John Calvin (1509-64) spent most of his adult life as a refugee from his native France. By far his longest exile was in Geneva, a city in which - in spite of his undoubted prominence - he seemed never to feel completely at home. Many of the figures who assisted Calvin in the reform of Geneva - energetic men such as Guillaume Farel and Pierre Viret - were forgotten by time, their books left largely unread after their deaths except by a handful of scholars. But Calvin’s theological influence did not cease with his death in 1564. If anything, it grew stronger, especially in the English-speaking world. Thomas Norton’s translation of Calvin’s Institutes went through eleven editions by 1632. Calvin’s catechism went through eighteen editions in English by 1628. Arthur Golding translated Calvin’s sermons on Job, which went through five editions between 1574 and 1584. In America, the Calvinism of the low-church Anglicans of Virginia, the Congregationalists of Massachusetts, the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians of North Carolina, and the Baptists of Rhode Island was reinforced by the Dutch Calvinism of New Jersey and New York and by the German Calvinism of Pennsylvania. Even John Wesley, the founder of the Methodists, a notably anti-Calvinist movement on the American frontier, once confessed that his theology came within a 'hair's-breadth of Calvinism'.

Byron made a number of statements about prose as a medium of expression, and almost always in its relation to poetry. On 17 November 1813, he confided to his journal: 'I began a comedy and burnt it because the scene ran into reality; - a novel, for the same reason. In rhyme, I can keep more away from facts; but the thought always runs through, through . . . yes, yes, through' (BLJ , iii, 209); six days later he added: 'I have burnt my Roman - as I did the first scenes and sketch of my comedy . . . I ran into realities more than ever; and some would have been recognized and others guessed at' (BLJ , iii, 217). In Beppo on the other hand, he announces: 'I've half a mind to tumble down to prose, / But verse is more in fashion - so here goes!'; and in Don Juan: 'if ever I should condescend to prose, / I'll write poetical commandments' (Beppo, 52, and Don Juan , i, 204). Fashion? Inferiority? An unsatisfactory means of achieving and sustaining creative objectivity? As diverse as these reflections are, one thing they seem to tell us is that, unlike Wordsworth, Byron does perceive an 'essential difference' between poetry and prose, though not necessarily - and here he might agree with Wordsworth - between 'the language of prose and metrical composition'; a difference in kind, in creative discipline. I should like to take these as signposts and to begin with a few remarks about his prose in general before focusing a little more specifically on 'To the Editor of the British Review' (1819) and Some Observations upon an Article in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (1820) (hereinafter referred to as 'To the Editor' and Some Observations respectively). The effort as a whole will attempt to suggest some answers to the questions: What is Byron's Prose, what characterizes it, what sort of subjects does it cover, how well does it work as a creative medium?

Writing to Louis de Cormenin in June of 1844, the twenty-two-year-old Flaubert sketches an ideal society of 'good lads, all men of letters, living together and gathering two or three times a week to eat a good meal washed down with a good wine, while savouring some succulent poet' ['bons garçons, tous gens d'art, vivant ensemble et se réunissant deux ou trois fois par semaine pour manger un bon morceau arrosé d'un bon vin, tout en dégustant quelque succulent poète' (Cor. i 209)]. Friendship, the pleasures of the table, the delights of conversation, above all talk devoted to literature: these are all central to Flaubert's personality, all the more important for someone who chose to lead an existence that was primarily solitary. These are also the motifs that run through his correspondence like brightly coloured threads, even when the general fabric grows dark with the pessimism of his later years.

For Flaubert, the nineteenth century was 'l'Hénaurme siècle'. This distortion of the epithet énorme admirably conveys not only his ironical attitude towards the misplaced self-confidence and pretension of the age, but also his frank enjoyment of the grotesque figures who, for him, embodied these quintessentially bourgeois characteristics. As the novelist Milan Kundera would later put it, with only minimal recourse to hyperbole: 'Flaubert discovered stupidity. I dare say that is the greatest discovery of a century so proud of its scientific thought.' In Flaubert's eyes, bêtise ['stupidity'] contaminated even the highest reaches of intellectual endeavour. Writing to George Sand after reading Lamennais's Essai sur l'indifférence en matière de religion, he boasted: 'I am now thoroughly acquainted with all those monumental jokers who have had such a calamitous influence on the nineteenth century' ['Je connais maintenant, et ê fond, tous ces immenses farceurs, qui ont eu sur le 19e siècle une influence désastreuse' (Cor. iv 758)].

Giuseppe Verdi, born in a country village in the Po Valley in 1813, rose to become the most popular opera composer of his century. Across a career that spanned more than sixty years he won international fame, becoming the venerated and often decorated grand old man of Italy, “il gran vegliardo.” Setting his stamp on two generations of performers, he transformed a showcase for prime donne and celebrated tenors into a serious theatre for singing actors. A patriot, Verdi was twice elected to political office and was honored as Senator for Life. He was also a farmer and philanthropist. At his death in 1901, he left behind a legacy of landmark works. Verdi's art has remained as accessible and popular as it was during his lifetime, his major operas constituting the backbone of today's standard repertory. Three of his homes and the home of Antonio Barezzi, his patron and father-in-law, are open to the public as museums. Now, as before, Verdi speaks to us all, even as he remains a beloved symbol of Italy and its culture, a man for his time and ours.

The child, the village, and the land

Verdi was born on October 10, 1813, in Roncole, a hamlet standing in open land about sixty-five miles southeast of Milan with the Apennines looming on the south and west and the River Po flowing to the north, where most income came from wheat, corn, and hogs. In this world of flat fields edged by rows of Lombardy poplars and irrigation canals, the only large buildings were the parish churches, among them Verdi's San Michele Arcangelo in Roncole. The people there spoke a sweet, liquid dialect that was heavily influenced by French and was the only spoken language of Verdi’s early years. Peaceful today but chaotic during Verdi’s infancy, the area was overrun with troops fighting the NapoleonicWars.

It is not difficult to discover the huge impact which Byron, most Eurocentred of all the English 'Romantic' writers, had on Europe; but it may be difficult to credit it from the perspective of 2004, in which he is just one 'Romantic' name out of half-a-dozen. A document may help. Francesco Guerrazzi was a poet and historical novelist, who had met Byron at Pisa, and became famous later as a politician - he was made dictator of Tuscany on the flight of the Grand Duke in 1849. He records in his Memorie an apparition he experienced while studying law:

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW ON (DEAD) LANGUAGE

The career of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–82) is in many ways contradictory, posing quite a distinctive historical puzzle. His status as both elite and popular; his once extravagant celebrity and now near total eclipse; his shrill enthusiasms and melancholic anxieties; all belie his current reputation as a poet of simple-minded and cheerful satisfactions. Longfellow as a figure attempts to bridge different aspects of American culture, starting with the problem of whether one existed at all. Passionately committed to the birth of a national literature, he devoted himself to establishing and extending an American poetic language. Like Whitman, Emerson, and many other men of letters and society, Longfellow felt called by the Revolution to the creation of a native literature that would do justice to the new American experience and represent its people. In “Our Native Writers” (1825), his graduation address, he called for a poetry that would express “our national character,” to be written by those who had “been nursed and brought up with us in the civil and religious freedom of our country.” And, in his ambition to speak for a new American people, he largely succeeded. The Song of Hiawatha appeared side by side with Leaves of Grass in bookstalls in 1855. Hiawatha sold 10,000 copies in the first four weeks and 30,000 copies in six months, while most of Whitman's first edition had to be given away. Yet Longfellow's poetry is essentially elegiac. If Longfellow succeeded in expressing America's newly emerging identity, he also records its anxieties and costs.

FEMININE FIGURES: IN CRITIQUE OF AMERICAN SELFHOOD

Emily Dickinson seems in many ways at the furthest remove from Walt Whitman. His inclusive, expansive energy poses the most extreme counterpoint to Dickinson's exclusions, retractions, and renunciations. Dickinson's work, however, addresses cultural forces and challenges in ways continuous with Whitman's, although ultimately with a difference in cultural position from his which remains fundamental.

Dickinson's placement in terms of wider cultural concerns has been complicated by a privacy so fine no event seems able to penetrate it. Both as woman and poet, Dickinson seems intractably a figure of isolation. Her biographical seclusion cut her off from direct social intercourse with her surrounding world. Her texts seem to draw a circle around themselves, in momentary and apparently inconsistent expression. Even phrases or words are fragmented and isolated by her idiosyncratic dashes, which substitute for the integrating medium of punctuation. All of these almost compel an image of Dickinson's as a private and autonomous, if also a provisional and fragmentary world.

But Dickinson's work nonetheless reflects and enacts cultural forces and cultural challenges. A resistance to history is certainly suggested by her own severe textual obliqueness, as well as by her riveting refusal either to appear in public or to allow the publication of her work. In another sense, however, Dickinson's texts are scenes of cultural crossroad, situated within and acting as an arena for the many and profound transitions taking place around her. This apparent contradiction between private and public involvements is indeed itself a cultural one. Dickinson, among other things, brings to a kind of great consummation – and also transformation – a developing tradition of nineteenth-century women's writing, in which just such tensions between private and public loom large.

SLAVE SPIRITUALS AND BLACK TYPOLOGY

Although slave-songs reach far back into slave history, the Civil War in many ways marks their birth into national consciousness. Civil division serves as well as a powerful backdrop for interpreting the spirituals, and especially their language and imagery. The music of the spirituals has generally attracted first attention and appreciation. But the texts are no less important registers of cultural forces effecting both the development of a black literary tradition and its place within American culture. While clearly a product of African enslavement in Protestant America, the spirituals present a complex interaction between multiple and crossing impulses: African and white American aesthetic as well as Christian religious forms; sacral and secular functions and meanings; with theological and social/political commitments.

The Bible is central to interpreting these interacting and competing elements, both in the spirituals themselves and in terms of their placement within American culture. Here, two related but distinct issues emerge: the treatment of the Bible within the spirituals, but also the question of access to the Bible by the spiritual singers. In its broadest implications, the spirituals' modes of Biblical engagement dramatize the ways in which interpreting the Bible carries powerful political implications within American culture, involving claims to American identity, even as such claims complicate just what that identity may be.

Many questions remain regarding the history and constitution of the spirituals: their development, their authorships, and establishing the texts themselves, as well as their religious and political implications. Textual analysis of slave spirituals is complicated by their production, transmission, and transcription. The versions which are available often result from painstaking work in collecting and collating variant forms, through such pivotal projects as musical arrangements and performances by the Fiske Jubilee Singers during the 1870s, and into oral histories of former slaves undertaken in the early twentieth century.

In an 1854 lecture entitled “Poetry and English Poetry,” Ralph Waldo Emerson introduced a familiar subject. “The question is often asked, Why no poet appears in America? Other nations in their early, expanding periods, in their war for existence, have shot forth the flowers of verse, and created mythology which continued to charm the imagination of after-men. But we have all manner of ability, except this: we are brave, victorious; we legislate, trade, plant, build, sail, and combine as well as any others, but we have no imagination, no constructive mind, no affirmative books.” Seventeen years earlier, in “The American Scholar,” his criticism had sounded more hopeful. “Perhaps the time is already come … when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill.” But the iron lids of the continent had stayed closed, despite the best efforts of Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, Poe, and Emerson himself (whose Poems had appeared in 1846) to pry them open.

The complaint was freely sounded even in books meant to appeal to national pride. When the New York editor Rufus Griswold (1815–57) published The Poets and Poetry of America in 1842, he cautioned that the United States could be said to have only the beginnings of a national literature. He had chosen the best poems he could find from the five hundred volumes of “rhythmical compositions” that had been published in America since the earliest days of European settlement. But he warned his readers not to expect too much.

American poets who were born during the first two decades of the nineteenth century differ in certain ways from their slightly older compatriots, though they still had to earn their living in some other way than writing verse. The provincial backwardness of earlier decades began to dissipate; poetry published in the 1830s and 1840s increasingly showed the influence of Wordsworth and Tennyson as well as that of Thomson, Cowper, and Burns. If American poets were finally beginning to discover the writings of living English poets, they were also engaged in an earnest recovery of seventeenth-century English writing, which seemed to them to possess a vigor and morning freshness that later English writing had lost. The seventeenth-century poets were valuable both as models of style and character to American writers who felt out of place in a society devoted to money-making and untroubled by any consciousness of higher truths. Oliver Wendell Holmes called Emerson's 1837 Phi Beta Kappa Address at Harvard “America's declaration of literary independence.” But Emerson's Address also contains this estimate of contemporary American society: “Public and private avarice make the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant. See already the tragic consequence. The mind of this country taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself.” (Contemporary British society was little better, as Americans learned from reading Carlyle.) The young writers of New England turned to the English seventeenth century for better sources of inspiration. Emerson's favorites were Herbert, Milton, and Bacon, but he took pride in having introduced Margaret Fuller to a host of other seventeenth-century writers as well: Chapman, John Ford, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Sir Thomas Browne.

THE POET AS PRESIDENT

Walt Whitman cuts so large a figure that readings of his work seem doomed to be fragmentary. At once accessible and evasive, transgressive and yet also centrally defining within American culture, Whitman's work has been persistently split into contradictory and opposing stances. These are readily familiar, in the guises of Whitman the solitary singer as against Whitman the political journalist; Whitman the imperial self as against Whitman the poet of democracy; Whitman the Romantic and/or antinomian ego as against Whitman the wound-dresser; Whitman the homoerotic radical as against Whitman the defender of the American Way.

These opposing categories, which essentially dissociate Whitman's autonomous as against his social involvements, in fact each and all enter into his texts, whose task, not least, is the mutual negotiation and transfiguration of just these various commitments. This transfigural project is at the center not only of Whitman's poetics, but of Whitman's conception of America. Whitman in his poetic work undertakes to enact and initiate a language of democratic selfhood out of which a habitable American community may be inaugurated. His poetic project is in this sense fundamentally political, and is specifically tied to a republican tradition which defines freedom not merely as the capacity for individual and independent self-determination, but as civic virtue: committed to participation in self-government, with other citizens, towards the common good. Whitman's attempt to further this political vision is, in turn, specifically structured through his adopting and transforming a political model of representation into a poetic voice. Through that voice, he addresses every common reader, in the effort and hope to awaken each to his and her individual place and responsibility within the American polity and possibility.

Although comic verses were widely reprinted in newspapers, and neoclassical verse was still used regularly on ceremonial occasions – college commencement exercises, Phi Beta Kappa Society meetings – most serious American poets in the early nineteenth century wrote narratives, lyrics, or contemplative verses: religious poems of praise or confession in the style of Herbert's “Temple” or Donne's Holy Sonnets; elegiac quatrains modeled on Gray's; hymns in the style of Cowper; blank-verse meditations like Night Thoughts or like Tintern Abbey. The size of the United States and the primitive state of its transportation system meant that poets often wrote in isolation from one another and were chiefly influenced by whatever books their family, college, or town libraries happened to supply. Although many young writers eagerly read reviews of new books of poetry in the great British quarterlies, to which college literary societies often subscribed, obtaining the books themselves was difficult. A bookseller in Philadelphia might issue a pirated edition of Wordsworth, but how would a poet in western Massachusetts learn of its existence, except by chance? An edition of Shelley's poems might be picked up by a young minister in Boston and reviewed in the magazine he edited in Louisville, but Carolinians or Georgians would be none the wiser. Cultural life in the United States was haphazard, random, a matter of luck and chance encounters – though for that reason still full of excitement that residents of British or European cities might never know. Stumbling upon a single book could change a life, and giving or lending books to someone else was a sign of high esteem.

The architecture of the Federal period is still admired in the United States; the prose of the Founding Fathers is widely praised as the best the country has ever produced. But the poetry that was part of the same culture has come to seem more alien than the neo-Latin poetry of the Puritans. The high gloss and urbanity of neoclassical verse seems inherently at odds with the prosaic realities of American life. Yet the poets who were writing neoclassical poetry at the turn of the nineteenth century were quite inventive in shaping imported conventions to fit their own purposes. The radiant self-satisfaction that beams through every couplet of Barlow's ten-book Columbiad will not attain such intensity again until the first edition of Leaves of Grass, and the reader who wants to understand Whitman's rewriting of European tradition would do well to examine Barlow's epic first.

Behind the enduring appeal of neoclassical conventions in the United States lay an educational system still devoted to the study of classical languages and literatures. When the hero of Washington Allston's novella The Hypochondriac wickedly suggested that the only reason people profess to value the classics is that they refuse to admit that their educations have been thrown away, he was assuming such an identification, which lasted well into the nineteenth century. Admission to a college demanded a reading knowledge of Latin and Greek, and the first two years of study were largely taken up with linguistic exercises. Such an education was very far from worthless to men who wished to take part in public affairs, where writing and speaking with power were still necessary skills.

WRITING ETIQUETTE

Anne Bradstreet inaugurated American poetry with a disclaimer. In the “Prologue” to her work she concedes that, as a woman poet, she may be “obnoxious” to the many readers eager to cast “despite … on female wits.” But, she goes on, while hers will always and only be an “unrefined ore” in contrast against male “glistring gold,” all she is seeking is a crown of kitchen herbs suitable to her station: “Give thyme and parsley wreath, I ask no bays.”

On this meek note she launched not only her own poetically ambitious project, but a rhetoric that is pursued by women writers through the next centuries. In a feminization of the classical apologia – apology in defense or justification – Bradstreet modestly denies her abilities. In doing so, however, she asserts her right to speak against those who would not even grant her that much. Reassuring her readers that she will not exceed her proper place, she enables herself, at least within these confines, to exercise her powers. But this in turn becomes a method and avenue exactly for broadening the narrow strictures allotted to her.

Modesty, then, serves as an image of confinement, restriction, and boundary. Yet it also represents the instability of that boundary, its revision and even transgression as a feminine mode of entry into a wider world. In this double sense, modesty emerges as a central topos and stance of female writing. (There are comparable topoi for men, especially in the discourses of religious humility. Nevertheless, I would claim that there are distinctions of gender within the uses of these topoi.