English Congregational Hymns in the Eighteenth CenturyHistorians of the English congregational hymn, focusing on its literary or theological aspects, have usually found the genre out of step with the rationalist era that produced it. This book takes a more balanced approach to the work of four writers and concludes that only eighteenth-century Britain, with its understanding of public verse, common truth, and the utility of poetry, could have invented the English hymn as we know it. The early hymns sought to inspire, teach, stir, and entertain congregations. The essential purpose shifted slightly in line with each poet's setting and in accord with the poetic thought of his day. For Isaac Watts's Independents, powerful traditional imagery was appropriate. Charles Wesley's enthusiasm proceeded from and served the spirit of the revival. John Newton's prophetic vision particularly suited the impoverished community at Olney. William Cowper's masterful handling of formal conventions and his idiosyncratic personal hymns reflect his poetic, rather than clerical, vocation. Despite such temporal variations, the great poetry by each man displays themes of general Christian relevance, suggesting common experience, showing normative features of the genre, and bearing a complex and intriguing relationship to secular literature. |
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Madeleine Forrell Marshall, Janet M. Todd. poems were presumably not dictated by God to their devout authors, they are unavoidably expressions of the literary education and orientation of the time. Minor poetry, as hymns may be, is ...
... God. Its special sphere is worship, and its fundamental relations are not literary but liturgical. [P. viii] Benson wanted hymns to be examined only devoutly, but this desire led him to underrate their literary potential, for ...
... God's loving-kindness or his own salvation, make themselves known in the powerful images he summons up, despite the controls of hymn purpose and convention. The similarities and differences between Cowper's hymns and those of his ...
... God. The poetry must have been even more accessible to Isaac Watts's contemporaries, so intimately familiar with the Bible, than it is to “moderns”; and the Christian element was present in the psalms, both by virtue of adaptation and ...
... meaning, which had never been seriously questioned: If thou feelest the threatninges of God, and thereby percevuest thy seife to be dismaied, thou mayest say the 6. psalm and the .37. If thou marvelest at th order of thynges created, and.
Contents
Self Sense the Revival | |
John Newton Olney Prophet | |
Exemplary Tradition the Loss of Control | |
Conclusion | |
Notes | |
Other editions - View all
English Congregational Hymns in the Eighteenth Century Madeleine Forell Marshall,Janet Todd Limited preview - 1982 |
English Congregational Hymns in the Eighteenth Century Madeleine Forrell Marshall,Janet M. Todd No preview available - 2014 |