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"But O, my Tongue doth Falter": Forms of Resemblance in Martha Wadsworth Brewster's Scriptural Paraphrases
Journal article   Peer reviewed

"But O, my Tongue doth Falter": Forms of Resemblance in Martha Wadsworth Brewster's Scriptural Paraphrases

Nicholas K Mohlmann
Legacy (Amherst, Mass.), Vol.41(2), pp.157-181
10/2024

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Abstract

Despite the remarkable circumstances of Brewster's book, I suggest that part of the reason her work has not been examined closely is because the poems themselves appear, at first glance, to be rather conventional eighteenth-century religious verse that reiterates the themes of conversion, grace, and religious emotion common in evangelical circles. [...]the circumstances of Brewster's entry into print are recounted, but the poetry itself remains more of a curiosity than an object of critical inquiry. Given that Brewster goes to lengths to reject gendered mediation and to display her poetic ingenuity, it seems counterintuitive that she would foreground accusations that she plagiarized her poetry from Isaac Watts, arguably the foremost masculine figure of evangelical poetry in the mid-eighteenth century.' Scholars like Putzi and Stokes locate the use of unoriginality in the aesthetics and social contexts of the nineteenth century, but work remains to be done to understand how developments in the eighteenth century contributed to the strains of thinking that established unoriginality, relation, and resemblance as important aesthetic qualities in American poetry.

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