10 Things I Learned from a Book I Read on Isaac Watts

From Douglas Bond’s The Poetic Wonder of Isaac Watts

1. Isaac Watts received 2 doctorate degrees – one from the University of Edinburgh and the other from the University of Aberdeen.

2. Watts began learning Latin at the age of 4, and later learned Greek, Hebrew and French.

3. His first hymn was written at the age of 14 and titled “Pindaric Ode.:” It was dedicated to his language teacher.

4. Watts was gifted with the ability to write poetry, and he became a hymn writer due to a dissatisfaction as a teenager in what songs were being circulated in the English church. He believed the church needed more inspiring songs. And there needed to be more singable songs for children, in his opinion.

5. He us buried at Bunhill Fields, which is the same cemetery in London for the following Christians: John Bunyan, John Owen, Thomas Goodwin, John Gill, Susanna Wesley, Charles Spurgeon.

6. July 17, 1698 was the date he preached his first public sermon. He was 24 years old.

7. During his pastorate at Mark Lane Chapel, Watts would write a hymn (weekly) to accommodate the passage of Scripture that he would preach from. They called his hymns “rhymed sermons.”

8. Watts never married, but he did propose to a woman named Elizabeth Singer. She declined his proposal, because she believed he was more committed to writing poetry than he would be to marriage.

9. Approximately, 700 hymns were written by Watts. Some of the more well known? “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” “Alas! And Did My Savior Bleed,”; “Our God, Our Help in Ages Past,” “Joy to the World,” “I Sing the Almighty Power of God,” and “How Sweet and Awful Is the Place.”

10. Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland, was so encouraged by the accessibility of Watts’ poetry for children that he included a poetic refrain in this famous story that paraphrases a Watts’ refrain in one of his poems.