 Spring 2009), 171–196, p.  175. She however suspects Whitman as moving through his career from a more radical to a more harmonious vision, at cost of evasion after the Civil War, p. 178. 47. George Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War (NY: Harper and Row, 1965), describes Whitman as an idealist for whom matter is an “expression or incarnation of unchanging spiritual reality,” p. 96. 48. Christopher Bundock, “And Thence from Jerusalem’s Ruins: Romantic Prophecy and the End(s) of History,” Literature Compass 10, 2013,

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p.  101. Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Visionary Poetics: Milton’s Tradition and His Legacy (Huntington Library Press, 1979), pp. 102, 104. 49. M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 334. 50. Geoffrey Hartman, “Poetics of Prophecy,” High Romantic Argument (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), pp. 20, 27. 51. Martin Buber, “Prophecy, Apocalyptic, and the Historical Hour,” Pointing the Way (NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1971), distinguishes an “ahistoric world-denying time-denying transcendent philosophy of apocalypse” as against prophecy as a “dialogue between the divine and human in history,” p.  198. Steven Goldsmith concurs in Unbuilding Jerusalem: Apocalypse and Romantic Representation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). He describes prophecy to “typically define the furthest extent to redemption as a return to life as normal,” whereas apocalypse sees the world as “so usurped by evil forces,” such that redemption requires “the abrupt end of history brought about by a thoroughly transcendental agent.” The order of history is then displaced by “a new and otherworldly order typically distinguished by its atemporality.” History becomes “a terminal structure governed by an immutable, providential design” into which it is totally absorbed, to achieve a “final, unchanging, sacred form” that marks “the violent end of history,” pp. 31–2. 52. Balfour, p. 85. Balfour notes that “It is a relatively simple matter to locate the urge to determine prophecy as prediction in the framework of a Christian hermeneutic that values the Hebrew Scriptures as the ‘Old’ Testament, as that body of texts whose main virtue was to anticipate the ‘New.’ Certainly the Christological emphasis dominates much of Protestant exegesis throughout the eighteenth century,” p. 72. 53. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass 1881–1882, Published Works, The Walt Whitman Archive. gen. eds. Ed Folsom, Kenneth M. Price, http://www. whitmanarchive.org. Hereafter cited as LG followed by page number. If the reference is from the 1855 edition, this will be noted. 54. Yosefa Raz, “Untuning Walt Whitman’s Prophetic Voice,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 36(1), (2018) 1–26, p. 2. 55. Levine, Herbert J. “Song of Myself’ as Whitman’s American Bible, Modern Language Quarterly 48 (1987): 145–161. 150; 153–155, 157. Levine sees Song sections 33, 38 as Christic: Whitman “models his self-­presentation on that of Jesus,” himself focusing all biblical images and references as “typological fulfillment,” offering “his own crucifixion scenes which then lead to resurrection,” p. 157. 56. Betsy Erkkila, Whitman the Political Poet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 125–7. Jimmie Killingsworth, “Whitman’s Sexual Themes During a Decade of Revision: 1866–1876,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 4:1 [1986], 7–15, sees an evolution from the poem’s 1855 untitled

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printing, to its 1856 title as “Poem of the Body,” to 1867 when “the poem’s new title and opening lines made clear that the poet sang of not merely the body, but the ‘discorrupted’ body ‘electrified’ with ‘the charge of the soul’.” 57. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman’s Bible (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993), 20–21. 58. There is an immense bibliography on Melville and religion, including on the Bible. Foundational studies include William  Shurr, The  Mystery of Iniquity; Lawrance Thompson, Melville’s Quarrel with God (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966); William Braswell, Melville’s Religious Thought (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1943); Cf. Brian Yothers, Melville’s Mirrors (Camden House, 2011). 59. On the question of Melville’s representation of history, see Helen Vendler, “Melville and the Lyric of History,” The Southern Review, vol. 35, no. 3, summer 1999, p.  579. Ian Finseth, “On Battle-Pieces: The Ethics of Aesthetics in Melville’s War Poetry,” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 12. 3 (October 2010); Randall Fuller, From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature (NY: Oxford University Press, 2011). None of these works discuss the Bible. 60. Ilana Pardes, Melville’s Bibles (Berkeley: University of California Press). 61. Jonathan Cook, “Melville and the Lord of Hosts: War and Divine Warrior Rhetoric in Battle Pieces,” The Mighty Convulsion: Whitman and Melville write the Civil War, eds. Christopher Sten, Tyler Hoffman (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2019), 135–153, pp.  135, 141, Melville’s “Northern faith in the divine righteousness of its cause by comparing the Union to ancient Israel during the Conquest” is qualified by compassion for the “human suffering for the reunited nation as a whole,” p. 135. 62. Pardes, Melville’s Bibles, pp. 8–10. 63. Timothy Sweet, “Melville’s Battle Pieces and Vernacular Poetics,” Literary Cultures of the Civil War, ed. Timothy Sweet (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016), 99–117, sees Melville both in tension against popular poetry as reductive,  while also serving as Melville’s model and background, p. 99. Sweet does not discuss the Bible. 64. Herman Melville, Battle Pieces and Aspects of War (NY: Harper and Brothers, 1866) Facsimile Reproduction, ed. Sidney Kaplan (Gainesville, Florida: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints 1960), Hathi Trust, University of Michigan, p.  259. Hereafter cited as BP followed by page number. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015008578869&view=1 up&seq=7&q1=contents.

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65. Herman Melville, Melville The Apple-Tree Table and other Sketches (Princeton University Press, 1922) The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Apple-tree Table And Other Sketches, by Herman Melville. 66. James H.  Moorhead, “Between Progress and the Apocalypse: A Reassessment of Millennialism in American Religious Thought, 1800–1880,” Journal of American History Vol. 71, No. 3 (Dec., 1984), pp.  524–542, describes “biblical prophecies” as the manner in which Americans attempted “to make sense out of experience” and in doing so “discerned instinctively a bond, a symbolic unity” among themselves and “between their lives as evangelicals and their lives as citizens,” p. 532. 67. Maclear, “Republic and Millennium,” pp. 185–6, 189–190, 203. 68. Eugene Genovese “Religion in the Collapse of the American Union,” Religion and the American Civil War, eds. Randall M.  Miller, Harry S.  Stout, Charles Reagan Wilson, Oxford University Press, 1999), 74–88, p. 74. 69. Eugene Genovese, “Religion in the Collapse of the American Union,” p. 75. 70. Mark Noll, “The Bible and Slavery,” describes the Civil War as “a hermeneutic crisis” after “two generations of common assumptions about how to read the Bible.” Interpretation marked “two crises: how a ‘simple’ reading yielded incommensurate readings with no means short of warfare to adjudicate” between them, and the “theological problem of biblical authority itself,” p. 49. 71. James Moorhead, “Between Progress and Apocalypse”: “The dualistic struggle of good against evil reduced an amorphous social reality to an intelligible pattern and focused vaguely understood anxieties,” p. 535. 72. Cody Marrs, Nineteenth Century American Literature and the Long Civil War (NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015), describes the ‘civil war” in Melville as a cyclical event … as doomed repetition,” p. 92. 73. Robert Penn Warren, in his “Introduction” to his edition of Selected Poems seems to seek for “the inner unity of the book” (p. 11). Carolyn Karcher also remarks on the “striking range of viewpoints” she sees as intending to include all Americans, as a debate between dissenting factions, Shadow Over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race and Violence in Melville’s America (Baton Rouge, Louisiana University Press, 1980), p. 263. 74. Bryan Short, Cast by Means of Figures: Herman Melville’s Rhetorical Development (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1922), sees the book as a “ventriloquistic presenting a variety of ethical stances other than Melville’s own and dispensing authority among a number of voices” (p. 151). To Richard Harter Fogle, “Melville and the Civil War,” Tulane Studies in English 9 (1959), it is a “mouthpiece for the feelings of the people,” p. 71.

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75. James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (NY: Ballantine Books, 1988), pp. 653–63. 76. Daniel Aaron points out that such appeals to Milton were common in sermons, orations, as well as the literature of the period, The Unwritten War (NY: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 343. Melville’s relationship to Milton has been often remarked, as in Henry F. Pommer, Milton and Melville (University of Pittsburg Press, 1950), who however argues that the relationship affirms clear and certain moral judgments. 77. Jonathan Cook, “Melville and the Lord of Hosts” reads the poem as a hymn of thanksgiving to the Lord of Hosts for victory. Israelites’ deliverance from Pharaoh’s army at the Red Sea, with the South “doomed like the apocalyptic Babylon.” “Now that the apocalyptic battle is over and Babylon has fallen, the poet depicts the Lord of Hosts as deserving psalm-like praise,” p. 148. 78. Vincent Kenny Herman, Melville’s Clarel: a Spiritual Journey (Hamden CT: Archen Books 1973), that Melville disclaims this vision of a resurrected Jerusalem, p. 117. 79. Brian Yothers “One’s Own Faith: Melville’s Reading of The New Testament and Psalms,”.Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 10, no. 3 (2008): 39–59, p. 51. 80. Cody, pp.  97–98 98. Cody sees Melville as repudiating history, where “time’s events are not wholly congruous instants but related moments of undoing in a vast historical cycle,” p.  104. This is an essentially gnostic reading of Melville—history as a “violent cyclicality” in which “countless wars” derive in “divisions in the cosmos itself,” p. 114. 81. Timothy Sweet, “Melville’s Battle Pieces,” emphasizes Melville’s poetry as address to an audience, in a “project of reconstituting a fragmented nation” through the power of verse to “produce communities of experience” and “to rally terms towards new reconciliatory purposes,” although Melville’s poetry is hardly vernacular, p. 99.

CHAPTER 6

Emily Dickinson’s Biblical Contests: Authority, Gender, History

Emily Dickinson’s poetry was for many years approached through the solitude of her reclusion. It is indeed riveting that, from around 1858 or 1859 to her death in 1886, she almost never left her house. Recent treatments have placed her more firmly in her social, historical, and cultural settings. This includes religion, which crosses between Dickinson’s interior and exterior experience, in ways that continue to be debated. A wide range of varied interpretations see her as devout, sectarian, heretical, secular, aestheticist, or having a kind of idiosyncratic spirituality. Theological contexts of Calvinism, the Connecticut Valley heritage of Jonathan Edwards, and tensions with liberalizing trends frame Dickinson in religious history. Her inner spiritual condition, however, remains the central focus, if diversely assessed.1 This very variety attests to Dickinson’s as a contested, ambivalent, yet deeply invested engagement with religious questions. Such ambivalence persists through her work in an ongoing agon. She invokes religious discourse, then revokes it, through a work of disputation that never ceases. Dickinson’s engagement with the Bible, however, has received less attention than has her spiritual and theological concerns.2 Yet the Bible is a pervasive resonance in her work, as it was in her surrounding world. The Bible is an important bridge between Dickinson’s poetic language and her surrounding cultures, as against views that emphasize her isolation. Her

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Wolosky, The Bible in American Poetic Culture, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40106-0_6

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uses of the Bible underscore hers to be a publicly shared language, tying her work to historical and religious contexts that also shape the poetry’s constructions. They highlight how her poems register the dramatic and intense controversies swirling around her. As Paul Crumbley writes: “Dickinson’s poems about the interior life do explore subjective experience but in a manner that looks outward as well as inward, showing readers how particular speakers position themselves in the world around them.”3 Dickinson’s biblical engagement connects her to a foundational American culture, dramatizing its fractures as religious, civic, political, and social. In her work, the meanings of biblical as other words face in opposing directions: affirming and denying, invoking and critiquing, registering both the intensified centrality of language and also its limits in grounding common life, in which the Bible in America played so central a role.

Textual Criticism Born in 1830, Dickinson grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, as it was swept by Second Great Awakening revivalism, which she resisted.4 In the approach to the Civil War, this intensity of religious activism became increasingly politicized and apocalyptic. Yet in the same period, liberal religious movements such as Unitarianism and Transcendentalism were also emerging, which the traditional Congregationalism of Amherst attempted to stem. Darwinism, empiricism, and other scientific developments presented their own challenges to biblical traditions. The revivals themselves ironically worked to weaken institutional hierarchies, unleashing a multiplication of voices that democratized American religion and politics, further challenging unitary readings of the Bible.5 The proliferation of interpretations, both within religious experience and as it extended into controversies over slavery, women’s rights, and national identity, all raised questions of hermeneutics, of how and by whom interpretations are made, both by implication and self-consciously. Around Dickinson as elsewhere, the invocation of biblical truth for such diverse and disputing interpretations weakened the very ground on which the opposing claims stood.6 Dickinson’s religion, and specifically her engagement with the Bible, takes place in these scenes of ongoing dispute in a language that is shared and historically charged. The biblical promise of meaningful design Dickinson saw as increasingly remote from the conflictual and then bellicose world of her experience. Its meanings proliferated, often in inflexible,

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absolute, and contradictory ways, that belied the very authority which they were claiming. The biblical controversies surrounding Dickinson extended to the biblical text itself. The Higher Criticism was beginning to subject the Bible to scrutiny as historical rather than revealed document, challenging its traditional status. Dickinson was quite aware of the reassessments of Higher Criticism, not least through her reading of George Eliot, who translated David Strauss’s Life of Jesus. Biblical authority, traditionally treated as absolute, was beginning to unravel under scholarly textual examination, with profound implications for the status and significance of biblical language. Religion frames Dickinson’s poetic first and foremost through her use of the hymnal as the basis of her poetic form. Almost all her poems are cast in the common meters of hymnal prosody. Yet her complex syntax, part rhymes, and interruption all undermine the hymnal’s steady rhythms and easy syntax which makes them singable in congregation. Dickinson’s poetics disrupt these harmonies of both hymnal form and hymnal claim. Indeed, Dickinson rewrites individual hymns of Isaac Watts, even while modeling her metrical forms on his Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs, which pervaded American religious experience, from New England to Southern and African American worship.7 Dickinson’s hymnology characteristically at once embraces and subverts hymnal experience in unresolved contention. This same contention is performed in the prayer forms to which her hymnal rhythms explicitly refer.8 Through all Dickinson’s religious addresses, biblical text remains central. Religious readings of Dickinson have underscored Incarnation and communion in her work.9 These, however, appear relatively rarely, and Dickinson’s religious poetics are much less dogmatic than textual. What is pervasive are biblical references, which take full part in Dickinson’s religious contention, without resolution. Cristanne Miller aptly summarizes this agon of Dickinson’s biblicism: “Contrary to the assumptions generally underlying scripturalism, Dickinson believes both that language is essentially fictitious or arbitrary and that language’s potential for meaning exceeds the individual’s control of it and its application to any single circumstance.” Dickinson thus goes against the orthodox notion “that language depended on the inherent ‘truth’ of the word. No word could be ambiguous or ironic and still manifest the essential truth of God.” But in Dickinson “there is no stable relation between spiritual truth, the facts of existence, and the terms of language.”10

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Dickinson, as Miller describes her, is responding to the dramatic transformations in views of biblical language and the implications for linguistic truth of her changing world. The proliferation of biblical as other religious interpretation reached Dickinson’s Amherst, where the Second Great Awakening swirled around her, including in Mary Lyon’s Seminary at Mount Holyoke, which Dickinson attended. The sectional schisms in churches and religious claims of the pre-Civil War period, and then the explosion into war itself, violently exposed how biblical interpretations, each claiming absolute truth, could contradict each other. Strikingly, Dickinson launched into poetry and wrote over half her poems during the years of the Civil War.11 Liberal theology associated with Emerson was also a preoccupation of conservative Amherst. Emerson lectured in Amherst in 1857, hosted by Dickinson’s brother Austin next door.12 Scientific challenges to biblical statement came to her as well through her Amherst Academy education, where Lyell’s new theories of geology were taught by Edward Hitchcock.13 As Dickinson brightly writes in one poem, “Faith” is a fine invention For Gentlemen who see! But Microscopes are prudent In an Emergency! (J 185, Fr 978, M 119/137).14

Emerging historicist philology of the biblical text posed other challenges to biblical authority for Dickinson. Higher Criticism undercut the “literalism” that attempted to secure biblical meaning as historical fact, thus claiming to anchor its authority. Such reading of Scripture as “literal” history was countered by Higher Criticism’s view of the text as itself historicized, written by different authors at different times. The meaning of scriptural language could then be approached in contextual, mythological, and other cultural ways. Dickinson’s awareness of Higher Criticism is explicit in her poetry. She comments that “Ararat’s a Legend—now—/ And no one credits Noah” (J 403, Fr532, M 292), that “Eden—[is] a legend” (J 503, Fr378, M 201), and that “No Moses there can be” (J 597, Fr521, M 255).15 “The Bible,” she writes, “is an antique Volume / Written by faded Men” (J 1545, Fr1577, M 636). Her sly mention of “Mazarin” in “I found the words to every thought” displays particular scholarship:

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Can Blaze be shown in Cochineal— Or Noon—in Mazarin? (J 581, Fr436, M 175)

Mazarin is an arcane term for the 1450 Gutenberg Latin Bible found in the library of Cardinal Mazarin in Paris. Here, Dickinson seems to be questioning whether the bible can illuminate as “Blaze” the way “Noon” does. The poem “If the foolish, call them flowers” (J 168, Fr 169, M 96) takes on scientific nomenclature alongside biblical criticism, raising hermeneutic questions tied to how we “Classify.” The “same Edition” of the Book of “Revelation” can be read in different ways: Those who read the “Revelations” [sic] Must not criticize Those who read the same Edition— With beclouded Eyes!

Whose are the “beclouded Eyes”—faith’s or scientific historicism? And how can one “criticize” the other when each reading is in the eye of the beholder? But settling the question would require an access to historical truth that is not available. The poem continues: Could we stand with that Old “Moses”— “Canaan” denied— Scan like him, the stately landscape On the other side— Doubtless, we should deem superfluous Many Sciences

The poem strikingly puts each biblical citation into quotation marks, underscoring its textuality. But establishing its meaning is as inaccessible as “Canaan” was to Moses—a double blow in citing the Bible against the possibility of affixing what it means. The counter-conditional “Could we stand” with Moses is followed by the equally conditional “should” that would “deem superfluous / Many Sciences.” What is implied is that science is not superfluous, since Moses remains inaccessible, and appeal to text does not give warrant for the truth of the biblical event. Moses emerges not as a figure of prophetic revelation, but of unknowing. In any case, as Dickinson writes in “It Always Felt to me a Wrong,” “in soberer moments” she knows “No Moses there can be” (J 597, Fr 521, 255).

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Dickinson acknowledges Higher Criticism’s challenge to the authority of biblical text, but she also resists it. In the very seeding of her verse with biblical figures, scenes, echoes, allusions, and specific quotations, she attests the Bible’s centrality to her. Quotation marks, which persistently appear, in fact have a double role. Quotation affirms the relevance of what is quoted. But it also distinguishes what is quoted from the quoter’s own voice: to quote is to mark words as not one’s own. Quotation brackets off someone else’s language in what can be a variety of attitudes, from appeal to irony or parody or refutation. When Dickinson alludes to or quotes from the Bible, she is thus situating its words in complex relation to others’ uses of them. The words are both her own and not her own: for confirmation, for irony, for challenge, for appeal. Her uses might not match those of others, multiplying biblical senses. Her biblical discourses thus intercross with the biblical language uses surrounding her, but in many different ways, underscoring both the variations and the intersections of meaning. It is risky to generalize, but my findings suggest that poems with biblical allusions, in or out of quotation marks, become in Dickinson largely scenes of contention and not of confirmation. The poems act as biblical commentary, and in this join with a large chorus of commentary going on around Dickinson, all charged with theological and political dispute. In the Dickinson library, a standard Comprehensive Commentary on the Holy Bible 1834–1835 edited by William Jenks, offers both textual notes and compendia of contemporary Congregationalist Christian doctrine. Dickinson’s poetic commentaries mostly dispute these doctrinal ones, in Jenks or in general. The poem “Because that you are going / And never coming back” is a death poem in which an anthology of biblical quotation from New and Old Testaments does not answer the question of death’s mystery. Imagining the death of someone loved, the poem takes a defiant tone in which the “significance” the lovers have for each other is something God cannot undo, even in their separation in death: “Discovery not God himself / Could now annihilate.” It goes on to biblical prooftexts that, however, do not prove: The “Life that is” will then have been A thing I never knew— As Paradise fictitious Until the Realm of you—

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The “Life that is to be,” to me, A Residence too plain Unless in my Redeemer’s Face I recognize your own— … If “God is Love” as he admits We think that me must be Because he is a “jealous God” He tells us certainly If “All is possible with” him As he besides concedes He will refund us finally Our confiscated Gods— (J 1260, Fr1314, M 574)

The “Life that is” and “is to be” suggests I Timothy 4:8 that “godliness is profitable unto all things, having promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come.” “God is Love” comes from I John 4:16; “Jealous God” from Exodus 34:14; and “All is possible” from Matthew 19:26. But Dickinson weaves these into a text that makes “Paradise” a fiction unless verified by the beloved. She puts the beloved’s “Face” before that of the “Redeemer’s,” places “God is Love” not only in quotations but in a conditional tense of “if.” This is then undercut by the contrary verse “jealous God.” “All is possible” likewise hovers between authoritative reassurance and a conditional “If” that unravels into the economic language that is always suspicious in Dickinson: God may or may not “refund us finally / Our confiscated Gods—.” But even if he does “refund,” this was first made necessary because he has first “confiscated” our earthly loved “Gods.” Dickinson’s “If ‘All is possible’” as demanding”‘refund” of the loved ones he has “confiscated” runs counter to Jenks’s commentary on Matthew. Jenks parses the verse as declaring ‘“the great truth in general, that nothing is too hard for God’” (Matthew 19:26). God’s power, in a very Calvinist phrasing, is “infinite and irresistible.” “With men this is impossible” but to “the almighty power of God … all things are possible … Faith is wrought by that power.” In heaven there will be “everlasting monuments” of God’s power (Jenks, 1834, 194). These are all doctrinal claims that Dickinson both elicits and retracts in favor of earthly attachments that death interrupts in divine confiscation. A similar play on quotation and commentary takes place in a poem on the figure of Enoch:

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“Was not” was all the Statement. The Unpretension stuns— Perhaps—the Comprehension— They wore no Lexicons But lest our Speculation In inanition die Because “God took him” mention That was Philology (J 1342, Fr1277, M 566)

Dickinson is commenting on the startling phrasing of Genesis 5:24, that Enoch walked with God and then “was not.” Jenks comments: “To walk with God is ‘to make God’s Word our rule’” (Hebrews 11:3). In Jenks, “Was not” shows that Enoch “should not see death,” since he is “so much above the world and so weary of it as to desire a speedy removal out of it. God often takes them soonest whom He loves best” (Jenks, 1835, 47). But Dickinson is puzzled: “The Unpretension stuns.” The textual “Statement” tests “Comprehension.” Does turning to “Lexicons” and “Philology” fully clarify “God took him?” The abrupt syntax, one of Dickinson’s most potent poetic modes, is self-interrupting, cutting into words that ultimately do not confirm each other. Dickinson’s poetic gestures characteristically balance between conventions of faith and a philology that queries and complicates. The poem “‘Heavenly Father’ take to thee” opens in appeal through the biblical Lord’s Prayer, but turns its words into quotations emptied of promise and contested in meaning: “Heavenly Father” take to thee The supreme iniquity Fashioned by thy candid Hand In a moment contraband Though to trust us seems to us More respectful “We are Dust” We apologize to thee For thine own Duplicity (J 1461, Fr1500, M 721)

Jenks’s commentary on this poem’s citations tends in dualistic directions. “We are Dust” echoes Gen 3:19 “dust thou art,” which Jenks reads: “precious soul [is] now lost and buried in the dust of the body, it was made spiritual and heavenly, but is become carnal and earthy … Man is a

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mean frail creature, little as dust,” a “mortal dying creature” (Jenks 1835, 34). In the poem, however, it is the “Heavenly Father” who is at fault. It is his “supreme iniquity” which “Fashioned … us” as mortal dust, betraying our living souls to death. To “trust us” would be “more respectful” than to declare us “Dust.” It is divine “Duplicity” to make us mortal bodies. Yet the poem ambiguously ends with human apology that at once pleads and accuses. Overt contest between Dickinson’s words and the Bible’s tilts different ways in different texts, enacting an age old rivalry between religious and poetic language. “To pile like Thunder to its close” extols poetry and love, but in a biblical scene and with a biblical conclusion: To pile like Thunder to its close Then crumble grand away While Everything created hid This—would be Poetry— Or Love—the two coeval come— We both and neither prove— Experience either and consume— For None see God and live—(J 1247, FR 1353, M 713)

A “Thunder” before which things “crumble grand away” invokes momentous event. As the poem moves to its close, this “Thunder” becomes biblical, the scene at Sinai of Revelation (Ex19:16-21). That is where Moses asks to see God’s face (Ex. 33) but is told he risks being consumed: “For none see God and live.” Revelation is, paradoxically, also concealment. Instead of full vision, Moses is told that he can only be shown divinity as it “passes by,” that is, only indirectly, in some mode of time and not eternity. Jenks’s commentary on this Exodus verse makes the vision of the “face” only occur in the next world: “in this world … his face shall not be seen; that is an honor reserved for the future eternal bliss of holy souls. There is a knowledge and enjoyment of God which must be waited for in another world” (1835, 460). This is not Dickinson’s reading. Her poems skirt access to any full vision. Revelation entails occlusion. In the face of “Thunder … Everything created hid.” This yields no full vision in an afterworld or in this one. But it does open the path to both poetry and love. The “two coeval come” in that “We both and neither prove.” Both poetry and love defy definitive certainty or grasp. Incomplete disclosure,

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however, inspires further experience which the absolute will cut off. Poetry and love both forcefully appear like thunder of revelation, but also remain hid: “For none see God and live.”

Dickinson’s Woman’s Bible Dickinson had benefitted from the revolution in women’s education, which had been part of the republican project committed to the need for an educated democratic citizenry. The first girl’s secondary school in history was dedicated by Benjamin Rush in Philadelphia in 1847. Although themselves unable to vote or hold office, girls would be mothers and wives of citizens who could. Dickinson enjoyed the burgeoning new opportunities for female education this unleashed, well beyond their original limited intentions. She studied at co-educational Amherst Academy, followed by a year at Mount Holyoke Seminary under Mary Lyon. Other republican norms and conditions allowed women to expand into a variety of public spheres. These included abolition, women’s rights, as well as church societies, which often organized civic and service activity. Women began to press their way into religious leadership, as preachers and ministers and also as founders of new sects with new modes of spirituality, such as Phoebe Palmer’s Holiness Movement. Women’s writing, itself a new phenomenon made possible by new literacy, began to explore and represent women’s experiences, not least in religion. Many women poets began rereading the Bible through female figures and values, recovering women’s voices only hinted or absent in the texts themselves. Dickinson’s verse registers such new consciousness of women’s religious place and its implications, indeed in highly innovative ways. Her poetry opens questions that become central to subsequent feminist discussions of the Bible. These include the implications of representing God as gendered male; the status of the body and specifically of the female body; dualisms of interiority and exteriority; and women’s position within religious hierarchies. Dickinson’s representations of God raise general questions about the power of images: how images of God in fact shape and impact relationship to ‘him.’ At issue is how male divine imagery informs the nature of God; shapes human relationship to God; and how this relationship may differ if the human is a man or a woman. A series of contemporary feminist theologians, reflecting on these issues, urge the need to reconstruct the imagery and gender of God. Rosemary Ruether argues that male language for God implies that males are more like God, in

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spiritual terms diminishing women, and in social terms grounding the exclusion of women from priesthood and religious leadership.16 That God’s male gender shapes—and distorts—relationship to the divine is iconoclastically announced in radical feminist Mary Daly’s summation: “if God is male, then the male is God.” “The conceptualizations of God and of the human relationship to God,” Daly writes, “have been oppressive.” The dominance of male language and male images has meant that “women have had the power of naming stolen from us.”17 Daphne Hampson similarly argues how, through divine gendering, “men and women are placed differently in relation to God and each other.”18 To image God in male terms is to imply a closer likeness between God and man—but not woman. Institutionally, as well as spiritually, Jesus’s identity as male has justified male leadership in the church as better representing God.19 Divine image turns into human claim. These issues of gender emerge full force in Dickinson’s scenes of prayer, often with biblical references cited or implied. Dickinson repeatedly addresses God. She does so always in gendered terms and often across great distance. In some prayers Dickinson attempts to reach across this gap, often with uncertain results. “I have a King who does not speak” opens declaring divine silence and remoteness. Facing this silence, the poet “trudges” through “hours meek” of the day, in a kind of feminine compliance. The verse is composed of a series of conditional “if”s. At night she may “peep … thro’ a dream,” and “If” she does gain (an unspecified) witness, she calls it “Victory.” But the poem’s final stanza poses the possibility that no such vision occurs: And if I don’t—the little Bird Within the Orchard, is not heard, And I omit to pray “Father, thy will be done” today For my will goes the other way, And it were perjury!. (J 103, Fr 157, M 88)

“If I don’t” is left as an incomplete statement, but implies this to be the case. The ensuing disappointment turns on the biblical text of the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6: 9-13) “And I omit to pray / ‘Father, they will be done’ today.” She quotes the prayer, but as what she “omit[s] to pray.” Against “thy will be done,” her “will goes the other way.” Her prayer rereads the biblical verse as a battle of wills.

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Biblical scenes and figures stray across Dickinson’s textual fields in a kind of gendered typology. Eden appears with more or less specific allusion. “Over the fence / Strawberries—grow” tempts the speaker to transgress limits as Eve did. The temptation is explicitly gendered. Over the fence— Strawberries—grow Over the fence— I could climb—if I tried, I know— Berries are nice! But—if I stained my Apron God would certainly scold! Oh, dear—I guess if he were a Boy— He’d—climb—if he could. (J 251, Fr 271, M 134)

The speaker, clearly a girl because she wears an “Apron,” knows she “could” climb “if she tried” over the fence of restrictions and controls. But she risks that her “Apron” might be “stained,” transgressing proprietary covering, modesty, and sexuality, which “God,” like a father or schoolmaster, would certainly “scold.” A new conditional ensues in which God’s gender remains male, but now as a human “Boy.” Here there is a double suspicion: that God identifies with the desire to “climb” that he forbids to his human creatures, but also that he is more lenient with boys than with girls. A similar scene, with similar gendering, unfolds in: So I pull my Stockings off Wading in the Water For the Disobedience’ Sake Boy that lived for “ought to” Went to Heaven perhaps at Death And perhaps he didn’t Moses wasn’t fairly used— Ananias wasn’t— (J 1201, Fr 1271, M 513)

The speaker disobeys as a “Boy” might, pulling “my Stockings off.” This is willful “Disobedience”: acting against the “ought to” for its own “Sake.” Would this transgression bar from “Heaven” at “Death”? The poem shifts from this question of how the divine might judge, to question

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divine judgment altogether. Indeed, it is the biblical text that is judged, questioning divine justice: Moses and Ananias weren’t “fairly used”: Ananais was struck dead in Acts 5: 1-5. Moses was denied entry into Canaan in Numbers 20:12. Moses in particular is a complex type in Dickinson. In “It always felt to me—a wrong / To that Old Moses—done—,” she protests God’s decision “To let him see—the Canaan— / Without the entering—.” The poem at once seriously engages the Bible and also, in a Higher Critical spirit, doubts it is a true account: And tho’ in soberer moments— No Moses there can be I’m satisfied—the Romance In point of injury— (J 597, Fr521, M 255)

Whether or not the Bible is “Romance,” Dickinson reads in it a tale of injustice. As to gender, she identifies with Moses, but against a God who treats Moses as if a male rival, seeming to “fasten” on him With tantalizing Play As Boy—should deal with lesser Boy— To prove ability.

God’s are not acts of justice but of competitive power. His dealings with humans are a cruel “play” just the way “A Boy—should deal with lesser Boy”: to demonstrate his superiority, his masculinity, “to prove ability.” Dickinson’s relationship to God is deeply shaped through her gender difference from him. Emerson, when claiming divinity in man, imagines a direct likeness between them. In Dickinson, the relationship is always once removed. Declaring “Title divine is mine,” she hastens to qualify, “The Wife without the Sign” (M 701 J 1072 Fr 194). “Divine” is for her at a remove of gender. This weakens her “Title,” in its multiple senses of claim, of ownership, and of authorship. Copied into the same fascicle is a poem commenting on Mark 10:14: “Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” It opens with the question: who is entitled to give titles, to name:

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Teach Him—When He makes the names— Such an one—to say— On his babbling—Berry—lips— As should sound—to me— Were my Ear—as near his nest— As my thought—today— As should sound— “Forbid us not”— Some like Emily. (J 227, Fr 198, M 701)

The poem seems to dare to try to “Teach Him” who “makes the names,” to speak in a way that can reach even a child’s “babbling—Berry— lips.” In this very disjunctive verse, the chain of naming is far from clear. The first reference is to Genesis, where God grants to Adam the power to name the creatures. But will the name match “my Ear,” sounding “As my thought?” “As should sound—” is left, as so often in Dickinson, incomplete. It is as if she will not dare to name. The implied wish “As should sound” is interrupted by the citation from Mark 10: 14: “Forbid us not.” Again, the performance of the quotation crosses appeal to the biblical text against itself. For the text asks not to be forbidden to name, as if she has indeed been forbidden, including the ability to name herself: “Some like Emily.” Biblical heroes provide other references in Dickinson, often complicated by the problem of crossing genders. Can male figures be models for her as they are for male biblical readers? Gender difference places women at a remove, as in the case of David: I took my Power in my Hand— And went against the World— ‘Twas not so much as David—had— But I—was twice as bold— I aimed by Pebble—but Myself Was all the one that fell— Was it Goliath—was too large— Or was myself—too small? (J 540, Fr 660, M 313)

David is here a type for the poet. Poetry is surely one “power” she would take in her “Hand,” which is often an image for writing. But differences intervene. In a woman’s topos of modesty, the speaker concedes her power

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is “not so much as David had.” Yet her challenge is greater than David’s. He confronted a specific enemy. She must go “against the World,” which erects barriers against women writing, or other heroic ventures. To act at all, therefore, she must be “twice as bold” as the male David was. And when, in the second stanza, she does aim her “Pebble,” it was “Myself / Was all the one that fell.” She is torn in self-division. Her struggle is against herself as much as against the “World,” with social barriers both outside and within her. She must overcome herself to dare to venture, further drained by just this inner conflict. The concluding confusion between “large” and “small” restages a familiar Dickinson scene in which terms of measurement remain difficult to assign. What is measured and with what outcome? Here Dickinson poses a question regarding her own strength: “was myself—too small?” As woman facing the world, she finds it hard to assess its challenges, not least against her doubts of her own ability or reception. One poem in which Dickinson does invoke a female biblical figure is no less self-questioning. “The Soul should always stand ajar” evokes the Song of Songs 5: 1-2, at the moment when the female speaker fails to respond quickly enough to her lover’s knock, and he disappears: The Soul should always stand ajar That if the Heaven inquire He will not be obliged to wait Or shy of troubling Her Depart, before the Host have slid The Bolt unto the Door— To search for the accomplished Guest Her Visitor, no more—(J 1055, Fr 1017, M 463)

The Song of Song’s female and male figures are traditionally allegorized as soul or church and God. As in the Song of Songs, the “Soul” here is to be ever alert for a visitation from “Heaven,” her divine “Guest.” This gendering, at first straightforward as “her” and “He,” becomes, however, complicated in the course of the poem. The soul is feminized with regard to the “Guest” as “Her Visitor,” fearing that if she is slow to respond to his knock, he will be shy of “troubling Her.” But the soul seems also referred to as “Host.” Or, is it the divine “Host” (as communion terms would suggest) who has the authority to unbolt the door?

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Dickinson’s most powerful poetics of the Bible is her practice of obscure syntax. Whether it is “Host” as re-gendered “Soul” or divine “Visitor,” what the poem registers is the failure of encounter. The “Guest” disappears before the speaker can welcome him. Even this missed opportunity is hypothetical. The poem takes place in the conditional, “If the Heaven inquire.” In a double suspension, the female figure remains in a state of ongoing alert about an encounter that might not happen or that she may miss. “The Soul should always stand ajar” inevitably evokes Dickinson’s reclusion, an event woven of many cultural as well as psychological strands. In religious terms there is a temptation, one she herself hints at, to see her reclusion as a spiritual vocation.20 As she writes in “Only a Shrine, but Mine,” “I made the Taper shine—… Regard a Nun” (J 918, Fr 981, M 452). This rather Catholic asceticism Dickinson would have found in Thomas a Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, a fifteenth-century classic on ascetic devotion. Dickinson received it as a gift from Susan Gilbert Dickinson, Emily Dickinson’s best friend turned sister-in-law and passionate partner in poetry and perhaps eros.21 In Kempis she read: “The further the soul withdraws from all the tumult of the world, the nearer she draws to her Maker. For God with His holy angels will draw near to him who withdraws himself from his friends and acquaintances.”22 Dickinson, however, on the whole resists, and protests, such stark dualism of interior and exterior, soul and body. In biblical contexts, she at times emphasizes a positive relation between body and soul. Her poem “I heard as if I had no Ear” refers to 1 Corinthians 2:9: “eye hath not seen, nor ear heard … the things which God hath prepared” (cf. Isaiah 64:4 “no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you”). The body here is “Dust” (Genesis 3:19), but in companionate embodiment with “Spirit,” together forming “Myself” and together a site of intersection—even friendship—between “Time” and “Eternity”: And Spirit turned unto the Dust “Old Friend, thou knowest me,” And Time went out to tell the News And met Eternity. (J1039, Fr 996, M 457)

Language here is a positive avenue, as “Spirit” addresses “Dust” and time goes out to “tell the News” to meet “Eternity.”

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The poem “The Body grows without” evokes 1 Corinthians 6:19-20, where Paul writes: “The body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you.” Dickinson retains here the assignments of interiority and exteriority, but in an image of the self as a “Temple” that gives “shelter” to the soul: The Body grows without— The more convenient way— That if the Spirit—like to hide Its Temple stands, alway, Ajar—secure—inviting— It never did betray The Soul that asked its shelter In solemn honesty. (J 578 Fr 438 M 176)

The “Body” awaits “Ajar” in ever ready invitation but is “secure” rather than imprisoning; “inviting” rather than entrapping or betraying. The “Spirit” is, perhaps strikingly, seeking “to hide.” The body is then a place of refuge and “shelter.” What is the “Spirit” hiding from? Perhaps here the body is even given priority, helping the soul to hide from death in which it would lose the body for pure spirit. Relationship to the body can, however, shade into strain against its traditional dualist assignments: “Sown in dishonor”! Ah! Indeed! May this “dishonor” be? If I were half so fine myself I’d notice nobody! “Sown in corruption”! Not so fast! Apostle is askew! Corinthians 1. 15. narrates A Circumstance or two! (J 62, Fr 153, M 91)

Quotation here, as the poem itself cites, is from 1 Corinthians 15:42-43. There the body is “sown in corruption” but in resurrection is “raised in incorruption. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory.” Dickinson’s quotations, as so often, seem to cite the Bible against itself in a poetics less of ambiguity than of performative self-contradiction. The poem invokes Paul’s “dishonor” and “corruption” apparently to challenge it: “Apostle is

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askew!” Paul promises glory only in an other world, where body is no longer body. Here, Dickinson’s explosive word “nobody” points both to and away from body, from self. Does “half so fine” compare her embodied self to a presumed other-worldly one? Or defy the body’s “dishonor” altogether? Dickinson is not comfortable without body. In a letter after her father’s death she asked: “I dream about father every night, always a different dream, and forget what I am doing daytimes, wondering where he is. Without any body, I keep thinking, what kind can that be” (L 471 Aug 1875 Letter 2: 559). In the poem “And with what body do they come?” she again insists that the “Body!” must somehow remain “real—a Face and Eyes.”23 The poem balances between embracing Paul and challenging him, turning to the Bible and away from it. When the body is gendered female, the situation becomes still more strained. If spirit traditionally ranks above body, then male body ranks above female body.24 Dickinson’s sequence of “Wife” poems all register hierarchy: “Wed to—Him” “befits” her soul to “modesty… “That bears another’s—name” (J 493, Fr 467, M 234). “She rose to His Requirement” as “Woman, and of Wife” by dropping her independent selfhood as “Playthings” (J 732 Fr 857 M 393).25 In the poem “I am afraid to own a Body,” it is a female body she fears to own: I am afraid to own a Body— I am afraid to own a Soul— Profound—precarious Property— Possession, not optional—. (J 1090, Fr 1050, M 472)

Dickinson shows here how fraught a word “own” is. The term conceals its economic meanings in apparent liberty of self-possession. In Dickinson’s time, “own” is still more burdened in that women had few property rights. The poem’s many images of ownership are in fact male. “Property” in her era was something only men could own. “Possession” in the first stanza becomes “Estate” in the second, another term that crosses between economic and spiritual meanings, as land property but also inner state. Double Estate—entailed at pleasure Upon an unsuspecting Heir—

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“Entailed,” a term of primogeniture inheritance, marks a specifically male prerogative. And “Heir” is likewise specifically male.26 The poem “I think just how my shape will rise” sets the question of gendered body in biblical terms: I think just how my shape will rise When I shall be “forgiven” — Till Hair—and Eyes—and timid Head — Are out of sight—in Heaven — I think just how my lips will weigh — With shapeless—quivering—prayer— That you—so late—“Consider” me — The “Sparrow” of your Care — I mind me that of Anguish—sent — Some drifts were moved away — Before my simple bosom—broke — And why not this—if they? And so I con that thing—“forgiven” — Until—delirious—borne — By my long bright—and longer—trust — I drop my Heart—unshriven! (J 237, Fr 252, M 124)

In this poem, Dickinson enumerates her body in detail: “Hair—and Eyes,” “timid Head;” “lips,” and then, “my simple bosom.” Both “bosom” and “timid” mark her as gendered female. What the first stanza offers is almost an inverse blazon: the body parts are traced as disappearing “out of sight—in Heaven.” “Lips” then take center stage as her possibility for language, as she addresses a “you” in almost abject appeal. Yet her “prayer” as linguistic body is “shapeless” and “quivering,” as will be her “shape” when it “will rise” out of body when she dies. The promise in Matthew 10: 29-31 that God cares for every “sparrow” seems to her to be offered “so late.” She is experiencing “Anguish” right now, presumably at witnessing the disappearance of body in death. Where, she asks, is “your Care?” The poem’s focus on the vanishing body outweighs its more conventional concern with judgment. Here Dickinson seems to assume she will be “forgiven.” The quotation marks suggest some allusion. One strong

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possibility is Col 1: 13-14: “Who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son: In whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins.” At the poem’s start, forgiveness seems to be expected. Yet that does not restore the loss that ascent out of body brings, which is also an ascent out of language. Words, like a bodiless soul, become “shapeless.” In this poem, ascent out of body is far from celebrated. It speaks instead of “Anguish,” of loss within or of the world. On seeing “drifts … moved away”—“my simple bosom—broke.” Sentence connections themselves break down in incompletion: “And why not this—if they?” Her concluding statement is one of repudiation, rejecting biblical promise. At first, she seems to consider asking to be “forgiven” (in quotes). The poem surprises, by rhyming it with “unshriven.” Dickinson rejects divine favor when weighed against her “long bright—and longer—trust,” a trust not in biblical assurances but in the “shapes” she has on earth, in body and in words.

Historicist Poetics That Dickinson’s reclusion did not cut her off from history and context has come to be recognized in much Dickinson scholarship. Her historical address, however, does not reduce to direct reference. Instead, history is registered through imagery, circulating terms, and other usages of language that come into her work from her surrounding culture. Thus, history, society, politics, enters Dickinson’s verse often indirectly, in the resonance of terms and words that she shares with her wider culture but puts to her own use. One persistent cultural resonance emerges in the economic imagery that repeatedly and insistently surfaces in Dickinson’s verse, but in ways that easily escape notice. With the rise of industry, American life was increasingly defined through economic measures and economic roles, as they became capitalized, mechanized, and monetized. Dickinson’s is a time of radical transformations in technology, industry, communications, and transportation. Dickinson joins other midcentury writers, including Thoreau, Emerson, Melville as well as women poets, in critique and alarm at the materialization of American life. This critique of American materialism in Dickinson has links to religious and biblical discourses, in both criticism and complicity. Vocabularies of economy, especially when coupled with biblical reference, resonate

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through Puritan covenant theology, where relationship to God is foundationally conceived as contractual and portrayed in economic as well as legal terms.27 A generalization I will venture is that economic language in Dickinson is always compromised. When God as the “Auctioneer of Parting” and “brings his Hammer down” to sell “the Wilderness,” they become “Prices of Despair” (J 1612, Fr 1646, M 733). In “I asked no other thing / No other—was denied—,” the divine “Mighty Merchant” “sneered” as he refuses her single request (J 621, Fr 687, M 333). The much quoted cry, “Burglar! Banker!—Father!” makes divinity and fatherhood images of each other as male economic powers of control. I never lost as much but twice, And that was in the sod. Twice have I stood a beggar Before the door of God! Angles-Twice descending Reimbursed my storeBurglar! banker—Father! I am poor once more! (J 49, Fr 39, M 57)

Having “lost… twice,” presumably to death “in the sod,” the speaker’s following cry to God as “Burglar! Banker!—Father!” exposes the social role of protector to be one of appropriation of what should be hers. Her terms recall Puritan economies of salvation. “Banker” becomes not security but control at dispensing to her what should be her own property, here exposed as theft. This “Father” is then less “Banker” than “Burglar,” before whom she is “beggar.” Yet the poem still launches itself as appeal, even if in terms of accusation. Other poems make contractual and economic critique into biblical commentary. “Faithful to the end” Amended From the Heavenly Clause— Constancy with a Proviso     variant: Lucrative indeed the offer Constancy abhors—      variant: But the Heart withdraws— “Crowns of Life” are servile Prizes To the stately Heart, Given for the Giving, solely,    variant: [for] the Majesty No Emolument.

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variant second stanza: “I will give” the base Proviso— Spare Your “Crown of Life”— Those it fits, too fair to wear it— Try it on Yourself— (J 1357, Fr1386A, M 591)28

Revelation 2:10 promises: “Be thou faithful unto death and I will give thee a crown of life.” But Dickinson in legalistic language treats the promise of faithfulness as “amended” out of the “Clause.” Legal and economic senses of a document intensify in the imagery of “Heavenly” rewards as “Lucrative.” This is “Constancy with a Proviso” that contradicts itself, or, in the variant line, from which “the Heart withdraws” (a pun on banking? on Dickinson’s reclusion?). The “Crowns of Life” are “Servile Prizes” or “Lucrative” on “offer.” Such “Proviso” is too costly for the speaker, or rather, too unfair. At best, it only confirms a value already achieved without such apparent beneficence: “Those it fits, too fair [implicating both justice and beauty?] to wear it.” At worst, it is offered not out of generosity or even fairness, but to assert the “Majesty” of the giver. “No Emolument” either denounces the attempt at payment or refuses it. Another poem laden with economic imagery takes as its text Matthew 7:14: “Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be who find it.” You’re right— “the way is narrow”— And “difficult the Gate”— And “few there be”—Correct again— That “enter in—thereat”— ‘Tis Costly—So are purples! ’Tis just the price of Breath— With but the “Discount” of the Grave— Termed by the Brokers—”Death“! And after that—there’s Heaven— The Good Man’s—”Dividend“— And Bad Men—”go to Jail”— I guess— (J 234, Fr 249, M 122)

The poem opens as if it were directly addressing the Bible text itself— “You’re right;” with the first stanza strewn with quotations. All emphasize, in Calvinist rhetoric and biblical citation, the difficulty of salvation:

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“difficult the Gate,” “few there be…That “enter in.” Then comes commentary. The language here is steadfastly economic transaction and legal enforcement, exposing and deflating the Matthew text as a trade whose worth is highly questionable. “Costly,” it actually demands life itself— “the price of Breath.” The “Discount” its “Brokers” offer is death. Heaven is calculated as “Dividend.” Those who fail to pay up “go to Jail.” Despite its light tone, this parable of parsimony attacks both religious and social economies as images of each other. The costliest experience in Dickinson’s life was war. In one of her elegies for the Civil War dead, both economy and the Bible structure the text: Victory comes late — And is held low to freezing lips — Too rapt with frost To take it — How sweet it would have tasted — Just a Drop — Was God so economical? His Table’s spread too high for Us — Unless We dine on tiptoe — Crumbs—fit such little mouths — Cherries—suit Robins — The Eagle’s Golden Breakfast strangles—Them — God keep His Oath to Sparrows — Who of little Love—know how to starve —(J 690, Fr 195, M 357)

This poem was written in memory of Amherst’s Frazer Stearns’s death at the Battle of New Bern in North Carolina (L 257). This was a Union victory. But for Dickinson suffering is not compensated by outcome. Loss is not balanced by gain in economic calculation. “Victory comes late” for those who don’t live to see it and whose death it does not justify. Even in victory God is accused as “economical,” calculating and withholding life rather than merciful. Two biblical contexts surface. The “Table’s spread too high for Us —,” placing communion out of reach and leaving only “Crumbs,” invokes Mark 7:28: “And she answered and said unto him, Yes, Lord: yet the dogs under the table eat of the children’s crumbs.” “God keep His Oath to Sparrows —” cites Matthew 10:29 “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care.” This is a recurrent reference in Dickinson. In “I think just how my shape will rise” God fails to answer to “The “Sparrow”

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of your Care —.” In the poem “Some, too fragile for winter winds” are like “Sparrows, unnoticed by the Father” (J 141, FR 91, M 64). Here “God keep His Oath to Sparrows” can be plea or taunt. In either case, the promise is not kept. Instead, God abandons those “Who of little Love— know how to starve.” The inclusion of “Robins” brings Dickinson into this failed equation, as they often are associated with herself and New England. The “Eagle” that strangles may mean America. The Civil War was a biblical battle. Dickinson’s registers this. References to war emerge from often barely noticed allusions: At least—to pray—is left—is left— Oh Jesus—in the Air— I know not which thy chamber is— I’m knocking—everywhere— Thou settest Earthquake in the South— And Maelstrom, in the Sea— Say, Jesus Christ of Nazareth— Hast thou no Arm for Me? (J 502, Fr 377, M 200)

This scene of uncertain prayer is addressed to Jesus rather than God the Father. One biblical context is Mathew 7:7-8: “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye. shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh, findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.” The speaker in this poem is “knocking everywhere.” Dickinson directly quotes this verse from Mathew in another poem in which prayer is defeated by divine parsimony. “I Meant to Have but Modest Needs” adopts the feminine attitude of modesty to conceal profound misgivings and distrust of a God who mocks the biblical promise “Whatsoever Ye shall ask— / Itself be given You.” Instead, God is exposed as a “Swindler” (J 476, Fr 711, M 347). “At least—to pray—is left—is left—” seems to grasp at prayer, as the last hope in despair. The second stanza shifts to a scene of terror making such appeal necessary. “Maelstrom, in the Sea” may recall the overwhelming vision of whirlwind in Job. Or, perhaps Revelation 11: 19’s apocalyptic outbreak is in the background: “and there were flashes of lightning and sounds and peals of thunder and an earthquake and a great hailstorm.” However, “South” in “Thou settest Earthquake in the South” cannot but suggest the cataclysm of the American war, where, as in Matthew 24:7, “nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and in

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various places there will be famines and earthquakes.” Longfellow’s “Christmas Bells” (discussed above) likewise speaks of “earthquake’s arm of might,” suggesting a familiar cultural phrase. Here, then, Civil War apocalyptic intrudes into Dickinson’s verse. In response, Dickinson offers a double-edged challenge: “Hast thou no Arm for Me?” She either petitions divine aid or declares its absence. Dickinson’s verse as a whole is a field of test and contest between time and eternity, this world and the next, in an attempt to align them together in meaningful pattern. The struggle between them goes now toward this side, now toward that. Dickinson never lets go her wish for assurance that eternity gives sense to time, heaven to earth, and that “suffering had a loving side” (L 406).29 The Civil War certainly would have increased both the fissure between event and redemptive pattern and the need for this gap to be closed. Biblical reference does not resolve this disparity: Good to have had them lost For News that they be savedThe nearer they departed Us The nearer they, restored, Shall stand to Our Right HandMost precious and the DeadNext precious Those that rose to goThen thought of Us, and stayed. (J 901, Fr 809, M 450)

Characteristically, no event is specified as to what is “lost” and what is “saved” here. “News” implies a public event, which in 1862 suggests battle. Whatever the reference, this poem appeals to an ultimate biblical confirmation of divine power, the declaration of Christ’s Messiahship, as in Matthew 25:33-34. “And he shall set the sheep on his right hand but the goats on the left. Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand come ye blessed of my father inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the earth.” Jenks’s comment on this verse refers it to Christ’s Second Coming when “He will sit as a Judge.” That will be a “great day of general judgment. All must be summoned before Christ’s tribunal; of every age from the beginning to the end of time; all from the remotest corners of the world.”30 In language that surfaces in the Dickinson poem, Jenks calls the dividing of sheep and goats a distinction as one “made between the precious and the vile.” In “that day they will be

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separated and parted forever” in “the process of the judgment concerning each” (Jenks, 263). Dickinson, too, considers what is “precious.” But as often with Dickinson’s measurements, it is unclear what is “Most precious” and what is “Next precious.” The image of Christ’s “Right Hand” echoes the apocalyptic ultimacy of much Civil War religious rhetoric as divine judgment. This the poem resists in its very syntactic challenge. Ultimately “Most precious” seems not to be “the dead” who “rose to go,” but rather those that “thought of Us, and stayed.” The poem finally sides with the living, against death and end of world final judgments. Dickinson’s persistence in biblical engagement confirms its centrality for her, as for her surrounding culture. Her disputes with it and within it reflect the biblical contentions of her period, concerning textual integrity, emerging gender consciousness, and the biblical politics pervading American culture and politics. Dickinson’s work, written in the domestic privacy assigned to women and which she enacted with a vengeance in her reclusion, serves as one of the most powerful registers of cultural, political, and religious life of her period. Often in critique and contest, but also at times with affirmation, Dickinson makes her cultural language her own: My period had come for Prayer— No other Art—would do— My Tactics missed a rudiment— Creator—Was it you? God grows above—so those who pray Horizons—must ascend— And so I stepped upon the North To see this Curious Friend— His House was not—no sign had He— By Chimney—nor by Door Could I infer his Residence— Vast Prairies of Air Unbroken by a Settler— Were all that I could see— Infinitude—Had’st Thou no Face That I might look on Thee? The Silence condescended— Creation stopped—for Me— But awed beyond my errand— I worshipped—did not “pray”—(J 564, Fr 525, M 289)

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This poem’s alignment of prayer with “Art” underscores Dickinson’s own vocation as poet, as the scene in which she works through her urgent concerns. Here it is a scene at best of invitation, at worst of skepticism, toward a “Creator” whom she nevertheless addresses: “Creator—Was it you?” The poem in this is more liturgical than meditative. It directs its energy toward an uncertain addressee, conjured as much by this question as by religious answer. In the text that unfolds, Dickinson, as she often does, complicates what at first seem to be clear declarations. “God above” seems a theological gesture, to whom, in order to pray, she “must ascend.” But an odd swerve occurs: “And so I stepped upon the North.” Perhaps this is mere abstract compass, but in 1862 “North” cannot be entirely dissociated from geographies of conflict. Could “Tactics” have a military echo? Is the divine implicated in human battle? How does worldly strife connect to “God … above”? Other American locations with historical reference surface in this poem. “Vast Prairies of Air / Unbroken by a Settler” point to Westward expansion, in which Manifest Destiny was closely tied to theologies of war, as North and South each claimed God’s sacred power and disputed whether slavery would be extended into western territories. But the American destiny is not clearly marked as divine design: “His house was not—no sign had He.” The geography of divinity is not easily legible. “His Residence” is at most something to “infer” and at hazard. The poem instead turns to what cannot be seen. Dickinson returns to the biblical scene of revelation at Sinai, where the “Infinitude” of divine face is witnessed as unseeable. Yet the question: “Had’st Thou no Face / That I might look on Thee?”— returning to the Sinai of Exodus 33—is not here mere repudiation. When “Creation stopped—for Me—,” this “Silence” is not failed language but a stillness of wonder. Perhaps “errand” recalls the Puritan errand into the wilderness or contemporary American mission. Dickinson, however, reorients it to an awe that, instead of conquest, offers a non-possessive appreciation. This she calls worship, which she distinguishes from to “pray,” a resort to quotation marks that at once distances her from a kind of prayer she suspects, yet transforms it to a new use. Here she both engages and distances herself from the culturally given. As in the culture around her, Dickinson’s biblical words point in a multitude of directions. Her work attests the Bible’s continued cultural grip, even as it is shifting, slipping, or tightening in the historical unfolding of scriptural meanings. Dickinson’s repeated references to the awe of not seeing God’s face in Exodus 33 can be said to extend to God’s text as well,

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the Bible, which will never be fully disclosed, exhausted, or commanded in its meanings.31 She demonstrates the ongoing energy to be found in biblical language, ready to be recreated within the efforts of art that at once engages, counters, and extends the life of cultural experience.

Notes 1. Dickinson’s religion is an extensive topic beyond the scope of this chapter. First seen as pious, Dickinson today is largely understood as caught between faith and skepticism, seen to be resolved in different degrees and directions. Cf. Roger Lundin, Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief (Cambridge: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing co., 1998), p. 84; Mcintosh, James, Nimble Believing: Dickinson and the Unknown (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 2000); cf. McIntosh, James, “Religion,” Emily Dickinson in Context. Ed. Eliza Richards. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, 151–159, “orthodox and unorthodox beliefs are not in active contradiction but are a system of believing that has its own internal integrity” through which “she is willing to vacillate to get her whole truth down,” p.  157. Jane Donohue Eberwein, “New England Puritan Heritage,” Emily Dickinson in Context, ed. Eliza Richards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 46–55, “as a doubt that inevitably accompanies faith,” p. 48. Keane, Patrick T. Emily Dickinson’s Approving God: Divine Design and the Problem of Suffering (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2008) calls hers an “ambivalent often combative relationship with God,” struggling between “belief and unbelief,” pp. 2, 20. Linda Freedman, Emily Dickinson and the Religious Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), reviews many discussions and sums up that “the critical debate has generally been shaped by responses to Dickinson’s personal ambivalence towards God.” p. 13. 2. Biblical discussion of Dickinson is perhaps surprisingly rare. Peggy Anderson, “The Bride of the White election: A new Look at Biblical influence on Emily Dickinson,” Nineteenth-Century Women Writers of the English-Speaking World, ed. Rhoda B. Nathan (London: Greenwood Press, 1986): pp. 1–11; Elisabeth McGregor, “‘Standing with the Prophets and Martyrs’: Emily Dickinson’s Scriptural Self-Defence,” Dickinson Studies, U.S. Poet, 39 (1981), pp. 18–26. Emily Seelbinder, “The Bible,” Emily Dickinson in Context. Ed. Eliza Richards. NY: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Jennifer Leader, Knowing, Seeing, Being (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), discusses the general biblical context surrounding Dickinson as “more hermeneutical than theological,” p. 83.

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3. Paul Crumbley, “Democratic Politics,” Emily Dickinson in Context. Ed. Eliza Richards. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 179–187, p. 180. 4. Cf. Dickinson’s letters: “I have perfect confidence in God and his promises, and yet I know not why, I feel that the world holds a predominant place in my affections,” Emily Dickinson: Letters, eds. Thomas Johnson, Theodora Ward (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), L 13. Later she writes: “I wonder often how the love of Christ is done—when that below holds so” (L 262). 5. Nathan Hatch, Democratization. 6. See Chap. 4. 7. Dickinson’s uses of hymnal were first discussed by Thomas Johnson. Cf. Shira Wolosky, “Rhetoric or Not: Hymnal Tropes in Emily Dickinson and Isaac Watts,” The New England Quarterly, Volume LXI, No. 2, June, 1988, 214–232, traces direct references to Watts in Dickinson. Cf. Victoria Morgan, Emily Dickinson and Hymn Culture (Burlington, Vt: Ashgate 2010 / Routledge, 2016), interestingly situates Dickinson’s use of hymnal in relation to other women’s hymns. Yet these are almost entirely pious as Dickinson’s are not. 8. For some of many examples see “Prayer is the little implement” (J 437, M 306, Fr623); of course—I prayed—and did God care (J 376, M 265, Fr581); “I’ve none to tell me to but Thee” (J 881, M 435 Fr929); “Savior! I’ve no one else to tell—” (J 217, M 139, Fr295); “You left me—Sire— Two Legacies” (J 644, M 348); “I prayed, at first, a little Girl” (J 576, M 298, Fr546); “I have a King, who does not speak—” (J 103, M 88, Fr157). 9. Freedman argues that “the life of Christ is the axial point in the poet’s mythic world,” in a poetry of “mediation” through “incarnation and embodiment” modeled on “moments” of Christological extremity, p. 11. Cf. pp  11, 16, 37–39, 42, 186; on the Bible in Dickinson’s typology, pp. 26–7. 10. Cristanne Miller, A Poet’s Grammar, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 131, 145, 147. Seelbinder, whose claim that Dickinson “embraced wholeheartedly” higher criticism, questioning the Bible “as received from God,” resolves Dickinson’s biblical dilemma too much to one side. But she rightly emphasizes that Dickinson’s experience of the Bible was “not solitary” but rather “poses questions about interpretation and appears eager to engage her readers in a dynamic interpretive process,” pp. 72, 73. 11. Shira Wolosky, Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). 12. Richard Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson (NY: Farrar, Straus Giroux 1974) Vol 2, p. 468. 13. On Dickinson and science see R. Brantley, Experience and Faith: The LateRomantic Imagination of Emily Dickinson (NY: Palgrave Macmillan,

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2004). Richard Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), Vol II, 337. She makes one offhand reference to Darwin, perhaps reflecting long familiarity: “But we thought Darwin had thrown ‘the Redeemer’ away,” Sewall, p. 653. 14. All poems of Dickinson are cited from Cristanne Miller, Dickinson’s Poems as she Preserved Them (Cambridge, Mass; Harvard University Press, 2006), cited as M followed by page number. I have however also noted the poem numbers from the edition of Thomas Johnson, The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1955), cited as J followed by poem number; and Ralph Franklin (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2005), cited as Fr followed by page number. 15. McCintosh, 2004, 82. 16. Rosemary Ruether, “The Liberation of Christology from Patriarchy,” Feminist Theology: A Reader, ed. Ann Loades (SPCK 1990) 138–147. Cf. Grace Jantzen, Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 47. 17. Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), pp. 18, 8, 19. 18. Daphne Hampson, Theology and Feminism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 2. 19. Hampson, p. 11; Mary Daly, p. 19, note 84. 20. Richard Sewall’s view is that Dickinson found in Kempis a positive model for “renouncing the world, bearing the burden, shouldering the Cross— that is, the simple, stern life of the dedicated religious.” The Life of Emily Dickinson Vol. II (NY: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1974), pp. 688, 692. 21. Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ (NY: Penguin, 1979A). Dickinson’s 1857 copy is in Harvard’s Houghton Library. A second copy of 1876 is in the Yale Beinecke Library. The eroticism of the relationship between Emily and Susan has been especially explored by Martha Nell Smith, “Susan and Emily Dickinson: Their Lives, in Letters,” Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson (NY: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 51–74. 22. A Kempis, pp. 35, 52. 23. Linda Freedman, “And with what Body do they come?” Dickinson’s Resurrection,” Religion & Literature, spring 2014, Vol. 46, No. 1 (spring 2014), pp. 180–187, argues that Dickinson sees in resurrection the “body as offering some kind of continuity and the possibility of recognition and reunion,” pp. 182–3. She does not mention gender. 24. Rosemary Ruether “Augustine: Sexuality, Gender and Women Feminist Interpretations of Augustine,” Feminist Interpretations of Augustine,  ed. Judith Chelius Stark (Phil: Penn State University Press, 2007) 47–60. 25. These poems are more fully discussed in Shira Wolosky, Feminist Theory Across Disciplines (NY: Routledge, 2013).

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26. For fuller discussion of this poem, see Shira Wolosky, “Being in the Body,” Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson, ed. Wendy Martin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 129–141. 27. Perry Miller, New England Mind, p. 403. 28. This is the version of the poem Dickinson had in draft, not the fair copy she kept, nor the version she sent to Higginson. See M 782, note 92. 29. May 1862 letter to Louise and Frances Norcross, Emily Dickinson Letters, ed. Emily Fragos (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), p. 194. 30. William Jenks, Comprehensive Commentary on the Holy Bible 1834–1835, pp 265. refers to Ps 110:1 and Ps 18:35 in Jewish commentary. Also Phil 2:9 Eph 1:21 on subduing enemies: “there he shall sit till they be all made either his friends or his footstool.” Cf. Luke 12:8, and the misery of sinners when “He will then sit on the throne of his glory,” Rev. 14:10. 31. Dickinson’s references to Exodus 33 include: “No Eye hath seen and lived” in “From Us She wandered now a Year” (M 498, Fr794); “For none see God and live” in “To pile like Thunder to its close” (M 713, Fr1353); “Himself have not a face” in “Silence is all we Dread” (M 711, Fr1300). In “No man saw awe,” Dickinson writes: “’Am not consumed,’ Old Moses wrote, / ‘Yet saw Him face to face’” (M 661, Fr1342). My period had come for Prayer / Had’st Thou no Face That I might look on Thee? (J 564, Fr 525, M 289).

CHAPTER 7

Women’s Bibles, White and Black: Twentieth Century and Beyond

The Civil War in many ways marks the end of a biblical era. Biblical contention continues. Yet now the lines begin to be drawn not within biblical discourses but, on one side, a hardening possession of the Bible along fundamentalist lines; on the other, a detachment from it either for other modes of religious spirituality or to an alternative secularism. Division, that is, begins to open not between biblical positions but between those claiming the Bible as against those who distance themselves from it. These splits toward and away from biblical discourse form an important part of women’s writings from the nineteenth into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Besides abolition and the Civil War itself, the most intense biblical clashes in America occurred around the woman question. In the antebellum period, controversy over women’s status blandished the Bible on opposing sides. As with slavery, conservative readings saw the Bible as teaching hierarchy, traditional order, and obedience; liberal ones read the Bible as a text of equality and emancipation.1 These orientations directed and are reflected in a series of biblical choices. They determine which texts are seen to be the central ones; which characters are exemplary; and, not least, who is authorized to interpret at all. Conservative readings cite texts of meekness and obedience to God and ‘his’ appointed interpreters, that is, male white ministers. Emancipatory readings, specifically by women, focus on egalitarian texts and their own right to interpret.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Wolosky, The Bible in American Poetic Culture, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40106-0_7

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Enlisting the Bible in the name of emancipation, however, became itself subject to argument. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Woman’s Bible stands a monument to conflicting forces. Stanton, like other leading figures in the women’s movement, began as a follower of Charles Finney, the immensely popular evangelical minister. She, however, lost faith in the Bible as a possible basis for women’s emancipation. “From the inauguration of the movement for women’s emancipation,” she declares in her introduction to the Woman’s Bible, “the Bible has been used to hold her in the ‘divinely ordained sphere’ prescribed in the Old and New Testaments.”2 Taking Historical Criticism to radically undermine biblical authority, she asserts the Bible to be based on sources “wholly human in their origin and inspired by the natural love of domination in the historians.” Yet the project of the Woman’s Bible itself—the selection of biblical texts seen to support emancipatory projects and women figures—concedes the cultural centrality of the Bible and attempts to enlist its authority.3 Even so, Stanton’s Woman’s Bible was too radical for her own suffrage movement and was rejected by the National-American Woman’s Suffrage Association in 1896. The Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments of 1848 expressed the more prevalent approach, attacking not the Bible but the “corrupt customs and a perverted application of the Scriptures” against women.4 Sarah Grimké, for example, begins her quite radical 1838 Letters on the Equality of Women declaring “the welfare of the world will be materially advanced” by recognizing “the designs of Jehovah in the creation of woman.” Indeed, in arguing for women’s equality, Grimké will “depend solely on the Bible to designate the sphere of woman.” This, however, she reminds, confronts questions of interpretation, including recognizing the “consequences of false translation.” Frances Willard, president of the Temperance Society whose membership dwarfed suffrage activists, tried to assure her followers that the Bible was still “a sufficient rule of faith and practice,” including for their more conservative modes of women’s activism. In challenging biblical authority, Stanton was seen to risk sacrificing a “potent” argument for women’s rights.5 Nevertheless, through the course of the nineteenth century, there is a movement from “positive, reform-minded biblical interpretation” to “rejecting the Bible as the Word of God” and “defin[ing] the Bible as the foundation of women’s oppression and the greatest stumbling block to women’s complete emancipation.”6 The Bible comes to be not only divided against itself in debate, but also one-sidedly claimed by conservative sides against opposing progressive ones. Biblical argument persists,

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with different views claiming its authority and interpreting its message. But that authority itself also comes to be questioned. If the Bible had earlier provided a language in which argument could be joined, it increasingly becomes itself a subject of argument. And women responded through a variety of strategies: from revolt, to conservation, to re-appropriation and reinterpretation.7 The lines distinguishing these approaches are not absolute. Their overlap can be seen in the traditions of African American women’s poetry, where the Bible has been especially important. This accords with the powerful and specific role the Bible has played in African American culture, evident not only in poetry but in preaching traditions, prayer, practices of worship, as also political speech and action in the Black community. Up until at least the most recent years, biblical culture has been closely allied to Black identity and assertion. The “Negro church,” writes Du Bois, is the only social institution of the Negroes which started in the African forest and survived slavery; under the leadership of priest or medicine man, afterward of the Christian pastor, the Church preserved in itself the remnants of African tribal life and became after emancipation the center of Negro social life.8

Nonetheless, the Bible’s position in African American culture is complicated as a European heritage that has been used in the oppression of Blacks, while at the same time providing a powerful resource for Black community and expression. This double status is enacted in Black women’s poetry, implicating both race and gender. The central issue remains biblical interpretation, to which poets by definition claim the right. Both white and Black women poets continue to engage biblical texts and textual debate. And all underscore the role of interpretation itself, revealing how the Bible can be mobilized for contradictory truths, which, as rooted in cultural settings, paradoxically undermine the very authority appealed to or alter its claims. Mark Noll writes: “Hermeneutics is always cultural,” including “who has the power to interpret.”9 For the Black community, “the shift to individual interpretation illuminates white dominant readings” as specific to white interests.10 For women, white and Black, traditional interpretation comes to be recognized as male. Ultimately, clashes in interpretation both confirm the Bible’s power while undermining its status as absolute or self-sufficient authority.

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From First to Second Wave Feminism First wave feminism is often remembered in its association with suffrage and the long battle for women’s right to vote. In this sense, it is a precursor to second wave liberal feminism. However, individual rights were not the main focus or framework of much women’s activism in the nineteenth century. Indeed, first wave feminism was generally not committed to liberal individualism as personal emancipation. Rather, it launched a strong voice against the intensifying private-interest individualism that accompanied industrialization and capitalization of American life, in the name of what activist women saw as women’s values.11 Nevertheless, the defense of women’s values challenged the traditional boundaries of the “woman’s sphere,” in which these values were rooted.12 The woman’s sphere as domestic remained in many ways complicit with the monetization and atomization of American culture. As supposed “haven in the heartless world,” it served as outlet, excuse, and justification for the devouring materialism American society was evolving into.13 Yet the woman’s sphere also served as an alternative value structure that women saw as resisting materialist atomism and upholding and sustaining community values.14 Women’s activism was largely directed in such community directions. Many women were active in civic life, church associations, and community service. They did not wield political power, legal standing, nor professional status. Yet, their activities were not confined to the domestic, even geographically. Sometimes what they did outside the home resembled what they did in it: care of orphans, of the elderly, of the ill, of the poor. But other women’s initiatives were neither like nor confined to the domestic sphere. They took place, rather, in the public sphere both as activity and in location: parks and urban planning, libraries, abolition, women’s rights. Not least among these was teaching. The access of women to education was for them a momentous Revolutionary transformation, obviously so for writers: one cannot write literature if one is not literate. Women’s education was first intended to train “Republican Mothers” for sons and husbands who could vote, as they could not. Once unleashed, however, education of women could not be contained, instead slowly opening paths to various professions and venues.15 In republican terms, education was regarded as essential for democratic self-government, so that teaching itself can be seen as civic contribution. Ruth Bloch has argued that women in effect were taking up civic virtue as men were increasingly caught up in the private interests of work.16

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Much of women’s civic virtue and public activism in turn took shape through religious affiliations and church groups. These were organized into the voluntary associations fueled by the Second Great Awakening.17 The Awakenings generally provided a public arena for women. Revivals and camp meetings were among the first scenes where women could speak in public, giving testimony at conversion and even preaching. There, too, they could exercise their independent religious choices. During the Second Great Awakening, women’s seminaries, secondary schools, and then colleges were founded under religious auspices or associated with them. Coeducational college was introduced under revivalism by Charles Finney at Oberlin, which also was the first to admit Blacks and encourage women’s public speaking. Mary Lyon’s Mount Holyoke Seminary which Dickinson attended was founded to train missionary wives. In the nineteenth century, the Bible is the mainstay of women’s poetry. Feminist biblical re-readings familiar to the twentieth century had already begun in the nineteenth, taking biblical women as central figures, recovering or reimagining women’s voices, viewpoints, and experiences; although as recurs in women’s history, these writings by women were unknown to later writers, neither republished, nor circulated, nor included in curricula. One notable figure in this nineteenth-century exploration of biblical women is “Vashti,” who is featured in poems by Helen Hunt Jackson, a contemporary of Emily Dickinson’s in Amherst, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and Frances Harper (discussed below). Counter to tradition, Jackson calls “Vashti” “pure and loyal-souled as fair.” Her act of defying King Ahashveros is praised as “refus[ing] the shame which madmen would compel.” Her action protects the state, preventing the drunken king from “bring[ing] our crown so low.”18 Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s Vashti is similarly defiant. She, too, refuses to expose herself as the king demands, scorning his command as reducing her to object like “yonder marble pillar, or the gold / and jeweled wine cup which thy lips caress.” To obey would be to “degrade me in the people’s sight.” But in Wilcox’s version, Vashti then does dare to appear and to speak. She will “loose my veil and loose my tongue!” “Shame” now means not her exposure, but her subservience to the king as his possession: “an ignoble state/ to be a thing for eyes to gaze upon.”19 In Wilcox’s version, Vashti is not banished, but herself abandons the court: Now, no more queen—nor wife—but woman still— Ay, and a woman strong enough to be Her own avenger.

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Wilcox’s is a feminism that challenges society in the name of women’s values and roles. She projects women’s social commitments as building society, although also urges owning their own sexuality and desire. Born in 1850 on a farm twelve miles from Madison, Wisconsin, Ella Wheeler pursued a career of writing for both creative and monetary reasons, to lift herself out of poverty. Her marriage to Robert Wilcox freed her for a life of travel, entertaining, and prolific literary production. Her many poems on womanhood show how much this term was in transition. Motherhood remains her ultimate model of womanhood and indeed of humanity. She poses it against America’s intensifying materialism and self-interest. The Bible figures in both her critique of individualism and her apotheosis of motherhood. She sees it as offering a religious mode of participation and indeed leadership for women, in a mixture of self-realization with communitarianism. Anne Braude has investigated how many women were attracted to non-mainstream religious movements that rejected traditional institutions. These included Spiritualism, Shakers, Theosophy, Christian Science, all with women founders.20 Ella Wheeler Wilcox aligned herself with such movements. She embraced Spiritualism, Theosophy, and New Thought, asserting individual spiritual authority within non-conformist religious formats. Yet her spirituality remains very gendered. The Bible enters Wilcox’s work as a discourse in support of her vision of a redemptive womanhood. The poem “Lord Speak Again” is a reading of Genesis governed by a principle of motherhood. There is a gesture to a feminized Deity: God at the creation brought “Motherhood … to His aid, / ‘My lesser self, the feminine of Me.” The fact that woman is created after man does not, for Wilcox, mark inferiority, but is an evolutionary divine intention to “finish in perfecting man.” God relied on women to fulfill his purposes. But she protests: women “have not heard” this divine call to realize the world’s “holiest purpose and its highest need,” which is “True Motherhood.” God must therefore        

speak again … so woman shall be stirred With the full meaning of that mighty word.21

Women are the ones who should receive God’s “mighty word” as its true interpreters and representatives. Wilcox’defines this role as an apotheosis of nurture and birth (including an indictment of abortion). Woman acts

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not as an individual but, as she writes in her Spiritualist New Thoughts, for a sort of feminized Emersonian Oversoul, “the supreme and all embracing Source, / … the mighty billows of the Over Soul.” The Bible remains a resource within these contexts. Asserting in her “Battle Hymn of the Women,” that freed “from old traditions” the world shall “rise and render/ Unto woman what is hers,” Wilcox grounds this feminist declaration in biblical terms: Unto woman, God the Maker   Gave the secret of His plan; It is written out in cipher, on her soul; From the darkness, you must take her,   To the light of day, O man! Would you know the mighty meaning of the scroll.22

The poem seems to sweep from Genesis’s “God the Maker” to the prophetic “mighty meaning of the scroll” of Ezekial. This biblical writing has now been interiorized “Unto woman” as a “cipher on her soul” that can thus read the “secret of His plan.” “O man!” must take woman from “darkness” to the Genesis “light of day,” granting women’s and Wilcox’s own power of interpretation of the divine plan. It is women, and she, who will finally change the course of history from violence to harmony. As Wilcox writes in “The Edict of Sex,” Two thousand years had passed since Christ was born, When suddenly there rose a mighty host Of women, sweeping to a central goal As many rivers sweep on to the sea.

The “mighty host” of women mark the return of Christ or even the form of his Second Coming. Such redemption will embrace not only women but Blacks. At first, Wilcox recounts that she has flinched from “the black man.” But then she witnesses in him the figure of Christ himself: ‘Go back!’ I cried. ‘What right have you to walk beside me here? For you are black, and I am white.’ I paused, struck dumb with fear. For lo! the black man was not there, but Christ stood in his place; And oh! the pain, the pain, the pain that looked from that dear face.23

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Charlotte Gilman marks a radical step beyond Wilcox into a political feminism and a suspicion against traditional religion and the Bible. Born in 1860 into the Beecher family (although her father deserted her mother in her first year), Gilman devotes her poetry to the same feminist social utopian vision as she does her fiction, speeches, journalism, and treatises on feminist topics. “The Yellow Wallpaper” (now) famously retells her horrible experience of a “rest cure,” in which she was immobilized, and almost driven into full insanity, for hysterical symptoms caused by her experience of traditional female roles in marriage. These she systematically and indefatigably critiques toward reform. She insists on women’s right to work, seeing marriage as otherwise little better than official prostitution. Her innovative ideas for reshaping gender roles include day care, pooling household labor, common chefs buying in bulk. Hers is a form of socialist communitarianism, in which women’s freedom will allow them to contribute to social welfare, not individual advancement. Gilman’s approach to religion is as radical as is her view of social roles, economic arrangements, and gender equality. Gilman supported Stanton’s Woman’s Bible against its condemnation at the 1896 women’s conference, as a mode of reinterpreting Scripture for feminist purposes. Her own social utopianism, however, relies not on Scripture, nor on Stanton’s liberalism, but on an anthropological, evolutionary vision which emphasizes social participation and responsibility.24 Gilman’s is a more cultural and radical rather than liberal feminism. Her utopian novel Herland imagines an entirely female society reproducing without men, whose social arrangements are modeled on the values of motherhood. Not individual emancipation, but service to community is exalted. In place of an enclosed women’s sphere, Gilman imagines a public world governed by women’s values—a women’s sphere that embraces society as a whole—although this can approach a collectivism that at times surfaces as racism, anti-Semitism, and nativism.25 Gilman recasts religion in the image of her ideal society. She displaces biblical discourses and mainstream religious terms for her own explicitly gendered religion of matriarchal principles. Her treatise His Religion and Hers contrasts a male religion of death to a female one of birth. The poem “The Real Religion” translates this schema into verse. Traditional religion is represented as male: Man, the hunter, Man, the warrior Slew for gain and slew for safety, Slew for rage, for sport, for glory… So the man’s mind, searching inward

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Saw in all one red reflection. Filled the world with dark religions Built on Death

In contrast, “Real Religion” is that of Woman, bearer; Woman, teacher… Service of the tireless mother Filling all the earth:—… Sees at last our real religion Built on Birth… The Soul in the body established … Sure faith in the world’s fresh spring Together we live, and grow.26

Gilman indicts traditional religion as complicitous with a male-­ dominated world, where domination itself is the moving force. Violence is there  justified across a wide range of motives: gain, safety, rage, sport, glory. Reality itself is perceived as a “reflection” of these male drives, “red” as blood and rage. But women’s religion, modeled on “Service of the tireless mother,” makes nurture the ultimate model of human spirituality. This religion is, or would be, life-giving and world-affirming. Gilman’s poem “The Living God” brings the Bible into this cultural feminist religious vision. She invokes the biblical “God that made the world” and proposes the familiar faith in a “predestined plan / to save the erring soul of man.” Yet divinity is not separate from material reality. Hers is a God “that is the world,” “God living in the earth.” “The sunlit sod is the breast of God” offers a feminized image of the divine. Gilman rejects a theology of “sin” in which “we may not win / The heaven of the blest.” The refrain repeats “Not near enough! Not clear enough / O God, come nearer still!” The verse then moves to a fuller feminization: The Living God. The God that is the world. The world? The world is man,—the work of man. Then—dare I follow what I see?— Then—by thy Glory—it must be That we are in thy plan? That strength divine in the work we do? That love in our mothers’ eyes? That wisdom clear in our thinking here? That power to help us rise?

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God in the daily work we’ve done, In the daily path we’ve trod? Stand still, my heart, for I am a part— I too—of the Living God!27

To the universal “world is man,” Gilman adds women: “we are in thy plan.” “Strength divine” is in the “work” women “do,” the “love in our mothers’ eyes.” Here to “rise” is still to be within the world, in “the daily work we’ve done” and the “daily path we’ve trod.” The “Living God” is unhierarchical, ungendered. Gilman’s writing recasts the Bible through transformation into feminine terms that deny traditional theologies and challenge society.

Moore, Plath, Sexton: Scriptural Ethics, Scriptural Ruptures Second wave feminism, with its commitment to liberal equality for women as individuals, has its roots in the nineteenth-century movements for women’s rights and suffrage, as in the feminist program of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. As the second wave emerged in strength in the later twentieth century, its emphasis on individual emancipation and liberation from traditional gender roles and other constraints largely tended to mute, mix, or push biblical engagement to the edge of poetic discourses. Biblical textures continue to be woven through women’s poetry, as also men’s. Yet, on the whole, the trend has been away from biblical engagement as a commanding discourse, both in poetry and in critical discussions of it. When the Bible is engaged, feminist contention with the Bible has intensified.28 There is a strong movement of “revision,” in which, granted that the Bible “both inspires and repels,” it is only possible to continue to participate in the “Bible’s history as self-revising tradition.”29 The Bible itself becomes a scene of contention, not of countering claims to its true interpretation, but to its continued authority, exemplary moral teaching, or even relevance. Marianne Moore (1887–1972) provides a kind of a bridge between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in her self-representation, her embrace of values coded feminine, and in her continued religious affiliations, even as she helped initiate radical innovations in poetic form and expression. Granddaughter and sister to Presbyterian ministers, living with her devout mother in New  York City, Moore is a major figure in American High

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Modernism. Unlike T.S. Eliot, however, hers is a liberal religion and democratic politics. A distinctive biblical poetics emerges most visibly in a set of her early poems invoking prophetic texts and Hebrew modes. Moore’s biblicism is as oblique and reticent as are her other strong commitments, hinted and enacted but never directly urged. In many poems there are brief biblical glances. The effect is centrifugal not centripetal, like seeds strewn that may grow in manifold ways. Modernist religion is emblemized in T.S. Eliot as High Church: monarchist, catholic, classicist. His religious poetics are more doctrinal than biblically textual. Moore’s poetics in contrast is non-­ doctrinal, non-dogmatic, and far more textual, not only in her use of allusions, but in her very approach to language. Traditions of multiplicity in biblical exegesis emerge in Moore through a resonance of figuration that always reaches into further possible associations. Moore’s texts are at once highly disciplined yet figurally open, more generative than guided. This is how she approaches the Bible as well. Moore’s is thus importantly a model of biblical engagement that is possible in a twentieth-century American world of diversity, which Moore celebrates and defends, although also warning that achieving it is like “The Labors of Hercules,” where one must convince snake-charming controversialists that one keeps on knowing “that the Negro is not brutal, that the Jew is not greedy, that the Oriental is not immoral, that the German is not a Hun”30

The quotation marks point to the “Notes” she purposely incompletely attached to her Complete Poems. There she attributes these words to “The Reverend J.W. Darr.” She offers them, on the one hand, as public shared speech, although not famously so. Above all, she warns against ignoring them as mere cliché, of not taking words seriously. Gender has its own distinctive position in Moore. Quite opposite to Whitman’s self-celebrating representation, even where or as he offers himself as a model for everyone, Moore’s selfhood is highly veiled in ways that can recall traditional female modesty. Yet, Moore follows in Whitman’s path of embrace of time and change, against closure and final judgment, in a poetics of figural multiplicity and generativity. This move toward

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temporality does not, however, signal in Moore a loss of ethical moorings or a renouncing of religion. It is in terms of ethics, long recognized as fundamental to Moore’s aesthetic, that Moore’s biblicism emerges. As Cristanne Miller argues, Hebrew poetics and prophetics served as a model for Moore’s stance as “ethical speaker addressing issues of public concern,” as well as for her handling of language and its poetic constructions.31 Moore’s notes from a Bible study course she attended in 1914 show a special interest in “Hebraic” biblical verse, in its language textures and its prophetic vision. In this and other ways Moore draws on American liberal Protestant traditions, which invite individual interpretation and response to biblical textuality. Hers was a “liberal, non-doctrinaire religious commitment” of Northern Protestantism during the progressive period, with strong “lay concern with the problems produced by immigration, rapid industrialization, and economic disparities.”32 Moore approached the Bible through this social-ethical commitment, normative in confirming each individual’s value as respecting the value of others. A range of poems refer to biblical figures or scenes and at times to scriptural Hebrew. Prophets are central figures in a list of titles: “The Past is the Present,” “The Bricks are Fallen Down, We Will Build with Hewn Stones. The Sycamores are Cut Down, We Will Change to Cedars” (Isaiah 9:10), “Feed Me, Also, River God,” and “Isaiah Jeremiah Ezekiel Daniel Jacob and Joseph.” Various biblical figures appear within poems: “Moses would not be grandson to Pharaoh” in “The Hero.” David is a poet-figure in “That Harp You Play so Well,” Solomon in “O to be a Dragon,” Jubal and Jabal in “Efforts at Affection,” Adam and Eve in “When I Buy Pictures.” Jonah is a pivotal figure in “Is Your Town Ninevah” and “Sojourn in the Whale.” Other poems with Hebrew or biblical address include “In the Days of Prismatic Color,” “Novices,” “Melchior Vulpius,” and “By Disposition of Angels.” Moore approaches the Bible in a spirit of Protestant call, but she never preaches. Instead, she imports into her verse interpretive ambiguity whose directions remain open. In Moore’s much discussed practices of quotation, so prevalent and characteristic of her work, neither the sources of quotation nor their interrelation are ever fully clear or finally determined. She suggests but does not declare. Many of Moore’s phrases are evocative but not definitive as to their very status as quotation or as to which of several sources they may recall. In this she at once honors and recasts others’ words. Two early poems quote passages from Isaiah 9:10: “The Bricks are Fallen Down, We Will Build with Hewn Stones,” incorporating other

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citations as well. These quotations bring the verses into contiguity with the prophetic sources, opening rather than anchoring each in relation to the other. The first makes the citation its title:

The Bricks are Fallen Down, We Will Build with Hewn Stones. The Sycamores are Cut Down, We Will Change to Cedars In what sense shall we be able to   Secure to ourselves peace and do as they did—   Who, when they were not able to rid    Themselves of war, cast out fear?     They did not say: “We shall not be brought      Into subjection by the naughtiness of the sea; Though we have ‘defeated ourselves with   False balances’ and laid weapons in the scale,   Glory shall spring from in-glory; hail,   Flood, earthquake, and famine shall Not inundate us nor shake the     Foundations of our inalienable energy”’33

The poem opens with a question that remains unclearly answered: “In what sense.” Does the prophetic citation, “The Bricks are Fallen Down, We Will Build with Hewn Stones,” announce arrogance? or fortitude, as a way to “cast out fear?” Isaiah in chapter 9:10 seems to be rebuking the people, as acting “in pride and stoutness of heart” (King James Version). Yet the poem also seems to invite to “do as they did,” that is, “secure to ourselves peace.” The Isaiah text is itself difficult to parse. Taken on its own it seems to declare initiative. But in its biblical context it seems to warn against presumption. This difficulty of interpretation is intensified as the poem emerges almost as a biblical word-puzzle, constructed in what amounts to a collage of biblical hints, almost like a commentary in which words from one verse are juxtaposed with words from another in the manner of midrash. Here the discontinuities leave meanings open even as they reverberate. “We shall not be brought / Into subjection” echoes 1 Corinthians 9:27: “But I  keep under my body, and bring  it  into subjection.” This quotation is further complicated by a double negative: this is what “they did not say,” and here they will “not be brought into subjection.” The play again is between defiance as positive defense or negative rebellion. “Though we have ‘defeated ourselves with / False balances’ and laid weapons in the scale” recalls the “False balances” denounced in Lev. 19:36 and Prov.

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11:1, as a fundamental ethics of dealing with others. “Flood, earthquake, and famine” quotes Deut. 32:23, then quoted in Matthew 24: 7 and Luke 21: 1. Other phrases suggest rather than directly cite: Does “laid weapons in the scale” echo Isaiah’s beating swords into ploughshares (Isaiah 2:4)? Does “the naughtiness of the sea,” invoke Jonah thrown into a “sea getting rougher and rougher” (Jonah 1:11) for his “naughtiness,” as one commentary puts it?34 “In-glory” seems a rephrasing of “vainglory,” perhaps as in Phil 2:3: “Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves.” Or perhaps Moore is relocating glory within the world. These quotations or echoes do not add up to clear pronouncement, message, or instruction. The poem recalls the work of biblical exegesis itself, the putting together of passages to inquire into their meaning. It demonstrates how such meaning is never easily fixed. In this sense, the poem itself rebukes the apocalyptic imagery of “hail, / Flood, earthquake and famine,” saying they “shall not inundate us.” If “Glory shall spring from in-glory,” it will not do so through apocalypse. The commitment is instead, in Moore’s characteristic mode of retraction, not to “shake the / Foundations of our inalienable energy,” an energy that is not final but ongoing. The poem “Feed Me, Also, River God” again cites Isaiah 9, “The bricks are fallen down,” here more clearly as a rebuke for “pride / And stoniness of heart.” You remember the Israelites who said In pride And stoniness of heart, The bricks are fallen down,   We will Build them with hewn stone, the sycamores are cut down   We will change to    Cedars! I am not ambitious to dress stones To renew Forts, nor to match My value in action against their ability to catch Up with arrested prosperity. I am not like Them, indefatigable.35

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“I am not ambitious to dress stones” seems to conform to the prohibition in Exodus 20:25 on the building of the altar, to which no tool—in the Hebrew cherev which also means sword—can be applied. Moore intensifies the imagery of stone by rendering as “Stoniness” the Hebrew words which the King James translates as “stoutness” and other translations as “pride” or “presumption.” Moore, that is, not only makes the image more tangible, but makes the heart itself into the stone that she refuses “to dress”—a play on the “stony heart” repeatedly rebuked in the Bible.36 From such stoniness, the speaker retreats. Perhaps it is just such stone-­ heartedness that has led the world to war in 1916.37 This poem’s speaker would not use stones “to renew / Forts.” She brings her ethical criticism closer to home, or reaches deeper into human conflict as rapacity, in enlisting her “value in action against their ability to catch / Up with arrested prosperity.” Ethics is betrayed in the reduction of action to competing material possession. Moore aims a final rebuke in “I am not like / Them, indefatigable.” To be human is to admit to limitation. Exceeding that leads to danger. The poem’s conclusion verges on the daring: But if you are a god you will Not discriminate against me. Yet—if you may fulfill None but prayers dressed As gifts in return for your own gifts—disregard the request.

Moore seems to be bringing her ethical concerns to the divine itself, as if testing God. The strong conditional tense of “If you are a god” suggests conditions for divinity itself, as invested in the very values Moore has enacted in the poem. A true divinity “will / Not discriminate against me.” Moore is unwilling to make her address a matter of exchange, where gift becomes mere payment or commercial equivalence. Her “prayers” suggest a kind of challenge to God, not to deny, but to recall the divine to its own ethics. Moore’s cautioning-prophetic biblical inflection emerges in a poem written in 1914: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Bloodshed and Strife are not of God What is war For; Is it not a sore   On this life’s body?38

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Again opening as a question, here there is something of an answer: “Is it not a sore / On this life’s body?” The wounding is not only on the individual bodies of those destroyed by war, but also on the body politic of the states in combat, and indeed on language itself as a possible public sphere of interchange. The poem’s final question is, again, also an answer: Yes? Although So Long as men will go   To battle fighting With gun-shot What Argument will not Fail of a hearing!

Gun-shot drowns out “argument,” makes public “hearing” fail. It is the opposite of prophetic language. As the poem also declares: “Bloodshed and strife are not of God.” Moore’s work is seeded with quotations. Biblical quotation is among them. It takes its place among her other references, without excessive fanfare. Moore approaches the Bible in tentative ways, opening possible exegeses that she never secures in definitive statement. She approaches with the modesty she is known for, recalling earlier modes of women’s self-­ representation, both as constraint and as claim to admirable values. This can be felt through many of her characteristic poetic techniques: its practices of quiet attention to often overlooked features and a placing of each, including herself as placer, within intricate, painstakingly assembled matrices. In prosody, there are her devoted and attentive metrical counts, her almost inaudible yet exquisite rhymes that make any syllable and part of speech worthy of attention. Her poetic forms enact a respect that is at once aesthetic and ethical. The Bible plays a part in such Moore aesthetic and ethics.39 The poem “When I Buy Pictures” (CP 48) makes this a topic. In point of fact, the poem is not about buying pictures—is about not buying them. It refuses such commercial ownership, choosing instead to be an “imaginary possessor” of treasures in museums where they are shared common wealth. Among the artifacts encountered in this public space is “the silver fence protecting Adam’s grave,” a near ekphrastic description of what Moore duly “Notes” to be a photograph she had found in Literary Digest (Jan. 5

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1918) (CP 268). To this biblically framed scene she adds a reference to the expulsion from Eden by the Archangel “Michael taking Adam by the wrist.” “When I Buy Pictures” then concludes with what the “Notes” attribute to A.R. Gordon’s The Poets of the Old Testament: It must not wish to disarm anything; nor may the approved triumph easily be honored— that which is great because something else is small. It comes to this: of whatever sort it is, it must be “lit with piercing glances into the life of things”: it must acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made it.

Value here attempts neither to “disarm” nor to “triumph.” It is not measured in ways that diminish something else—to be “great because something else is small.” The quotation she brings from Gordon then describes “spiritual forces” as what lights “with piercing glances into the life of things.” The spiritual is what opens into deeper and further vision. The poem “The Past is the Present” (CP 88), written in the context of the Bible Study class Moore attended from March until December, 1914, directly reflects on “Hebrew Poetry” as a mode of Moore’s own poetic:      If external action is effete   And rhyme is outmoded,    I shall revert to you,   Habakkuk, as when in a Bible class the teacher was speaking of unrhymed verse.   He said and I think I repeat his exact words “Hebrew poetry is   prose with a sort of heightened consciousness.”  Ecstasy affords     the occasion and expediency determines the form.

This poem’s opening “if” in the conditional tense does not in fact declare judgment against “external action” or “outmoded rhyme.”40 Yet Moore offers a more supple verse that follows its own self-generated measure, taking the “unrhymed verse” of Hebrew poetry as model. Moore’s “Notes” attribute her quotation to Smith’s Book of the Twelve Prophets, which glosses Habakkuk’s “heightened consciousness” as a “revelation … baffled by experience” (CP 276). Revelation does not totally unveil, but, “baffled by experience,” it requires deciphering never complete. There always remains the occasional and the expedient, which form enacts rather

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than fixing with finality. As an earlier epigraph of the poem poses: “How is one to know what one doesn’t know.”41 The poem’s eventual title, “The Past is the Present,” may be a witty comment on Hebrew grammar, but also declares both the continued interweaving of biblical text in present textual creation and the sense of hidden and further depths that the Bible represents and enacts. The poem “Novices” (CP 60) presents a dazzling description of Hebrew as a mode of ethical reflection. The title’s “Novices” are cautioned against “little assumptions of the scared ego confusing the issue,” where they are not able to look past themselves. Overconfidence can make them “blind to the right word, deaf to satire.” Included in their errors is the dismissal of “stuffy remarks of the Hebrews” as well as condescension to women, writing “the sort of thing that would in their judgment interest a lady.” Against these immature or unimaginative views, Moore concludes the poem with a crescendo of Hebraic praise, presided over by the prophets “Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel:” “split like a glass against a wall” in this “precipitate of dazzling impressions, the spontaneous unforced passion of the Hebrew language— an abyss of verbs full of reverberations and tempestuous energy” in which the action perpetuates action and angle is at variance with angle till submerged by the general action; obscured by “fathomless suggestions of color,” … in this drama of water against rocks—this “ocean of hurrying consonants”

This avalanche of quotations and juxtaposed, piled-up figures in a “precipitate of dazzling impressions” performs as well as describes Moore’s own poetic practices. Her poem enacts the “drama of water against rocks” it describes. Water and words both cascade in “the ‘ocean of hurrying consonants.’” Ocean and poetry are figures for each other and then also for the “the Hebrew language.” The quotations that follow are taken from George Adam Smith’s analysis of Isaiah 17: 12-13 in The Expositor’s Bible, which Moore had copied into her journal.42 The Hebrew language’s “action perpetuates action and angle is at variance with angle” applies to the biblical text overall. The Bible is a text “full of reverberations and tempestuous energy,” including interpretive responses to it, as are Moore’s in this poem. It is an “abyss” in being “fathomless.” No interpretation can

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exhaust it, no formula can fully contain it. The poem is a homage to both world and word beyond any total grasp, which the Bible at once attests to and inspires. Marianne Moore, in her experimental verse and the rigors of her self-­ representation, is a central voice of American women’s modernism. Gender, however, is one feature rather than the impelling center of attention. This is no longer the case in women poets who follow her. Gender and its roles become focal points of contention, finally questioning the very definitions of gender itself. Two major poets of this late second wave feminism still engage the Bible as a core discourse, but one which partakes in the broad contention with the conditions in which they find themselves. Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) and Anne Sexton (1928–1974) were both mid-­ twentieth-­century poets born in Massachusetts, whose work and life were tragically torn between conflicting gender roles as wives, mothers, and poets. Both committed suicide. Referred to as “confessional poets,” their work was often situated within the domestic and familial spheres assigned historically as “private,” but which they show to be an arena of power structure continuous with the “public” and political world. Their poetics is perhaps surprisingly engaged with biblical language and scene. In this they continue, but bring to a new critical edge, the poetic tradition of biblical contention, at once invoking and revoking biblical reference rather than competing for its authority. In Plath, the scene of biblical agon often pivots around motherhood. Traditionally imaged as one avenue to the divine, in Plath motherhood is turned into rage at contemporary cultural violation and women’s place in it. Her poem “Magi” critiques these biblical kings as “abstracts” that “hover like dull angels” over the child’s cradle. They do not bring blessing. They instead are alienated and remote from bodily life, from the “vulgar” embodiment of “a nose or an eye” or the concrete, immediate care of a “bellyache” or of “Love the mother of milk.” The poem repudiates these “papery godfolk” as “loveless.” It’s conclusion challenges: “What girl ever flourished in such company?”43 In the poem “Brasilia,” Mary, caught under bombardment, mourns her endangered rather than redemptive “baby a nail / Driven, driven in. / He shrieks in his grease” (p. 258). The poem “Mary’s Song” grotesquely presents the Christ child as a “Sunday lamb” that “cracks in its fat,” in a world of endless “ovens” such as burn heretics and Jews. Christ is the “child the world will kill and eat,” not in redemptive sacrifice but as cruel immolation (p. 257).

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Other feminized biblical figures haunt Plath. In “Lady Lazarus,” resurrection becomes a scene of strip tease, exposing male abusers to be like Nazis, and unleashing a Fury-like intent to “eat men like air” (p. 254). “Fever 103” stages an extensive unraveling of biblical topoi. It opens asking: “Pure? What does it mean?” and proceeds to make purity a mode of destructive reduction. Christ is a “Hothouse baby in its crib” set in a scene “Like Hiroshima” of nuclear Holocaust. Christ’s “three days, three nights” are a feverish delirium of almost gnostic hostility between world and God: “I am too pure for you or anyone. / Your body / Hurts me as the world hurts God.” Here to “rise” is an ascension of a “Virgin” as inflammable “pure acetylene.” I think I am going up, I think I may rise—— The beads of hot metal fly, and I love, I Am a pure acetylene Virgin Attended by roses, By kisses, by cherubim, By whatever these pink things mean. Not you, nor him Nor him, nor him (My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats)—— To Paradise. (p. 231)

Conjuring typical paintings, the Virgin is portrayed as “Attended by roses, / / By kisses, by cherubim,” to which is added, in one of Plath’s vivid deflations, “By whatever those pink things mean.” But to ascend here is to suffer the agony of dualism. The body is disdained as “old whore petticoats.” Body and self, self in body, must be dissolved and immolated for a “Paradise” that requires abandoning, or negating, the world, itself something close to demonic scene. This is less to revise or transform than to explode biblical reference. In Anne Sexton’s poetics, the Bible is yet more intensely intimate and violently contested. Hers is an excruciating ambivalence, as is registered in her epigraph to “The Jesus Papers”: “And would you mock God?” “God is not mocked except by believers.”44 “The Jesus Papers” offers a sequence from birth to crucifixion. In the opening nativity scene, “Jesus Suckles,”

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the child Jesus addresses a series of metaphors to and of Mary, punctuated by denials: “No. No. / All lies” (p. 337). The trend is toward humanizing Jesus, concluding with the possessive narcissism of a baby: “I am a truck. I run everything. I own you.” The following poem, “Jesus Awake,” challenges Jesus’s “fasting” and “celibate life” against “Sensuous Man and Woman,” to insist on his own sexuality. The poem is skeptical of the “celibate” man whose “scrolls [texts or testicles?] bit each other … His penis no longer arched with sorrow over Him” (p. 338). Transgression—or a Freudean humanizing?—is dared in “Jesus asleep” where “he desired Mary / His penis sang like a dog.” Sexuality as creative energy is suggested: “With his penis like a chisel / He carved the Pieta.” The Jesus miracles are recounted in everyday, colloquial language and domestic imagery. Yet there remains alienation and ambivalence. In the sequence’s conclusion, “The Author of the Jesus Paper speaks,” it is difficult to tell whether Christ sacrifices or saves women: “When … the Christ is born / we must all eat sacrifices / We must all eat beautiful women” (p. 345). Sexton is clearly drawn to as well as haunted by religious language and constructions. There seems almost a yearning so extreme as to be painful, although also self-defeating. It is as if she has internalized the bifurcation of biblical heritage, its ownership, and its disowning. In both she is distressed. Her later work especially has been called religious poetry, although from very acute angles. Any treatment of these texts is a large project not possible here. Religious longing, or agon, occurs in poems in earlier books, but extend into complex sequences in her later work, including “The Jesus Papers,” “O Ye Tongues” which consists of nine “Psalms” (pp. 396–416). Her posthumous collection, The Awful Rowing Toward God, apparently prepared for publication before her suicide, has been read as a final journey through ascetic divestment of life to a mystical death.45 Sexton does draw on radical ascetic tearing from the world, as in the poem “The Wall”: “take off your life like trousers,/ shoes, your underwear,/ take off your flesh / unpick the lock of your bones … take off the wall that separates you from God” (p. 445). Such divestment of body is a path she follows in many poems. In “Is it True,” for example, a vision of Christ as “a lamb that has been slain” is achieved in a death where “Maybe my evil body is done with.” However asceticism is regarded, Sexton powerfully represents the ambivalence to the body, specifically the female gendered body, in a dualism that feminists have exposed to be deeply implanted in Western tradition.46 Sexton’s verse is provocatively, transgressively embodied. She writes of before unmentioned female breasts and uterus and also sexual

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abuse. “Housewife” shows the woman as wife to the house as “another kind of skin,” itself become a female body, penetrated by the owner husband: “Men enter by force, drawn back like Jonah / into their fleshy mothers.” Her acknowledgment of the body thus, while liberating from taboos, maintains traditions of the flesh as enmired, sticky with materiality. As Sexton writes in “Consorting with Angels,” “I was tired of being a woman … I was tired of the gender of things” (p. 111). The poem concludes with a prelapsarian biblical vision of Eden as a release from gender, the way angels are: I lost my common gender and my final aspect Adam was on the left of me And Eve was on the right of me… We wove our arms together And rode under the sun. I was not a woman anymore, Not one thing or the other.

The speaker resides with both Adam and Eve, double-gendered or no-­ gendered, “not a woman anymore.” She has escaped gendered categories. Yet, as in the case of sects which transcend gender by renouncing the body, Sexton enters this post-gendered state by shedding her body altogether.47 Moving from Genesis to the Song of Songs, the poem concludes: O daughters of Jerusalem the king has brought me into his chamber. I am black and I am beautiful. I’ve been opened and undressed. I have no arms or legs. I’m all one skin like a fish. I’m no more a woman Than Christ was a man.

The erotic body of the Song of Songs is stripped of limbs. It is to be “like a fish,” unrecognizable in sex, undifferentiated. Sexton here discards the gendered body, perhaps any body, pointing beyond it to an almost trans state. Yet she still phrases this in biblical terms, framed by—or rather breaking the frame of—Eden, Adam, and Eve. To be one in Christ is to lose gendered body.

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On the whole, Sexton’s poems of religious agon draw more on tropes of Christian spirituality and mysticism than on biblical textualities, all with ambivalence. The poem “Sickness unto Death” alludes to John 11, the resurrection of Lazarus, but the poet, although she is offered “Bibles, crucifixes, a yellow daisy/ but I could not touch them.” The poem does trace a kind of resurrection, but one in which she sees herself as foul: a “house full of bowel movement” and a “defaced altar.” She escapes her body by eating herself “bite by bite … swallowing canker after canker.” Her self-immolation concludes in a vision of Jesus as he “put his mouth to mine / and gave me his air,” a rebirth that remains caught between a stricken body and a negative release from it (p.  441). “The Earth Falls Down” offers another biblical scene, as a frame for Sexton’s concerns about the world’s historical and environmental violence. The title points to the Fall, which, in the poem is ongoing and reenacted. As in the Fall, the question is one of blame. The poem proposes a list of possible culpabilities: “the weather” and other natural “conditions”; the “hearts of strangers” or “dogs” or “bosses” or “presidents for their unpardonable songs”; “Mothers and fathers of the world,” “lessons,” and “the pellets of power.” Then it is God she holds accountable: Blame it on God perhaps? He of the first opening that pushed us all into our first mistakes?

The “first opening” could be creation, or could be temptation, as of the apple. Either way, it is God, the poem  re-asking classic theological disputes, who has “pushed us all into our first mistakes.” But Sexton finally blames man, as Christian theology has done, but with a collapse of all distinctions between divine and human that is itself an indictment: No, I’ll blame it on Man For Man is God and man is eating the earth up like a candy bar and not one of them can be left alone with the ocean for it is known he will gulp it all down. (p. 424)

Consuming the apple is a continuing sin, as humans consume the world in gluttonous appetite. Here, biblical and theological energies underwrite

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the suffering that Sexton dramatizes throughout her work, which Jesus in his humanity jarringly and powerfully represents, if also remaining out of reach: There is a beautiful Jesus. He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef. How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in! How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes! But I can’t. Need is not quite belief. (“With Mercy for the Greedy,” p. 62)

Sexton’s is a living Bible in bitterness, protest, pain, appeal. It is difficult to tell whether hers is continuity or rupture.

African American Women Poets: Chanting the Bible Biblical contest runs deep in African American culture. For Black women poets, there is the challenge shared with other women as to how the biblical text and its traditions of interpretation may reflect women’s experiences or fail to do so. Disputes continue as to whether the Bible is to be censured as hierarchical, subordinationist, and authoritarian or invoked as emancipatory and egalitarian. But unlike white American women, the Bible comes to African Americans through a European culture different from and historically overriding their own. The very encounter by African Americans with the Bible took place through foreign and hostile religious and social institutions. Access to the biblical text and interpretation were closely controlled by slaveholders and churches affiliated with them, enlisted to confirm the subjugation of African Americans. The Bible was commandeered to deny the very humanity the Bible was claimed to teach. In their own reading of the Bible, therefore, Blacks needed to directly oppose the official white interpretation, especially of established Southern Christianity. To claim the Bible required “rupture, disruption, disturbance or explosion of Europeanized and white Protestant North American spin on the Bible and its traditions.”48 The Bible nevertheless became a powerful resource in Black culture, “both primer and sacred authoritative book for black people” and “one of the chief components of black existence.” Black women, too, “continued to see a reflection and sanctification of their own experience and community.”49 For them, the status of women added in their biblical experience to the racial and economic oppression of slavery and its aftermaths.

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These multiple biblical contests make Black women’s experience of the Bible intensely riven.50 Renita Weems poses the question “how and why, … for those committed to liberation perspectives on the Bible, … modern readers from marginalized communities continue to regard the Bible as meaningful resource for shaping modern existence.”51 On the one hand, the Bible was one of the bulwarks of African American common life, “fundamental to community” with “evidence of Bible everywhere in African American culture.”52 It is a core resource of both solidarity and individual value. On the other hand, it was used to control, coerce, and deny the dignity and human equality of slaves.53 The Bible is thus, in Allen Dwight Callahan terms, both “good book” and “poison book,” “curse and blessing.”54 This poses a “dilemma” as to whether the Bible should be “discarded or ‘re-tooled’,” abandoned, or reinterpreted. Biblical authority becomes both retained and contested.55 Through most of its history, African American culture does not disown the Bible, nor reject its language. Instead, the Bible is embraced as its own.56 But this means strong dispute against white American interpretation. Frederick Douglass vividly portrays the slaveholders as a false Christianity. Indeed, he concludes his Narrative with the “Parody”: They’ll loudly talk of Christ’s reward, And bind his image with a cord, And scold, and swing the lash abhorred, And sell their brother in the Lord To handcuffed heavenly union.57

Albert Raboteau recounts the formation of African Americans’ own congregations with their own pastors, toward, in effect, developing an independent black Christianity.58 And yet, even as biblical religion forms a core center of a distinct Black community, the claim to the Bible also points to participation in American culture. As a language that is common across racial and gendered lines, the Bible marks a joint life with Americans of all sorts, providing a common discourse even as it is experienced in distinct and indeed disputed ways. To reject the Bible, to receive the Bible, to transform the Bible: these are the possible avenues of African American women’s hermeneutics. Gender as well as race are points of stress. African American women poets accordingly forge a distinctive biblical poetics confronting white American forms. The question whether biblical worlds split apart into Black against

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white is partly reflected but also partly overcome in African American women’s poetry, which has been deeply inscribed with a still common biblical language.59 What is striking is that African American women’s poetry does not on the whole reject the Bible, does not discard and abandon it. Audre Lorde famously declared that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”60 The Bible may be implicated in this challenge. Yet, the Bible has remained a central, if not commanding mode of African American discourse, in poetry as in public speaking such as Martin Luther King Jr’s and John Lewis’s. Whether the Bible continues to hold a prominent cultural position is a question of public discourse today, as are its implications as to whether and how common discourse itself can be sustained or reforged. African American women’s poetry necessarily begins with Phyllis Wheatley.61 Du Bois in Souls of Black Folk places Wheatley within the “liberalizing tendencies of the latter half of the eighteenth century … along with kindlier relations between black and white.” She thereby represents for him “thoughts of ultimate adjustment and assimilation,” in the attempt “to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American.”62 Yet in Phyllis Wheatley’s poetic world, the two identities collide with each other even as she strives to superimpose them. Painful divisions emerge in her poem “On Being Brought From Africa to America”: Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land, Taught my benighted soul to understand That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too: Once I redemption neither sought nor knew. Some view our sable race with scornful eye, “Their colour is a diabolic die.” Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain, May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.

Here African identity is judged by a white American Christian standard. But the American Christian is also judged. The “scornful eye” that sees color as “a diabolic die” betrays its own Christian values. There is strain as the Black is measured by the white in color-coded language, seeking to “be refin’d” and “angelic.” Still, this is a rebuke against America’s own religious culture as its self-betrayal.

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A somewhat different configuration emerges in a biblical poem of Wheatley’s, “Goliath of Gath,” based on 1 Samuel Chap 17. Here are no direct markers of either race or gender. Yet the defeat of the Goliath giant by the marginal David endows the weak with power and justice with victory. So David defies Goliath: The God, who sav’d me from these beasts of prey,   “By me this monster in the dust shall lay.” . . That all the earth’s inhabitants may know   “That there’s a God, who governs all below: . . Small is my tribe, but valiant in the fight;   “Small is my city, but thy royal right.”

Spoken through the voice of a male biblical figure remote from Wheatley’s own, nonetheless the poem speaks for a minority “small … tribe” and stands against a monstrous power to declare the deliverance of the downtrodden by a just God. In the poetry of Frances Harper, a much clearer voice is sounded opposing domination, even as it embraces Christianity as emancipatory. Frances Harper was a leading Black woman in both abolition and the freedmen movement, as also women’s rights. Yet she is also a faithful Christian, raised in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, then moving to the more liberal Quaker and Unitarian movements, but throughout committed to the Bible as spiritual revelation. Biblical language ties her to her people, to uphold their dignity, their human value. The image of God grounds equality, liberty, and  respect. In Harper, a split opens between white Christianity as hypocritical and self-betraying and a true Black Christianity that is faithful to the Bible. In “The Bible Defense of Slavery” discussed above, she denounces the use of the Bible in defense of slavery as an outright evil. Many Harper texts enact such biblical combat. The Bible becomes in her an African American woman’s text, its story her own and her people’s story. The poem “Deliverance” is striking as a kind of individually authored spiritual. African American poetry in general reflects a kind of mixing of genres and sources rooted in oral and communal forms, with rhythms and phrasings drawn from sermons and songs.63 In Harper, this is a poetic that ties her own voice to her community’s. In many Harper poems, the accent is not on gender. She does have poems on Mary Magdelena as first witness to Christ’s resurrection, on Ruth and Naomi, on Rizpah and Hagar. Gendered representation is,

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however, implicit in Harper’s poetic voice itself, and she is firm in her role as biblical interpreter with its public power. The full implication of the prophetic role for women here emerges. The prophet speaks not for herself, but for an authority that calls her, and to a purpose beyond herself. She exercises power, but without herself becoming the focus of attention. Although she is strongly visible, at issue is not her private personhood but service in a public role. Women’s prophetic roles combine authority and modesty. This feminized prophetism is dramatized in Harper’s poem “Vashti,” which joins with other treatments by nineteenth-century women poets of this eclipsed biblical figure. In Harper, as in other treatments, Vashti is a queen who rebels against male command in the name of women’s values. Harper’s poem narrates how the King of Persia at a drunken feast orders “Vashti come to me.” In verses structured around his insistent and possessive “I” and “my,” his intent is to display her as one of “the treasures of my house,” the chief of his “costly jewels.” But she refuses his command to “Unveil her lovely face”: “Go, tell the King,” she proudly said, “That I am Persia’s Queen, And by his crowds of merry men I never will be seen. “A queen unveil’d before the crowd!— Upon each lip my name!— Why, Persia’s women all would blush And weep for Vashti’s shame! (FHP 181)

Interestingly, Vashti’s defiance is grounded in her modesty, which she sees as a positive value and a mode of self-definition. A crucial issue is voice. Here we hear Vashti speak, as we do not in the biblical text, a transformation from silence to language that constitutes a major trope in women’s writing. Harper fills in a gap in the Bible as her own midrash or commentary. The poem, as close reading of the text, importantly underscores a passage that does appear in the Book of Esther, on the public implication of Vashti’s actions. The king is told he must punish Vashti, lest The women, restive ‘neath our rule Would learn to scorn our name, And from her deed to us would come Reproach and burning shame.

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Vashti threatens to set an example of insubordination, of rebellion against male hierarchy and control. This “shame” as challenge to male “rule” contrasts with Vashti’s “shame” of obeying it, their “name” against her claiming her own. She in the poem abandons the palace—perhaps on her own accord (the Bible is not clear as to Vashti’s fate): She heard the King’s command And left her high estate; Strong in her earnest womanhood She calmly met her fate. And left the palace of the King Proud of her spotless name— A woman who could bend to grief But would not bow to shame.

Rejecting what she defines as shame—it is her obedience that would be shameful; she claims he own name, another central concern in women’s poetry involving both selfhood and voice, as does Harper in this poem of biblical womanhood. Rosemary Ruether has noted that the “close identification between progressive feminism and progressive Christianity typical of America in the nineteenth century collapse[d] in the 1920s.” By the time of the Second Wave, feminism emerged as “more secular and more suspicious of the positive character of Christianity,” largely assuming “that the Christian churches are inherently antiwoman.” But, as Ruether notes, this is not the same case for African American women.64 For them, as the nineteenth century moves forward into the twentieth, there is less of a core biblical matrix, but also, unlike many Anglo women poets, less rejection or dismissal. Renita Weems observes that the “Bible is in many ways alien and antagonistic to modern women’s identity,” and especially to that of African American women, given that the Bible has been an “instrument of dominant culture to subjugate them.” Yet the Bible remains “deep in African American religious life.” To reject the Bible altogether “would be to cut off my conversation with the women who birthed me.”65 Accordingly, African American women strain to remain “within their constituency within Christian and biblical traditions.”66 Weems here provides an argument for the Bible’s continued part in public culture. Its resonances from the past give connection among participants and historical depth to current discourses, even when embattled as in the American history of slavery.

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“To be fully enslaved is to be cut off from cultural roots,” writes Vincent Wimbush.67 To claim the Bible is to claim and define the past, as a language through which to negotiate America and their own place in it. Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) is a major figure of African American poetics, at a nexus of identities as African American, civic American, and woman. Born in Topeka, Kansas, her life and work are situated in the South Side of Chicago. Her poetry evolved through many different genres, voices, and poetic commitments. Mastery of traditional form is evident in the remarkable sonnets she has written. Yet she is never merely formalist, never sees the artwork as enclosed in an autonomous space. From the outset she engages, portrays, protests the conditions of Black Americans, although this becomes more commanding, direct, and urgent in her later work.68 Hers is a relational aesthetic where the artwork is a crossroads of encounters between history, culture, politics, ethics, religion, race, gender.69 To be relational, however, is also to be counter-­ relational, to open gaps and conflicts among the elements of the poetry. Bringing these diverse domains of experience into encounter thus also means registering and enacting their inconsistencies, contradictions, frictions. In Brooks, diverse poetic strands interweave through specifically African American ones of spirituals and hymns, sermons and speeches, dialect and protest. Her later poetry remains intense with imagery and rhythm, in what might be called a chant style—a sermon tradition that Zora Neal Hurston calls “a sort of liquefying of words”—rather than a strict formal grid.70 Brooks’s poetic drive is one of summons and response, call and recall, within communal contexts that include religious ones.71 Renita Weems speaks of African American women’s engagement with the Bible as “trying to find meaning and hope for their communal existence.”72 The Bible resonates through Brooks’s writing in this way, not as systematic exposition but as touchstone and echo.73 It reaches back into oral traditions of slavery, of preaching and spirituals, when illiteracy was forced although also resisted. Church community remains a background for Brooks. In her memoir, Report from Part I and Part II, she refers her poem “Beulah at Church” to her church experiences as a child. These were dual. Church is disciplinary—“big people closing you in:” and yet also is inviting: “I do not want to stay away … Something there surprises me.”74 This double pull toward yet away from religion threads through Brooks’s earlier formal verses, such as “the funeral,” “hunchback girl: she thinks of heaven,” “The preacher: ruminates behind the sermon,”

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“obituary for a living lady.” These offer the pained, loving irony of Brooks’s portraits of ghetto life.75 More specifically biblical is the sonnet “God Works in a Mysterious Way,” in which the Bible appears as a “Beam from a Book”76: But often now the youthful eye cuts down its Own dainty veiling. Or submits to winds. And many an eye that all its age has drawn it Beam from a Book endures the impudence Of modern glare that never heard of tact Or timeliness, or Mystery that shrouds Immortal joy: it merely can direct Chancing feet across dissembling clods. Out from Thy shadows, from Thy pleasant meadows, Quickly, in undiluted light. Be glad, whose Mansions are bright, to right Thy children’s air. If Thou be more than hate or atmosphere Step forth in splendor, mortify our wolves. Or we assume a sovereignty ourselves.

This sonnet’s compression places acute stress on the possibility of continued biblical reference. To disown the Bible would be “the youthful eye cut[ting] down its/ own dainty veiling.” Playing on revelation, the poem reminds that “veiling “is always retained even in what may be revealed, as a “Mystery that shrouds / Immortal joy.” Access is always partial. Yet to tear the veil away would be to “submit[] to winds,” to endure “the impudence of modern glare,” to lose the “tact or timeliness” of the “Book.” Note the poem writes of “timeliness” not timelessness. The Bible must enter historical experience. But to be reduced to time without direction would be to proceed with “Chancing feet across dissembling clods.” Specific biblical reference and commentary in the poem emerges with the “shadows” out of which Psalm 23 guides and the “Mansions are bright” promised in John 14:2. “Mortify our wolves” may point to John 10:12, which warns that the “hired hand” abandons the sheep to the wolf, as against a true shepherd. This is one option the poem traces, an abandonment of the “Beam from a Book.” And yet: there is a question. Is this inheritance really just “hate or atmosphere?” In which case, we will “assume a sovereignty ourselves.” But to do so returns us to the sonnet’s start, away from where “many an eye that all its age has drawn” and thus to lose the “Mystery.”

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Biblical energy emerges in Brooks’s later work as a “chant” poetry associated with Black preaching of rhythmic repetition. An important turn in her career came with her participation in the 1967 Fisk University Writers’ Conference in Nashville, Tennessee.77 From the formal virtuosity of her earlier verse she came to see her work as “tiny speeches to black people”; wanting “to ‘call’ all black people … I wish to reach black people in pulpits, black people in mines, on farms, on thrones.”78 Her “Sermon on the Warpland” sequence draws on preaching traditions and rhythms as their central organizing modes—what she called “preachments.”79 “Warpland” seems a complex pun: suggesting warp-land or war-planned or war-­ plane(d), which in all cases conjures a disturbed American state. The first “Sermon on the Warpland” bids to “Build now your Church, my brothers, sisters … . Prepare to meet … the brash and terrible weather.” The “Second Sermon on the Warpland” summons to face the “whirlwind,” as the condition that has to be met in order to move onward: This is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind… Salve salvage in the spin… prop a malign or failing light but know the whirlwind is our commonwealth.

“Whirlwind” evokes Job, and Hosea’s “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirl wind” (Hosea 8:7). So Brooks has said: “the world is a whirlwind and the social world is a whirlwind.”80 Yet the poem reaches beyond apocalypse. As a call to “Live!” there still can be “blooming,” even in whirlwind. There can be, she goes on, “salvage in the spin,” even if facing a “malign or failing light.” This rescue is also political: the poem calls on its readers to “know the whirlwind is our commonwealth.” Shared polity is the framework in which individuals act. However, leadership in this “commonwealth” is not arrogance, and art is not remote beauty: Not the easy man, who rides above them all… Not the pet bird of poets, that sweetest sonnet Shall straddle the whirlwind. Nevertheless, live.

Pointing beyond her own sweet sonnets, she takes on an assertive rhythmic leadership that calls to “live.”81

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The whirlwind returns, significantly, in the long Chant Poem “In Montgomery.” Undertaken as a journalistic account requested by the Ebony magazine in 1971, Brooks returned to Montgomery, Alabama, as the scene of the bus boycott protest against segregation of 1955–1956, which lasted 381  days. The poem travels through history, from past to present situation. It is composed of both direct and indirect quotation, from interviews with older people who remember the boycott; a black member of the legislature, Thomas Reed; E.D. Nixon, who led the legal suit against segregation; and young people living currently in Montgomery, which she calls “History City.” As D.H. Melhem writes: the poetry offers a “merging with composite voice of leadership and prophecy.”82 “In Montgomery” enacts the double force of the Bible as at once resource to draw on but also to resist, good book and poison book. The church remains a background presence in the poem’s portraits of community life, glimpsed through the poem’s course. The Bible itself is the focus of two sections: one early in the poem and as its conclusion. The opening scene is a starkly black and white public confrontation across historical time. The first thing I saw at Court Square corner was Black, lifting that bale … White white white is the Capitol… In Montgomery is no Race Problem. There is the white decision, the white and pleasant vow, that the white foot shall not release the Black neck.83

Black laborer confronts white Capitol. “In Montgomery is no Race Problem” is a white denial. But Brooks also announces her own voice: “My work: to cite in semi-song the / meaning.” Then follows an intensely woven biblical tapestry: Blackness is what stood up and clawed the oppressive ceiling till, behold, there was light and clawed the oppressive walls till, behold, there was room to extend! Blackness remembered the Bible it was Blackness that resaid: How forcible are right words set thine house in order

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they have sewn the wind a new commandment I give unto ye, that ye love one another, and: Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning

This passage invokes Genesis 1, “behold, there was light” as a figure for how “Blackness” “stood up” against “the oppressive ceiling” and “clawed the oppressive walls.” “Room to extend” brings the blessing of Genesis 28:14 to “Blackness”: “And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad.” There follows invocations of the prophets: Isaiah 38:1 command to King Hezekiah to “set thine house in order,” a political rebuke to American powers; and again Hosea 8:7, warning that to “have sewn the wind” will be to “reap the whirlwind.” But Hezekiah repented, and the Lord responded: “I have heard thy prayer, I have seen thy tears” (Isiah 38:5). So here, the whirlwind is turned toward the “new commandment” announced in John 13: 34, and the promise of Psalm 30:5, that although “weeping may endure for a night, joy cometh in the morning.” This is perhaps the poem’s promise: that “it was Blackness that resaid,” a rereading that shows “How forcible are right words.” Brooks’s, then, is a voice of healing and of hope as well as of rebuke and outrage. Biblical word carries both, is accusing and also consoling. In “In Montgomery,” there is “Mrs. Sallie Townsend” who “serves her Lord in Hickman’s Street.” Despite her crossed life, she has faith that “Everything is going to change,” even if they are “changes I won’t see.” The vision remains American: …a nation grow up high in the east that were to come through free in the world. And I know that’s one of the comings to be (GBM 5-6)

Genesis 28:14 promised: “thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east.” But America has not fulfilled its covenant. Being “free in the world” has not come. Yet hope remains that this is still “one of the comings to be.” The covenant promise appears again: “Montgomery was a pilot light for the nation” (Isaiah 49:6). But the dialect voice of the poem comments: we done sent up prayers and been real good

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and done gone through all that sufferin’. God is a righteous God He look down peaceful on all. But Jesus get MAD! Jesus’ll get up and DO somp’m.”

God is “righteous” in multiple biblical verses. But here the voices of Montgomery call God to judge, or perhaps to judgment, for a world that does not realize divine justice: “Jesus get MAD!” “In Montgomery’s” conclusion is set inside the “Dexter Avenue Baptist Church” where Martin Luther King was pastor at the time of the boycott and from which he emerged as a national prophetic leader. “Martin King / gave the True Bread” which John announced “comes down from heaven and gives life to the world” (John 6: 58-59). Years later, this “True Bread” is “still strengthening.” The poem invokes “the ’59 Covenant / to refresh our thinking about the / mission and glory of this Church.” The preacher explicates: The slaves found correspondence between the Scriptures, especially the Old Testament, and the religions they had known in Africa. The Christian religion is a SINGING religion. (28)

Biblical and Black song intercross. The poem then concludes with gospel song, played on “WBAX, the Soul station,” where “The Jackson Southernaires” sing “The Old Ship of Zion!” A plea for justice and charity echoes Isaiah 58:7: WBAX is pleading: Try to feed somebody who’s HUNGRY Try to clothe somebody who’s Naked Try to visit somebody who’s SICK or in PRISON (28)

The vision and voice soar. Sadly, the poem’s last couplet gainsays these words: Martin Luther King is not free. Nor is Montgomery

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The covenant is not yet kept. Yet this very rebuke is made in biblical words as biblical call. There is one biblical text that is strangely invisible in Brooks’s work—a kind of biblical silence or ghost. Ilana Pardes has underscored the importance of the Song of Songs 1:5 to Black aesthetic: “I am black, but [and] comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem.”84 Brooks conducts throughout her work from early to late what Harry Shaw has called the “war with beauty.”85 The damage done to Black girls and women in their subjection to and measurement by white beauty standards is an ongoing concern among Brooks’s many portraits of Black women and addresses to them. “In Montgomery” does cite the Song of Songs 2:16, “My beloved is mine, and I am his” as a “Hymn 312: “I Am Thine, O Lord, I have heard Thy voice / And it / told Thy love to me.” The poem that concludes Brooks’s last poetry collection, “Infirm,” opens invoking Jeremiah 17:14 and 20: “Heal me, LORD, and I will be healed … Say to them, ‘Hear the word of the Lord.’” Concurrent is Luke 5:15 “and went there a fame abroad of him: and great multitudes came together to hear, and to be healed by him of their infirmities.” What follows echoes, without citing, the Song of Songs: Everybody here is infirm. Everybody here is infirm. Oh, Mend me, Mend me, Lord. Today I say to them say to them, say to them Lord: look! I am beautiful… You are beautiful too.

Here is powerful biblical blessing and promise; yet also omission of direct citation, as if only through the gap between the Bible’s redemptive power and its destructive use can it remain a language of poetry and Black communal life.

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Cultural Divides As the twentieth century has moved into the twenty-first, the cultural divide between biblical and other discourses has seemed to widen. On one side the Bible is claimed by conservative and fundamentalist groups as their own, insisting on their interpretation as absolute and “literal,” but which is in fact firmly based in their specific interpretive frameworks, with their own set of values, reading of history, and political claims.86 On the other side, secularizing discourses are often suspicious of religion as disciplinary regime, through which power is exercised unequally and unjustly.87 For many, the Bible no longer provides moral authority or a ground of values long tied to American egalitarian and emancipatory possibility. What persists in poetry, however, is a variety of spiritual appeals loosely associated with biblical echoes, not as a governing framework either in poetics or references, but as a figural energy that flows and ebbs through poetic textures. Yet in that guise, occasional and evocative, the Bible continues to resonate, with readers responding to it as a public discourse tying the poems  to histories of experience. The Bible does not govern, but it resonates. Jewish women writers such as Marge Piercy in The Art of Blessing the Day, Alicia Ostriker in The Book of Life, Jacqueline Osherow and Myra Sklerew through many collections, refract Jewish scenes, which include biblical traditions. Judy Grahn’s “My Name is Judith,” published in Work of a Common Woman, opens with a regendering of the Hebrew name “Judith, meaning / She Who is Praised,” followed by a commentary both defying and elaborating the Song of Songs: “do not mistake my breasts / for mounds of potatoes … do not take my lips for a streak of luck / nor my neck for an appletree.” The Song is retracted as an allegory of love between God and soul or people or church. Instead, it becomes a material textual base for contesting the very possibility of love under society’s conditions: I cannot call my name Love. if Love means rebirth then when I see us dead on our feet . . do not get me mixed up with Love. not until we have ground we call our own to stand on & weapons of our own in hand.88

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The Bible itself emerges as a powerful weapon almost despite itself. Its phrases still resonate, still invite recognition and response, even if in critical angle against the text’s traditions of reading. For African American women poets, Scripture, too, is a contested arena, but as a deeply intimate experience with its own traditions and histories. This includes critique but also strong identification. Biblical experience here is not limited to textuality as such. Vincent Wimbush proposes that “Scripture” within Black community life is not “texts per se” but “textures, gestures, and power—namely the signs, material products, ritual practices and performances, expressivities, orientations, ethics and politics associated with the phenomenon of the invention and use of ‘scriptures.’”89 As in Gwendolyn Brooks’s later poetry, preaching and song are experiential frames for biblical resonances, in modes of chant. Bruce Rosenberg’s The Art of the American Folk Preacher analyzes sermon and spirituals practices of chant as rhythmic repetition of “formulaic” phrases, “regularly employed under the same metrical conditions.” Taking the Bible as its launching point and based in its “lexical concentration,” the chant sermon proceeds through parallelisms “as a series of incremental repetitions.”90 As James Weldon Johnson puts it, the preacher’s “secret of oratory is a progression of rhythmic words.”91 The rhythms are shared with the congregation, who in turn respond in what becomes a participatory performance with an antiphonal feel, an “active role of the audience in performance.” “Nearly all of the audience know the stories from the Bible,” writes Rosenberg, which remains the “focus and structural basis of the sermons,” using “familiar stories and words.” Participation thus relies on and is energized by the Bible as a “repeated use of a shared universal language.” 92 Chant tradition with its religious roots describes the poetics of Maya Angelou (1928–2914). Born in St. Louis, Missouri, she arose out of poverty, rape,  and displacement. She began to write when she moved to Brooklyn at the age of thirty, having met James Baldwin and other writers, as well as Martin Luther King, Jr. She spent time in Egypt, and then Ghana, in 1963 for three years, taking on her African name. She returned to the United States as a writer, actress, and activist.93 Asked about her methods, she answers: “I keep in my writing room a Bible, a dictionary, Roget’s Thesaurus.”94 Her poem, “Just Like Job” performs a response to biblical text through chant rhythmic repetition95: My Lord, my Lord, long have I cried out to Thee

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in the heat of the sun, the cool of the moon, my screams searched the heavens for Thee. my God, when my blanket was nothing but dew, rags and bones were all I owned, I chanted Your name just like Job.96

The opening “My Lord” enacts Jesus’s own cry from the cross as well as prayer’s pleading. “Heat of the sun” / “cool of the moon” follows biblical parallel construction. “Screams” both accuse and search. Like Job, the speaker is reduced to “Rags and bones.” Still, “I chanted your name.” Father, Father, my life give I gladly to Thee deep rivers ahead high mountains above my soul wants only Your love but fears gather round like wolves in the dark. have You forgotten my name? O Lord, come to Your child, O Lord, forget me not. You said to lean on Your arm and I’m leaning you said to trust in Your love and I’m trusting you said to call on Your name and I’m calling I’m stepping out on Your word.

“Deep rivers ahead / High mountains above” are parallelisms familiar to biblical prosody and spiritual song. Love and fears parallel and counter each other. “Have you forgotten my name” is at once question and longing. What then follows is chanting, antiphonal repetition, call and response between divine and poet. This is indeed a “stepping out on Your word,” which phrase becomes a repeated refrain through the last part of the poem. The poem then concludes by turning from Job to the Song of Songs, naming God “My beautiful Rose of Sharon, / And I’m stepping out on Your word.”

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The poetic career of Carolyn Rodgers (1940–2010) is itself almost an emblem of tensions between the call of biblical religion within African American community and suspicion of it as a white European institution. Growing up in Bronzeville, Rodgers first worked as a social worker, then joined Gwendolyn Brooks’s Writer’s Workshop from 1967 to 1971, which was dedicated to promoting the arts in the city of Chicago. Her poem “To Gwen” pays tribute to her as “all that we must be and are yet to become.”97 She then became active in the Black Arts Movement, writing in black dialect, idioms, slang, in a transgressive breaking away from standard English. As a woman, she likewise challenged conventional gender roles, transposing the critique of domesticity that had emerged in confessional poets such as Plath and Sexton to her own social contexts.98 Rodgers, however, came up against a strongly masculinist mode in the Black Arts Movement, in which women poets felt themselves to be silenced both as figures and as voices.99 She asserted herself in purposely aggressive modes. Rodger’s “The Last M.F.” is resolutely transgressive: They say, that I should not use the word mothafucka anymo in my poetry or in any speech I give. they say, that I must and can only say it to myself as the new Black Womanhood suggests a softer self100

Rodgers, however, experienced something like a conversion experience, or perhaps reconciliation, between her revolutionary nationalism and traditions of Christianity. Her late collection How I got Ovah, which was nominated for a National Book Award (and interestingly does not include “The Last M.F.”), reads almost like a journal or journey from her earlier, Black Arts revolutionary aesthetics to her later “religious turn” embracing Christian community as powerful resource within Black culture.101 In a striking series of poems of conversation / confrontation, a daughter’s militant Black nationalism challenges her mother’s continued church culture. A series of poems including the “Jesus was Crucified, It must be Deep” (8-10) published earlier, followed by later poems responding to it, “It is Deep” (11-12) and “How I got ovah II / It is Deep II” (77-78), present contrasting positions between daughter and mother as they confront each other. A militant rejection of white society fences with a no less critical

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yet less militant response to racism. Younger against older generation, revolutionary ideologies against more traditional Christian church community, go back and forth in an almost antiphonal rhythm.102 In “Jesus was Crucified” the mother telephones the daughter who is “sick” and harangues her: “U DON’T BELIEVE IN GOD NO MO DO U?” she sd if yuh read yuh bible it’ll show u … sh sd what was in the bible was happnin now, fire & all, and she sd just cause I didn’t      believe the bible don’t make it not true

The daughter responds:           (and I sd)     just cause she believe the bible didn’t make it true and sh sd it is it is and deep deep down in you heart u know it’s true           (and I sd) it must be d           eeeep  (p. 8)

Black vernacular, experimental lineation, non-standard grammar and orthography, informal speech patterning, all reflect Rodgers’ Black Aesthetic rooted in the Black Arts Movement. Yet this aesthetic of transgression of standard English, experimental and colloquial energy continue into later poems of reconciliation.103 The phrase “it must be d / eeeep” appears here as the daughter’s scoffing response to her mother’s affirmation of the “bible,” that “deep deep down / in you heart u know it’s true.” Even here, despite their differences, the poem concludes with the fundamental bond between mother and daughter:     but befo she hung up my motha sd     well girl, if yuh need me call me i hope we don’t have to straighten the truth out no mo. i sd I hoped we didn’t too

The tie between mother and daughter is the thread binding the poems in the series together. The phrase “It must be Deep,” first skeptical, becomes declaration in the next poem “It is Deep,” with the subtitle: “(don’t never forget the bridge that you crossed over on).” In this poem,

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“My mother, religiously girdled in /her god” visits the daughter, “concern making her gruff and tight-lipped/ and scared / that her ‘baby’ was starving” (p. 11). Now the daughter’s anger begins to soften as she draws closer to the mother’s experience. The daughter concedes that her “religiously girdled mother” would “not be considered ‘relevant’ or ‘Black’ but / there she was, standing in my room.” And her mother, too, has endured “the factory where she ‘cut uh slave,’” and, as the poem concludes, has “waded through a storm.” Above all, the mother has come now at her daughter’s need. The opening image is of the telephone as “witch cord” that has been “disconnected.” The mother, understanding that “disconnection results from non-payment of bill (s),” makes the telephone itself an image of connection and disconnection, payment and duress, technology and personal attachment. This is the deepest stratum the poem reveals: “you got folks who care about you…” Care is what bridges the distance between the daughter’s militant attempt at revolution and the mother’s tie to tradition. So the poem’s conclusion returns to the subtitle: (don’t never forget the bridge that you crossed over on) … My mother, religious-negro, proud of having waded through a storm, is very obviously, a sturdy Black bridge that I crossed over, on.

Rodger’s shift from militant nationalist to Christian calling has been described as a move from public to private and personal spheres. This, however, overlooks how she portrays religion importantly to make up a public community, which frames and also strengthens individuals in both social and personal life. In what has been called a “dialogue with the street,” her protest is conducted with a sense of her culture’s past and institutions, represented by her mother, through her use of vernacular and experiment as it engages spirituals and sermon traditions.104 The very back and forth between mother and daughter echoes the call and response of spirituals and church participation. The key figure of bridge here is located through her mother as “sturdy Black bridge that I /crossed over on.”105 The volume’s concluding poem, biblically titled “Living Water,” again reminds of the deep purpose of Rodger’s poetic devotion: “to bring you across the bridge / our blood and bones create” (p. 81).

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The collection’s title “How I got ovah,” echoes black gospel song and slang for spiritual triumph, as overcoming worldly hardships and outwitting an adversary.106 The poem “i got ovah II / It Is Deep II” near the collection’s end (p.  77) recounts the daughter’s reluctance to attend church with her mother, who sings the “holy gospel choir” the spiritual song “oh oh oh somebody touched me.” The song begins to itself touch the daughter, to whom the mother affirms: “musta been the hand of the Lord.” In the poem “and when the revolution came” (p. 63), in antiphonal structure “the militants” exhort the “church folks” who give their response in turn. The militants issue urgent calls to “wake up … niggers you got to change,” declaring and when the revolution came the militants said all you church going niggers got to give up easter and Christmas and the bible cause that’s white man’s religion.

But “the church folks said well well well well,” which Zora Lee Hurston mentions as typical response to sermon performance.107 To the militants claim to “build black institutions,” the church folk reply that the church, through harsh years, have built “anything that needs building.” When the “militants” say “our children call each other sister and brother” the “church folks” say “yes, lord Jesus we been calling each other/ sister and brother a long time.” Rodgers here is not repudiating the “revolution” and its “militants,” nor simply endorsing the “church folk.” She does not ignore the hardship and racism in which Black lives are lived and biblical religion’s complicity in it. Nevertheless, in Rodgers, biblical language in Black vernacular with sermonic and spiritual rhythms affirms a Black Christianity while recording its oppression. In the poem “Some Me of Beauty,” Rodgers names herself as “a Woman, human / and black,” making this the crux of her “spiritual transformation / a root revival of love” (p. 53). The possibility of bridging different cultural realms through the biblical language so deeply embedded in American poetics and culture persists in African American women’s poetry, alongside other discourses. The public power of African American women’s voices with biblical resonance dramatically is displayed in the Inaugural poems read by Maya Angelou and

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Amanda Gorman. Maya Angelou performed at President Clinton’s inauguration, with her poem “On The Pulse of the Morning” deeply biblical. Opening apparently with the natural and evolutionary history of “A Rock, A River and A Tree,” the poem gradually interweaves and reveals these as figures with sacral and biblical history. Humans beyond nature are “created only a little lower than / The angels.” The slave spiritual “Down by the Riverside” is recalled as “today I call you to my riverside, / If you will study war no more,” based in Isaiah 2:4. The poem’s focal image of the “Rock,” a biblical epithet of God, specifically evokes Isiah 2: 10: “Go into the rocks, hide in the ground.” The Rock cries out to us today, you may stand upon me, But do not hide your face.

This recalls the slave spiritual, “O Sinnerman” with its “run to the rock, rock won’t you hide me.” This spiritual image in turn recalls Exodus 33, where God bids Moses to “stand upon a rock” when he asks to see the “divine glory,” wherewith he instead witnesses God as passing by. Writes Angelou: “The Rock cries out to us today, you may stand upon me, / But do not hide your face.” Further scriptural texts come in with Come, Clad in peace, and I will sing the songs The Creator gave to me when I and the Tree and the rock were one.

“Clad in peace” suggests the Prince of Peace of Isaiah 9:6. “I will sing the songs” recalls Psalm 137 “By the rivers of Babylon” when the children of Israel are asked to “sing one of the songs of Zion.” As to “Tree,” with a very light touch it offers a Christic image. “They hear the first and last of every Tree / Speak to humankind today” recalls “I am the alpha and omega” announced in the book of Revelation (1:8, 1: 17-18, 21: 6-7). What follows is a witness on the one hand to a bloody and cruel history of “wrenching pain”; on the other, a vision of “bright morning,” a traditional and spiritual phrase for redemption: I am that Tree planted by the River, Which will not be moved. I, the Rock, I the River, I the Tree

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I am yours—your passages have been paid. Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need For this bright morning dawning for you.

The “passages” that “have been paid” evokes the middle passage of the slave trade, which Angelou recalls slaves that have been “Sold, stolen, arriving on the nightmare, / Praying for a dream.” In Christic terms, these have “been paid” through a “piercing” that points to the suffering of the crucifixion. But the poem is not doctrinal, embracing different faiths and opening from “Private need” to “your most public self.” Angelou as woman poet takes up just this prophetic stance. Against the “mouths spilling words / Armed for slaughter” she lists and names diverse peoples in and beyond America. She addresses and awakens a shared world of “your sister’s eyes, … your Brother’s face, your country.” Thus Angelou, in language at once biblical and spiritual bids to “Lift up your eyes upon / This day breaking for you.” Amanda Gorman (born 1998) follows Maya Angelou as Inaugural Poet. Raised by a single mother in Los Angeles, she attended Harvard 2016–2020. In her poem “The Hill We Climb,” the Bible is among the threads she weaves. Speaking as and for “we,” she insists on her and her hearers inclusion in what emerges as an American project in civic, plural, individual, and communal senses. “We the successors of a country and a time” makes her story of “a skinny Black girl / descended from slaves” into an American one, and the American story into hers. Insistent in steadily repeated anaphora opening line after line, she declares an inclusive and summoning “We”: “We close the divide,” “We lay down our arms.” “We seek harm to none and harmony to all” renews Lincoln’s Second Inaugural “With malice towards none, with charity for all.” Gorman’s poetry works through rhythmic emphasis and pause, play on key words and repetitions, immediate concrete references, and also archetypal references. It opens its verses in appeal to a joint heritage, even while naming failures and betrayals. But in doing so it presses that heritage in more open and just directions than history has as yet. When day comes we ask ourselves Where can we find light in this never-ending shade?108

History has indeed been dark. Yet the appeal to light, to the day to come, sounds a redemptive note, as in Harper’s “A Brighter Coming Day.” A

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more direct biblical reference to Jonah follows in “We braved the belly of the beast,” bringing normal idiom toward allusion. Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken but simply unfinished… but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect We are striving to forge a union with purpose Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree And no one shall make them afraid If we’re to live up to our own time Then victory won’t lie in the blade But in all the bridges we’ve made That is the promise to glade The hill we climb …

“Witnessed” is a religious term no less than a legal one. “A nation that isn’t broken” might echo 2 Chronicles 15:6-7, “And they were broken in pieces, nation against nation… But ye be strong, and let not your hands be slack, for your work shall be rewarded.” What follows is civic language in the Revolutionary tradition, with an amendment pressing from perfection to purpose: “not to form a more perfect union,” but “striving to form a union that is perfect, / we are striving to forge a union with purpose.” Perfection implies totality, an End Time notion in which completion signals stoppage. But we live in human time. In time we are responsible, in time striving takes place. Purpose here includes that effort of striving itself. Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one shall make them afraid. If we’re to live up to our own time Then victory won’t lie in the blade.

recalls three biblical passages, Micah 4:1-5; 1 Kings 4:25; and Zechariah 3:10. George Washington famously quoted Micah in his letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, bidding the “children of the stock of Abraham” to “continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants, while everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig

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three and there shall be none to make him afraid.” In Micah the vision is part of the prophecy when swords shall be beaten into plowshares, nation will not lift up sword against nation, and “all the peoples walk each one in the name of its God.” Gorman brings the text specifically to confirm diversity and equality, republican values interwoven into biblical ones. The call here is not to transcend time but to live “up to our own time.” “Victory won’t lie in the blade” suggests Michah’s remade swords. The poem’s title, “The Hill We Climb” also recalls Michah: “and many nations shall go and say, ‘Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord.’” This has, however, a specifically American intonation, in John Winthrop’s sermon on the Arabella en route to America in 1630. Winthrop envisions the founding to come as “a city on a hill,” a new Jerusalem but on earth, a purpose toward which to strive, as Gorman further cites: in this faith we trust For while we have our eyes on the future history has its eyes on us This is the era of just redemption We feared at its inception We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour      but within it we found the power to author a new chapter.

“In this faith we trust” inevitably recalls even as it rewrites the American motto “In God we trust.” “Our eyes are on future / history has its eyes on us” strongly echoes Winthrop’s “The eyes of all people are upon us.” Future and past answer each other in a chiasm pointing futureward. Gorman envisions an “era of just redemption,” her repeated “We” insistently inscribing herself as Black American woman in American promise. The image “to author a new chapter” offers poetry as model for such vision, for citizenship itself. Gorman’s poem “In this Place” confirms her civic commitment. Delivered at the Library of Congress, the poem reclaims and rewrites American narrative rather than dismantling it. It registers “resistance” and includes injustices and racism in its roster. The “undocumented” march with other Americans, while “men so white they gleam blue” in “Charlottesville” are  rebuked in their continued intolerance and race hatred. They themselves “seem like statues,” frozen in a past whose site is

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a struggle over which should be America’s monument. The library site of the poem, in contrast, itself becomes an image of America, with its citizens its writers. The poem’s opening declares and then repeats throughout as a refrain: “There’s a poem in this place … Our country / our America / our American lyric to write—/ a poem by the people.” “Tyrants fear the poet,” she goes on. As in Whitman, creativity and citizenship mirror each other and awaken each self: There’s a poem in this place— A poem in America A poet in every American Who rewrites this nation.

Gorman carries forward the tradition of poetry as public event, where poetry can launch words in intensified ways that resound and are recalled through social spaces. Her own purpose is emphatically civic. “The Hill We Climb” declares: “We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it. / Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.” The difference between “shatter” and “share” are a few mere letters. The poem acknowledges, indeed exposes division and danger as what “we” must confront, then answers summoning to “The Hill We Climb.”

Final Remarks Wilfred Cantwell Smith, in his book What Is Scripture, writes: “Being scripture is not a quality inherent in a given text, or type of text, so much as [it is] an interactive relation between that text and a community of persons.”109 The meaning of the text necessarily changes as the communities of persons do. This at once marks difference and connection. Lincoln famously reflected in his Second Inaugural of North and South: “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other … The prayers of both could not be answered ~ that of neither has been answered fully.” Here he unveils in one breath both conflict and commonality. His own response to this challenging and mysterious complex of biblical authorities he takes from Isaiah 66:5, “let us judge not that we be not judged.” Here he already points away from Final Judgments or absolute and dogmatic claims, to the interchange of interpretation as an ongoing mode of relationship rather than unbridgeable confrontation.

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If the Bible took part in tearing the national fabric in the Civil War, it has also been seen to “draw the nation back together.”110 Edmund Morgan writes that the Puritan heritage, “while contributing to divisions among Americans, also furnished both sides with a common set of values that limited the extent and bitterness of divisions and thus helped to make a United States Constitution possible.”111 Perry Miller similarly notes that in their rivalry, the proliferating churches still “were all members of one single society,” and indeed, that they formed a counterforce against atomism and the “incoherent individualism” that America also generates.112 Most recently, Robert Putnam in his sociological study Amazing Grace, shows significant overlap within the wide range of religious forms and affiliations, with the majority feeling that religion plays a positive role in American life whose “diversity is embodied within these [social] networks, enable[ing] the peaceful co-existence of myriad religions in contemporary America.”113 In challenging any simply “literal” understanding of the Bible, Hans Frei outlines how reading the Bible takes place within, and also shapes culture, as and through “common identifying patterns making up a symbolized world and the communal ways of inhabiting it.”114 The move from literalism to interpretive activism reminds that the Bible’s words are not only individual possessions but shared among many, which means they are open to interaction, at each point and through a long history which continues to resonate. In its own biblical setting as well as in poetic recreation, the biblical word is one in which many voices participate. To speak in a biblical language is to be part of an echoing world of words addressing and responding, in different voices, thus creating an idiom in which many can take part. The expansion of meanings, echoes, resonances, and implications suggests that multiple viewpoints, even in disagreement, are an intrinsic part of ongoing biblical experience. The Bible in poetry, in the multiplicity and figural energy of verse, counters the taking of absolute positions, of exclusive claims to understanding, and reductive uses of biblical authority. Poetry takes part in the experience of commentary and interpretation intrinsic to biblical encounter. This very inevitability of interpretation in biblical reading affirms not authoritarian truths but human address and response as itself a norm for which the Bible remains a powerful scene. Cultural language collapses into conflict and war when interpretation itself goes unrecognized and is mistaken for absolute truth.

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The experience of the Bible in poetry can underscore and illuminate how interpretation generates more interpretation, richly incomplete, unfolding further dimensions of meaning through a shared past and a possible common, although not unitary, present and future.

Notes 1. Carolyn de Swarte Gifford, “American Women and the Bible: The Nature of Women as a Hermeneutical Issue,” Feminist Perspectives on Biblical Scholarship, ed. Adela Yarbro Collins (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985), pp. 11–33, pp. 16–17. 2. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman’s Bible, p. 7. 3. Kathi Kern, Mrs. Stanton’s Bible (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 100. 4. Lisa Strange, “Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Woman’s Bible and the Roots of Feminist Theology,” Gender Issues Fall 1999 15–36, that Stanton “defined the Bible as the foundation of women’s oppression and the greatest stumbling block to women’s complete emancipation,” p.  34. Erika Larsen, “Radical Words Then and Now: The Historical and Contemporary Impact of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible,” Criterion 10:2 2017, 45–60; Emily R. Mace, “Feminist Forerunners and a Usable Past: A Historiography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible,” JFSR 25.2 (2009) 5–23, p. 6. 5. James h. Smylie, “The Woman’s Bible and the Spiritual Crisis,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Fall 1976, Vol. 59, No. 3 (Fall 1976), pp. 305–328, p. 317; Kern, p. 96. 6. Chanta M. Haywood, Prophesying Daughters: Black Women Preachers and the Word, 1823–1913 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), p. 27. 7. As Phyllis Trible was among the first to outline, feminist options include to “reject” the Bible as “patriarchal religion,” but also the possibility to “discover freedom through the appropriation of biblical symbols,” “Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Mar., 1973, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Mar., 1973), pp. 30–48, p. 31. 8. W.  E. B.  Du Bois, “The Negro Church,” Proceedings of the Eighth Conference for the Study of the Negro’s Problems, Atlanta University, Georgia 1903, p. ii. Cf. Souls of Black Folk, p.  137. Cf. Sylvia Frey “Jubilee,” that “slaves pursued religion as a chief, often the only way to define self and discover community,” p. 88. 9. Mark Noll, America’s God, p. 395.

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10. Mark Noll, In the Beginning Was the Word (NY: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 204. 11. Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Moral Woman and Immoral Man,” Politics and Society 4 (4) 1974, 453–473. Aileen Kraditor, The Ideas of the  Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (NY: Columbia University Press, 1965), argues that suffrage was won not on the basis of individual rights but women’s values. 12. Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1829–1860,” Dimity Convictions (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976), p. 217. 13. Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World (NY: Basic Books, 1979); Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (NY: Avon Boks, 1978). 14. Shira Wolosky, “Public Women, Private Men,” Signs Vol. 28, No. 2 (Winter 2003), pp. 665–694. 15. Linda Kerber, “The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlightenment – An American Perspective,” American Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Summer, 1976), pp. 187–205; Linda K. Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,” Journal of American History Vol. 75, no. 1, June 1988, 9–39. 16. Ruth Bloch, “The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America,” Signs 13: 1, 1987, 37–58. 17. Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). 18. Helen Hunt Jackson, Poems (Boston, Roberts Bros, 1893), p.  180. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008657406. 19. Ella Wheeler Wilcox, “The Revolt of Vashti,” Poems of Progress (Chicago: Conkey and Comp., 1909). 20. Anne Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth Century America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989). 21. Ella Wheeler Wilcox, “Lord Speak Again,” Poems of Progress and New Thought Pastels (London: Gay & Hancock, 1911). 22. Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Poems of Experience (London : Gay and Hancock, Ltd. 1910). 23. Ella Wheeler Wilcox, More Poems (London, Gay and Hancock Ltd. 1916). 24. Mary Hill, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: the Makings of a Radical Feminist (Phil: Temple University Press, 1980), p. 279. 25. Lisa. Ganobsik-Williams, “The Intellectualism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Evolutionary Perspectives on Race, Ethnicity and Class.” Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer, eds. Jill Rudd and Val Gough (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999); Malina Mamigonian, “‘Knowing good and evil’: Charlotte Gilman’s Religion of Sound

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Sociology,” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, Spring 2003, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Spring 2003), pp. 56–83, p. 59. 26. Charlotte Gilman, The Later Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1996). 27. Charlotte Gilman, In This Our World (Boston: Small, Maynard & Company, 1898), p.  48. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/ epub/60481/pg60481-­images.html#Page_48. 28. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “Introduction,” Searching the Scriptures (Crossroad, 1993), describes a “hermeneutics of suspicion” of feminist Bible interpretation as “approaching the canonical text as a ‘cover-up’ for patriarchal murder and oppression.” A “hermeneutics of re-vision … ‘searches’ texts for values and visions that can nurture those who live in subjection and authorize their struggles for liberation and transformation,” p. 11. 29. Alicia Ostriker, Feminist Revision of the Bible (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), on “how writers of any marginalized group come to deal with dominant culture,” p. 57. Cf. Amy Benson Brown, American Women Writers and the Bible (Westport, Conn. Greenwood Press 1999). 30. Marianne Moore, Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (NY: Macmillan Penguin Books,1982), p.  53. Hereafter cited as CP followed by the page number. 31. Cristanne Miller, “Marianne Moore and a Poetry of Hebrew (Protestant) Prophecy,” 20th-Century American Women’s Poetries of Engagement, Sources Spring 2002, No. 12, ed. Cristina Giorcelli, Cristanne Miller, Shira Wolosky, 29, 34–35. Miller demonstrates the “Hebraic” tradition as a significant model for Moore’s later work, within liberal Protestant traditions and contemporary modes of biblical scholarship. Cf. Cristanne Miller, Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp.  21, 24; Also, Cristanne Miller, Cultures of Modernism (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005), pp. 240, 152. 32. Cristanne Miller, “Hebrew Poetry,” pp. 30–32. 33. Marianne Moore, Observations (NY: Dial Press, 1924), p. 24. 34. John Gifford Bellett, The Minor Prophet and Other Books, calls Jonah’s a “naughtiness of heart” (London: Robert Allen, 1870), most recently reissued on kindle 2015. 35. Marianne Moore “Feed Me, Also, River God,” The Egoist 1916, p. 118. 36. For example, Isaiah 44:22, Zechariah 7:12, Ezekiel 11:19, 36:26, Nehemiah 9:29-30,2 Chronicles 36:16. 37. Cristanne Miller, “Marianne Moore and the Poetry of Hebrew.” Cristanne Miller underscores that Moore is writing these Hebraic poems during a period of Moore’s alarm over war in the wake of World War I, p, 30.

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38. “Isaiah Jeremiah Ezekiel Daniel,” Lantern 23 Spring 1915: 60. 39. Moore’s modesty is often linked to her ethics. See Bonnie Costello, “The “Feminine” Language of Marianne Moore, Women and Language in Literature and Society, eds. Sally McConnel-Ginet, Ruth Borker, Nelly Furman (NY: Praeger Special Studies, 1980), 222–239; also Costello, Marianne Moore: Imaginary Possessions (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1981; Cynthia Hogue, “Another Postmodernism: Towards an Ethical Poetics,” How2 online journal Vol 1 no 7 Spring 2002. Cf. Jeredith Merrin, An Enabling Humility (NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), discusses humility in traditional religious terms. 40. John Slatin points out the opening “If” leaves uncertain whether or not rhyme is “outmoded,” Savage’s Romance (Pennsylvania State University, 1986), p. 25. 41. Robin Schulze, Becoming Marianne Moore: The Early Poems 1907–1924 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 209. The poem first appeared in December 1915 issue of Alfred Kreymborg’s Others: An Anthology of New Verse, as the final poem in a set of verses. Later versions substituted the title “The Past is the Present” in place of the original heading/title: So far as the future is concerned, “Shall not one say, with the Russian philosopher, ‘How is one to know what one doesn’t know?’” So far as the present is concerned. 42. John Slatin, “Advancing Backward in a Circle”: Marianne Moore as (Natural) Historian” Twentieth Century Literature, Summer–Autumn, 1984), pp. 273–326, locating the quotations in Moore’s Reading Diary 1916–21, p.  128, in the Moore Collection, Rosenbach Museum, Philadelphia, p. 298. 43. All poems cited are from Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (NY: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1981), “Magi,” p.130. 44. All poems are cited from Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), “Jesus Papers,” pp. 337–344. 45. For a discussion of Sexton as religious poet, see William Shurr, “Mysticism and Suicide: Anne Sexton’s Last Poetry,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Fall 1985, Vol. 68, No. 3 (Fall 1985), pp. 335–356, pp. 347 ff. 46. Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 47. Rosemary Radford Ruether,  “The Liberation of Christology from Patriarchy,  Feminist Theology: A Reader, Ed. Ann Loades, (London: Westminster Press, 1990),  p. 145. 48. Vincent Wimbush, “Introduction,” African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Structures, ed. Vincent L.  Wimbush (NY; Continuum, 2003), 1–48, p. 9.

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49. Cain Hope Felder, “Introduction,” Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation, ed. Cain Hope Felder (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), pp. 26, 32. 50. Vincent Wimbush theorizes a range of positions that contend with each other in Black Bible experience, including “rejection, suspicion, awe.” Their own interpretation emphasizes “God’s acceptance of the worth of the individual,” the “formation of communities,” and “testimony of personal experience with God,” “The Bible and African Americans,” p. 86. 51. Cf. Renita J. Weems, “Reading Her Way through the Struggle: African American Women and the Bible,” Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation, ed. Cain Hope Felder. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 57–77, p. 57. Cf. Renita J. Weems, “Re-Reading for Liberation: African American Women and the Bible,” Feminist Interpretation of the Bible and the Hermeneutics of Liberation (Sheffield Academic Press 2003), 19–32, asks how the Bible “continues to occupy an important place in the hearts and minds of many African American women: despite all that we know about its antagonistic role in our oppression as women, [yet it] continues to have the power to fill many of us with passion and a vision for liberation?” p. 26. 52. Callahan, p. xi. Cf. Raboteau, Slave Religion, who describes the Bible “as the numinous medium through which Africans in North America held onto precious vestiges of collective patrimony that survived the cultural slaughter of the Middle Passage.” William Myers, “Dilemma of the African American Biblical Student,” Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation,” ed. Cain Hope Felder, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 40–56, emphasizes the role of Scripture in African American survival and hope, p. 45. 53. Weems, “Reading Her Way,” p. 62. 54. Callahan pp. ix; 38. “To take share of the Bible, African Americans would have to counter-interpret the passages adduced as evidence of the biblical curses that black folks purportedly bore,” p. 39. Chanta M. Haywood, Prophesying Daughters, speaks of a “hermeneutic of transformation, that not only seeks to transform the dynamic between self and other but also preserves the transformational potential inherent in the notion of a sacred text.” “The linguistic mechanism responsible for continuing structures of oppression, and redirecting the curse into the desired blessing” and “extends beyond the individual to the social and communal realms in Hebrew Bible,” p. 16. 55. William Myers, pp.  42, 45. Janet Dueitsman Cornelius, Slave Missions and the Black Church in the Antebellum South (Columbia: University of

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South Carolina Press, 1999), “Black Christians believed the Bible spoke to them in a special way, and they resented the slaveholders’ abuse of God’s word. Therefore, it was crucial that some people in the slave community gain reading skills, to ‘take the Bible back,’ to read what it really said,” pp. 86, 113. 56. Katherine Clay Bassard, Transforming Scriptures: African American Women Writers and the Bible (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), asks: “How did African American women come to identify so strongly with an ancient, even foreign text?” p. 6. Yet, speaking of Frances Harper, Bassard claims that black women on the whole “stop short of de-­ authorizing the biblical account,” but rather to as “undoing racial hermeneutics” and “expos[ing] to view the subversiveness inherent in its textuality,” pp. 45–46. 57. Douglass, Narrative, pp. 50–52; 105–107. 58. Raboteau, “Exodus, Ethiopia,” p. 176. Wimbush, “The Bible and African Americans,” describes the arising of separatist communities with a “fundamental disdain for and mistrust of American society.” There is “less faith in democratic equality, freedom of opportunity, less concern about holding America to its responsibilities as a biblical nation because they do not believe America’s claims about itself to be true,” p.  94. Countee Cullen, Black Magdalenes (NY: Harper and Row, 1925), speaks of a “Black Jesus” which sees the “Jesus narrative as representing the collective experience of blacks,” p.  234. Theophus H.  Smith, Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America speaks of a “Black Bible,” p. 181. 59. Wimbush, “A critical polemical race and culturally conscious reading of the Bible reflected the desire to enter mainstream of American society … That the Bible and the whole tradition of which it was part was engaged at all signified relative acceptance of American society,” p. 93. 60. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (NY: Crown Publishing, 2007). 61. Cf. Will Harris,” Phillis Wheatley, Diaspora Subjectivity, and the African American Canon,” Melus Fall, 2008, Vol. 33, No. 3. 27–43. 62. W. E. B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folks, p. 34. 63. Vincent Wimbush, “Bible and African Americans,” p. 84. William Myers, “Dilemma,” notes how the Black “canon” is grounded in community forms: spirituals, sermons, conversion narratives, call narratives, p. 54. 64. Rosemary Ruether, “Introduction,” Women and Religion in America Vol 3, eds. Rosemary Ruether, Rosemary Keller (NY: Harper and Row 1986), xiii–xxi, xiii. 65. Weems, “Reading Her Way,” p. 57. 66. Weems: “Reading Her Way,” pp. 57–59, 69. 67. Vincent Wimbush, “The Bible and African Americans,” pp. 82–3.

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68. Philip A.  Greasley, “Gwendolyn Brooks: The Emerging Poetic Voice,” The Great Lakes Review, Fall, 1984, Vol. 10, No. 2, 14–23. 69. Wolosky, “Relational Aesthetics.” 70. Zora Neal Hurston, The Sanctified Church (NY: Marlowe & Company, 1981), p.  80. Keith Gilyard speaks of “chants” as one background for “linking the twentieth century style to scripture,” “The Bible and African American Poetry,” African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures, ed. Vincent Wimbush (New York: Continuum, 2000) 205–220, p. 205. 71. D.H. Melhem, Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice (Lexington, Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 1987), remarks that her “aesthetic life was not detached” but “integral to the spiritual life of community like the religious origins of drama,” p. 182. 72. Renita Weems, “Reading Her Way,” p. 62. Cf. Wimbush, “The Bible and African Americans,” p. 83. Wimbush describes African American writing as “public, or communal, not private or individualistic,” p. 84. 73. Margot Harper Bank, Religious Allusion in the Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks (NY: Harper, 2012). 74. Gwendolyn Brooks, Report from Part II (Chicago: Third World Press, 1996), p.  14. George Kent’s A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990) mentions various church involvements of Brooks and her family, including her mother Keziah’s regular church attendance throughout her life, p. 258.  Cf. George Kent, Blackness and the Adventure of Western Culture (Chicago: Third World Press, 1972), 112–113. Brooks’ essay, “What prayer did for me,” Chicago American (Feb 26, 1958) describes her recognition of a “strength superior to any that I have known.” She, however continues: “I rarely ask for anything, a little lingering independence of spirit,” pp. 129, 147. 75. Harry Shaw, “Maud Martha,” pp. 116–117. 76. Gwendolyn Brooks, Blacks (Chicago: Third World Press, 1987), p. 72. Poems will be cited from this edition. 77. Brooks evolution in her aesthetic practices emerges in her “Interview” with Martha H. Brown, The Great Lakes Review 6 Summer 1979, where she speaks of the sonnet as “irrelevant” to her goal of “blackening English,” p. 55. Cf. Gary Smith, “Gwendolyn Brooks’s ‘Children of the Poor,’ Metaphysical Poetry and the Inconditions of Love,” A Life Distilled, eds. Maria Mootry, Gary Smith (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 165–176. 78. Gwendolyn Brooks, Report from Part I (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1973), p. 183. Cf. D. H. Melham, “Gwendolyn Brooks: The Heroic Voice of Prophecy,” Studies in Black Literature Autumn 1976, 1–3, describes “In the Mecca” as an “oracular voice, prescriptive and poetic,” p. 2.

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79. Melham, “Gwendolyn Brooks,” pp. 183–4. Cf. D. H. Melham, Heroism in the New Black Poetry (University Press of Kentucky, 1990), calls the “Sermon’s style “grand heroic,””in an “elevated mode with formal biblical inflections,” which she calls “preachment,” p. 18. The “heroic prophetic motives of her work” is seen in the “use of imperatives, parallel constructions, and figurative language evoking the Bible,” p. 22. 80. Hull, p. 39. 81. The “wild weed” later in the poem, compared to a “citizen,” may refer to the Parable of the Weeds from Matthew 13:24-27. 82. Melhem, “Gwendolyn Brooks,” p. 184, note 387. 83. Gwendolyn Brooks, In Montgomery and Other Poems (Chicago: Third World Press Ebony Aug 1971; 2003), 1–27, p. 1. Hereafter cited as GBM. 84. Ilana Pardes, The Song of Songs: A Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). 85. Harry B. Shaw “Maud Martha: The War with Beauty,” Gwendolyn Brooks, ed. Harold Bloom (NY: Chelsea House, 2000), 111–122, p.114; Harry B. Shaw, “The War with Beauty,” A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction, eds. Maria Mootry and Gary Smith (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), p. 197. 86. Timothy Weber, “The Two-Edged Sword: The Fundamentalist Use of the Bible,” The Bible in America, eds. Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch (NY: Oxford University Press, 1982), 101–120, calls fundamentalism a “two-­ edged sword: while claiming to preserve old paradigms they were unintentionally undermining it.” While claiming “literal” meaning for the Bible, it “took experience away from lay people just like liberal counterparts did” 115–116. Cf. George Marsden, “Everyone One’s Own Interpreter? The Bible, Science, and Authority in Mid-NineteenthCentury America,” The Bible in America, eds. Nathan Hatch, Mark Noll (NY: Oxford University Press, 1982), on the shock at the collapse of consensus, pp. 220–221. 87. Christopher Newfield takes this position, see Chap. 5. Cf. Hilton Obenzinger, American Palestine Melville Twain and the Holy Land Mania (Princeton: Princeton UP 2000), “preoccupations with the Bible and biblical geography stood at the ideological core of American colonial expansion,” p. 5. 88. Judy Grahn, The Work of a Common Woman (Freedom, Calif.: The Crossing Press, 1978). 89. Vincent Wimbush, “Introduction,” Theorizing Scriptures: New Critical Orientations to a Cultural Phenomenon, ed. Vincent Wimbush (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), pp. 3–5. 90. Bruce Rosenberg, The Art of the American Folk Preacher (NY: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 52, 105. 91. James Weldon Johnson, God’s Trombones, p. 5, note 353.

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92. Rosenberg, pp. 105, 100. 93. Harold Bloom, Black American Women Poets and Dramatists (NY: Chelsea House, 1995), pp.  1–2. Eva Lennox Birch, Black American Women’s Writing (NY: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), pp. 121–125. 94. Maya Angelou, “Shades and Slashes of Light,” Black Women Writers 1950–1980, ed. Mari Evans (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press 1984), 3–5, p. 4. 95. “Opening” as biblical elaboration, Rosenberg, p.  23, Bassard, p.  7, note 572. 96. Maya Angelou, The Complete Collected Poems (NY: Random House, 1994), p. 172. 97. Poems cited from Carolyn Rodgers, When I Got Ovah: New and Selected Poems (NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1975), p. 40. 98. Ajuan Maria Mance, Inventing Black Women: African American Poets and Self –Representation 1877–2000 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007), p. 125. 99. Carmen L.  Phelps, Visionary Women Writers of Chicago’s Black Arts Movement (Jackson, Miss: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), pp. 95. Also Mance, Inventing, pp.  125–7. Cf. Calvin Hernton, The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers (NY: Anchor Press, 1987). James Edward Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), argues that “issues of misogyny and homophobia within the Black Arts movement” are part of a “more complicated and conflicted reality,” with different stances at different times, and the emergence of Black Arts women writers such as Rodgers as a counter to “masculinist” culture, p. 84. 100. Carolyn Rodgers “The Last M.F.” Songs of a Blackbird (Chicago: Third World Press, 1969), p. 37. 101. Andrew Peart, “Introduction,” Poetry, Vol. 221, Iss. 1 (Oct 2022), 43–45, 86. 102. Estella M.  Sales, “Contradictions in Black Life: Recognized and Reconciled in ‘How I Got Ovah,’” CLA Journal 25:1 Sept 198, 71–82, charts these and other dichotomies, arguing that Rodgers’s is a project of reconciliation among them, including bridging the apparent opposition between “individual poetic voice as opposed to the conscious, collective poetic voice,” pp. 74–75. 103. Mance notes that Rodgers “retains many themes and aesthetic interests[that] had been explored in nationalist poetry,” p.  125. The Black Arts Movement work was followed by “spiritually based systems of meaning as a redefinition of social transformation and political change, but rooted in her embrace of Christianity,” p. 127.

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104. Phelps speaks of a “Dialogue with the street,” p.  109, and of the “exchange of voices of women” as both “intimate and political,” p. 108, note 615. Esther Sales compares Rodgers’s forms to “church response as like sermons,” p. 75, as does Caren Phelps, p. 110. Cf. Keith Leonard, “African American Women Poets and the Power of the Word,” Cambridge Companion to African American Women’s Literature, ed. Mitchell Angelyn (NY: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 168–186, discusses Black poetics as incorporating folk forms, jazz, sermon, and religious traditions in verse and of the rejection of “the binary logics of white supremacy and the most simplistic versions of identity politics,… [to] elaborate on the value of multiplicity for ethnic identity.” 105. Phelps proposes the mother as bridge, with Black “histories and fates interconnected despite disagreement,” p. 110, note 615. 106. Sales, p. 71, cf. note 618. 107. Hurston, p. 88, cf. note 586. 108. Poems of Amanda Gorman cited from Call Us What We Carry (NY: Viking, 2021). 109. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, What Is Scripture? A Comparative Approach (Minneapolis, Minn: Fortress Press, 1993), pp. ix, 17. 110. Noll, America’s God, p. 208. 111. Edmund Morgan, “The Puritan Ethic and the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly Vol. 24, No. 1 (Jan., 1967), 3–43, p. 20. 112. Perry Miller, Nature’s Nation, pp. 87–88. 113. Robert Putnam, Amazing Grace (NY: Simon and Schuster, 2012), p. 526. 114. Hans Frei, “The “Literal Reading” of Biblical Narrative in the Christian Tradition: Does it Stretch or Will it Break?” The Bible and the Narrative Tradition, ed. Frank McConnell (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 119.

Index1

A Abolition, 2, 8, 81, 82, 97, 113–125, 136, 146n10, 180, 210, 233, 236, 259 Abrams, M.H., 175, 196n42 Adams, John, 84, 108n45 Aesthetics, 6–8, 12n25, 71n131, 73n162, 74n166, 158, 173, 181, 192n8, 201, 244, 248, 262, 268, 272, 273 African Americans, 2, 90, 116, 119, 121, 131–132, 144, 203, 235, 256 Ahlstrom, Sidney, 165, 193n21 American Revolution, 7, 77–79, 83–96, 99–105, 116, 119, 122, 155, 156, 160, 169, 210, 236, 278 Anderson, Benedict, 6, 12n26 Angelou, Maya, 275–277

Apocalypse, 7, 8, 31, 80–83, 93, 96–105, 117, 121, 122, 131, 138, 141–144, 157, 170, 175–176, 182–190, 202, 224–226, 246, 264 Apocalyptic, 8, 31, 82, 83, 93, 96–99, 101, 103–105, 117, 121, 122, 131, 141, 143, 144, 157, 175, 176, 183–190, 202, 224–226, 246 Augustine, 14, 19, 20, 42, 163, 169, 170 B Baldwin, Alice, 55, 60n36 Balfour, Ian, 175, 195n39 Barlow, Joel, 85, 87–89 Bay Psalm Book, 35, 42, 46

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Wolosky, The Bible in American Poetic Culture, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40106-0

293

294 

INDEX

Bercovitch, Sacvan, 12n24, 14, 18, 20–22, 54, 55, 56n1, 56n3, 59n31, 60n41 Biblical Higher Criticism, 155, 157, 203, 204, 206 Biblical interpretation, 1–8, 13–15, 18, 23–24, 26, 33, 38, 43, 48, 54, 55, 78, 80, 85, 97, 114–115, 122, 126, 129, 131, 135–137, 143–145, 163–164, 168, 170, 173, 176, 183, 184, 188–190, 201–203, 234, 239, 242–244, 250, 256, 269, 280–282 literalism, 7, 11n14, 13–14, 20, 26, 32, 49, 50, 74n165, 136, 155–157, 161–163, 171, 182, 190, 204, 269, 281 Biblical translations, 4 Geneva Bible, 26 KJV, 43 Webster, 171 Biblical typology, 14, 21, 26, 27, 32, 33, 40, 41, 43, 44, 49, 54, 87, 88, 93, 96, 100, 120, 129–132, 136, 138–140, 143, 164, 173–174, 176, 182, 184, 212 Bloch, Ruth, 18, 58n19, 80, 83, 84, 93, 106n11, 106n15, 107n16, 145, 236, 283n16 Bloom, Harold, 170, 194n34 Bonomi, Patricia, 5, 12n22, 58n24, 106n11, 111n80 Bozeman, Theodore Dwight, 15, 56n7 Bradford, William, 49 Bradstreet, Anne, 23–31 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 262–268, 270, 272 Brown, John, 184 Brown, Sterling, 134 Buber, Martin, 175, 197n51

Bundock, Christopher, 175, 195n39, 196n42 Butler, Jon, 12n22, 96, 114 C Calling, 21–23, 47, 54, 86, 89, 90, 271, 274 Calvin, Calvinism, 3, 10n10, 20, 42, 47, 49, 53, 56n7, 59n28, 60n42, 61n51, 72n148, 73n155, 80, 85, 97, 106n6, 201, 207, 222 Cavell, Stanley, 170, 194n33 Civic culture, 3, 20–22, 36, 39, 49, 79–81, 83, 85, 86, 88–104, 115, 160, 171, 180, 202, 210, 236, 237, 262, 277, 278, 280 Civil War, 2, 8, 77, 78, 83, 92, 96–105, 113, 115–117, 128, 130, 131, 144–145, 172, 179, 182–191, 202, 204, 223–225, 233, 281 Conventicles, 19, 24, 42, 58n24 Cotton, John, 19, 21, 31–40, 42, 46, 47, 49, 50, 55 Covenant, 7, 8, 15, 17, 20–25, 27, 28, 32, 33, 35, 36, 39, 43–49, 55, 79–84, 91, 93, 96, 97, 105, 140, 141, 143, 173–175, 221, 266–268 Crumbley, Paul, 202, 229n3 D Davies, Reverend Samuel, 137 Democracy, democratic, 7, 16, 17, 81, 98, 100, 114, 119, 167, 178, 180, 181, 190, 202, 210, 236, 243, 280 Dickinson, Emily, 6–8, 97, 137, 157, 201–228, 237

 INDEX 

Douglass, Frederick, 115, 133, 137, 257 Du Bois, W. E. B., 149n37, 235, 258, 282n8 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 144–145 Dwight, Timothy, 85, 88, 92–96, 113 E Edwards, Jonathan, 28, 53, 82, 92, 164, 201 Eliot, George, 203 Eliot, T.S., 243 Elliot, Emory, 79, 109n48, 109n53 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 8, 155–171, 174, 176, 204, 213, 220, 239 Enlightenment, 8, 78–80, 84, 88–90, 95, 113, 115, 118, 122, 126 Erkkila, Betsy, 179, 197n56 Eschatology, 14, 20, 26, 82, 83, 96, 97, 141–143, 174, 188, 190 F Faust, Catherine Drew Gilpin, 100, 112n92, 145, 153n95 Feminism, 28, 180, 210, 211, 236–242, 251, 253, 261 Fluck, Winfried, 15 Folger, Peter, 19 Foster, Stephen, 16, 57n13, 65n87 Franklin, Benjamin, 19 Freneau, Philip, 85–87, 89, 92, 116 G Genovese, Eugene, 126, 146n9, 149n37, 199n68 Gilman, Charlotte, 240–242 Gorman, Amanda, 276, 277, 279, 280 Gorski, Philip, 56n7, 58n15, 79, 80, 84

295

Great awakenings, 4, 77, 79, 114, 137, 202, 204, 237, 253 Greenblatt, Steven, 4, 10n12 H Hall, David Donald, 5, 11n18, 11n21, 62n60, 63n61 Hambricke-Stowe, Charles, 44, 61n54 Hammon. Jupiter, 135–136 Harper, Frances, 125–131, 137, 237, 259, 260, 277 Hatch, Nathan, 10n13, 84, 87, 96, 106n11 Hebrew, Hebraism, 2, 7, 15, 17, 19, 21, 22, 26, 31, 34–41, 46, 54, 82, 84, 117, 126, 140, 141, 143, 175, 243–244, 247, 249, 250, 269, 278 Henry VIII, 4 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 132–134 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 99, 100 Hooker, Thomas, 22, 40 Howe, Julia Ward, 97 Hutchinson, Anne, 24–25, 31, 32, 38, 55, 160 Hymns, 3, 6, 42, 88, 97, 100, 104, 118, 123, 124, 127, 137–139, 158–160, 173, 203, 239, 262, 268 I Individualism, 5, 17, 22, 23, 35, 47, 55, 79, 80, 86, 92, 93, 95, 96, 114, 167–169, 236, 238, 281 J Johnson, Edward, 48 Johnson, James Weldon, 132, 149n39, 150n46, 270, 289n91 Johnson, Thomas, 39

296 

INDEX

K King, Martin Luther Jr., 3, 47, 258, 267, 270 L Levine, Herbert, 176, 197n55 Liberty, 5, 24, 37, 79–96, 101–104, 116–123, 129, 167, 218, 259 Lincoln, Abraham, 78, 186, 277, 280 Longfellow, 225 Lovell, James, 132, 134, 142, 149n38 M Mather, Increase, 41 Mather, Richard, 22 Mather, Samuel, 56n3 Melville, Herman, 1, 8, 97, 157, 162, 182–191, 220 Millennialism, 80–85, 93, 94, 96, 105, 122, 141, 182–183 Miller, Cristanne, 196n46, 203, 204, 244, 284n31, 284n37 Miller, Perry, 5, 11n20, 20, 22, 45, 49, 55, 107n23, 145, 281 Modesty, 212, 214, 218, 224, 243, 248, 260, 285n39 Moore, Marianne, 242–251 Moorhead, James, 108n35, 184 Morgan, Edmund, 11n15, 42, 62n59, 281 N Niebuhr, Richard, 14, 56n4, 80 Noll, Mark, 5, 9n1, 10n4, 11n17, 58n23, 80, 145, 199n70, 235

P Packer, Barbara, 170, 194n35 Pardes, Ilana, 182, 198n60, 198n62, 268, 289n84 Paul, 31, 102, 115, 135, 137, 144, 164, 171, 177, 178, 217, 218 Pease, Donald, 15 Plain style, 49–50, 74n164 Plath, Sylvia, 251, 252, 272 Pocock, J.G.A., 4, 11n19, 79 Prophecy, 13, 20, 26, 34, 39, 87, 90, 98, 100, 101, 117, 127–131, 139, 143, 144, 155, 157, 172–177, 185, 189–191, 205, 239, 243, 244, 247–251, 260, 264–266, 277, 279 Prophesizes, 87 Psalms, 26–28, 35, 41–43, 46, 51, 53, 54, 117, 137–138, 159, 184, 188, 203, 253, 263, 266, 276 Puritans, Puritanism, 2, 5, 7, 13–55, 77, 79, 82–83, 87, 88, 92, 99, 103, 118, 140, 143, 169, 221, 227, 281 as both-worldly, 20–22, 25, 42, 51, 135 as a congressive, 18, 23, 47, 55, 114 R Raboteau, Albert, 10n8, 132–134, 141, 142, 149n37, 150n40, 150n42, 257 Raz, Yosefa, 176, 196n43, 197n54 Republic, republicanism, 8, 17, 23, 36, 39, 79–105, 115–116, 118–122, 126–128, 133, 134, 155, 160, 167, 169, 176, 179, 181, 183, 210, 236, 279

 INDEX 

Rosenberg, Bruce, 270, 290n95 Ruether, Rosemary, 210, 230n16, 230n24, 261, 287n64 S Sexton, Anne, 251–256 Simms, William Gilmore, 103–104, 121, 123 Slavery, 2, 7, 80, 89, 90, 100–102, 169, 170 Sola scriptura, 3–4, 11n14, 46–47, 156, 192n1 Sollors, Werner, 2, 10n7 Spirituals, 3, 8, 131–145, 274 Stanford, Anne, 30, 61n57, 65n81 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 180, 234, 240, 242 Stiles, Ezra, 39 Stoddard, Solomon, 49 Stout, Harry, 81, 96, 109n46 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 98 T Taylor, Edward, 6, 39–46, 48–54 Timrod, Henry, 100–102 Tuveson, Ernst Lee, 108n35, 141

297

V Virtue, 20, 48, 79–95, 122, 236, 237 W Walzer, Michael, 2, 10n6 Watts, Isaac, 137–139, 203 Weber, Max, 47, 72n144 Weems, Renita, 257, 261, 262, 286n51 Wheatley, Phyllis, 90–92, 258, 259 Whitfield, James, 119 Whitman, Walt, 7–8, 97, 157, 171–181, 191, 243 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 117–118 Wigglesworth, Michael, 47, 48 Wilcox, Ella Wheeler, 237–240 Williams, Roger, 31–32, 49, 55 Winship, Michael, 17, 36, 57n14, 57n15, 63n63 Winthrop, John, 14, 21, 23, 25, 32, 33, 35, 43, 47, 279 Wittreich, Joseph, 175, 197n48 Wolin, Sheldon, 20, 55, 60n34 Z Zuckerman, Michael, 17, 57n14