%0 Journal Article
%T The Calvinist Couplet:  Ralph Erskine¡¯s Gospel Sonnets and Espousal Poetics in Early Evangelicalism
%A Wendy Raphael Roberts
%J Christianity & Literature
%@ 2056-5666
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/0148333119827675
%X The article provides the first modern analysis of one of the bestselling transatlantic evangelical poems of the eighteenth century, the Scottish minister Ralph Erskine¡¯s Gospel Sonnets. The article argues that the importance of the marriage metaphor and rhyme in the poem provided a specific meaning to the form of the couplet in eighteenth-century transatlantic evangelicalism¡ªa form often associated with an outdated understanding of a monolithic enlightenment. In the case of Erskine, it produced the Calvinist couplet. What the author terms ¡°espousal poetics¡± designates the much larger presence and purpose of the marriage metaphor in the emerging revivalist community: to fuse the paradoxes of a sound Calvinist theology with poetics
%K early evangelicalism
%K historical poetics
%K espousal
%K Calvinism and aesthetics
%K transatlantic literature
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0148333119827675