Critics speak of avant-gardes, artists rarely do. Just who counts as avant- and who as rear guard is sternly contested by critics – and rightly so. The term avant-garde, which is widely abused in the promotion of everything from pullovers to poets, expresses a critic’s dream of social and cultural opposition, of a progressive alternative culture, and a consumer’s lust for novelty. By my count, four literary avant-garde scenes since 1945 have mattered to poetry: Black Mountain College (1950–56); Greenwich Village (1950–63); the Black Arts Movement (1962–70); and the Language poets of New York and San Francisco (1979–89). The definition I employ has four elements: 1) avant-gardists are motivated by a will to produce the dominant art of the future, not just by a desire to receive recognition of their own talent; 2) to this end, they form a public confederation of artists in different media, 3) who oppose the established conventions of a contemporary art community. Finally 4) an avant-garde has an explicit view of the relation between art and society.

The literary avant-garde of 1950–56 followed avant-garde movements in painting and in jazz, which by 1950 had already taken on their own shapes. The abstract expressionist painters of the mid- and late 1940s (Pollock, Rothko, deKooning, Hofmann, Kline, Motherwell and others) were recognized by poets as having produced an avant-garde painting, and the bebop jazz musicians of the same period (Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk, Kenny Clarke, and Dizzy Gillespie) were even more often acknowledged by poets as forerunners.

This multivolume History marks a new beginning in the study of American literature. The first Cambridge History of American Literature (1917) helped introduce a new branch of English writing. The Literary History of the United States, assembled thirty years later under the aegis of Robert E. Spiller, helped establish a new field of academic study. This History embodies the work of a generation of Americanists who have redrawn the boundaries of the field. Trained in the 1960s and early 1970s, representing the broad spectrum of both new and established directions in all branches of American writing, these scholars and critics have shaped, and continue to shape, what has become a major area of modern literary scholarship.

Over the past three decades, Americanist literary criticism has expanded from a border province into a center of humanist studies. The vitality of the field is reflected in the rising interest in American literature nationally and globally, in the scope of scholarly activity, and in the polemical intensity of debate. Significantly, American texts have come to provide a major focus for inter- and cross-disciplinary investigation. Gender studies, ethnic studies, and popular-culture studies, among others, have penetrated to all corners of the profession, but perhaps their single largest base is American literature. The same is true with regard to controversies over multiculturalism and canon formation: the issues are transhistorical and transcultural, but the debates themselves have often turned on American books.

In a culture marked by rapid change, nothing changes more frequently than the past. With the growth of jet travel, the once disruptive technology of the railroad came to seem almost quaintly endearing. Similarly, intellectual revolutions have a way of making the previous revolution seem less threatening than it seemed to those who lived through it. We look back at yesterday’s shocking revolution as the good old days to which we now long to return. A case in point is the recent literary-theory revolution, which has made the critical movements of the 1940s look more innocuously “traditional” than they appeared to be when they were taking place. We can gain a perspective on the recent history of criticism, then, by considering how forms of academic criticism that may appear so conservative to us now were experienced by their contemporaries.

Such an effort is especially necessary today because the upheavals provoked by recent literary theory have changed how the history of criticism appears to us. As very different groups have reacted antagonistically to the new theories, party lines have been quietly redrawn, making unaccustomed allies of critics who once were adversaries. As our period promises or threatens to become an Age of Theory, middlebrow journalists and some disenchanted academics have discovered points of commonality not previously apparent to either group. By the same token, today’s avant-garde often fails to see how earlier movements anticipated its ideas.

Rear guard – who covets that designation? In the last fifty years only too many artists have claimed to be avant-garde. It would be easy enough for a poet to speak of meter as an aspect of technique that does or does not work for him or her, some of the time or always – Lowell sometimes explained his choices this way. But the adoption of metrical form in the years just after the war was more commonly taken as a sign of affiliation, and the predictable consequence was a War of the Anthologies in the 1950s. Certainly since 1960 free verse, the technical sign of experimentalist poets, has dominated verse writing. Yet a deeper truth about the postwar era is that it has been predominantly reactionary against the avant-garde experiments of the generation born in the 1880s. The reaction really began when Eliot and Pound returned briefly to quatrains in 1919; it continued in the work of Hart Crane, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Yvor Winters in the late 1920s and the 1930s. Auden’s emigration to New York in 1939 reinforced this reaction, as he gained influence on young American poets through the 1950s. Immediately after the war, many poets did want to be known as rear guard. There was then an urgent desire among young poets to set the modernist generation off to the side, as though American poetry had never crossed with the international avant-garde, as though it were still English poetry.

Determining how cultural practices work in specific social contexts has been a principal object of the recent critical projects known as “cultural studies” and “the new historicism.” These terms now designate an exceptionally broad, often interlocking array of inquiries that make use of the critical theories and methods we have discussed in our last three chapters.

It may be debated whether cultural studies and new historicism should be seen as parallel, overlapping, or antithetical developments. To some critics, these terms designate two faces of the same oppositional impulse. To others, they represent diametrically opposed practices – with “cultural studies” being politically oppositional and materialist, and “new historicism” defusing or precluding oppositional politics by relentlessly textualizing history or implicating all cultural production in hegemonic power. In this contrastive usage, “cultural studies” and “new historicism” often boil down to code terms for Marx and Foucault, the one seeking the material transformation of society, the other seeing “power” as so pervasive and insidious that would-be resistance only reproduces it.

Generally, though, cultural studies and the new historicism can be neither simply identified nor neatly opposed. Instead of a polar opposition, these terms mark different emphases among a fluid range of theories and practices that so interact, overlap, and mingle that the taxonomy finally becomes of limited value. Nonetheless, the characteristic emphases of the two movements do differ in ways that reflect their diverse origins. Cultural studies began in England as a critique of postwar British society by neo-Marxist intellectuals and activists who were particularly concerned with class relations and material culture, who favored empirical analysis over theoretical abstraction, and who generally worked between or beyond traditional academic disciplines and outside the elite British universities.

In 1945 poetry occupied an altogether different position in the literary culture than it does now, a half-century later. In the winter of that year a critic in Partisan Review could plausibly claim: “no one will deny that the discussion of poetry is one of the highest proofs of civilization that a society can give.” Delmore Schwartz then named America’s most famous living poet, T. S. Eliot, a culture hero, “who brings new arts and skills to man-kind.” Poetry, painting, and jazz seemed to be the healthy arts; drama and fiction were ailing. (Literary criticism was thriving, but no one thought then to call it an art form.) Randall Jarrell, reviewing new books by Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, and others, said that America had better poetry than it deserved, “how queer it is that our age should have poets like these.”

Young poets like Jarrell, Robert Lowell, and John Berryman, who moved in the literary circles of New York, enjoyed a special status within this culture. Their poems and reviews were published regularly in the most prestigious journals and, quite interestingly, the ideological differences between, say, Partisan Review and Sewanee Review, or the Kenyon Review did not matter for poets. Distinguished poet–critics Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom edited two of these journals. The editors of the Partisan gave these young poets extraordinary latitude to range around in their critical reviews, though serious political differences might have separated Lowell, a conscientious objector, never a Marxist or an anti-Stalinist, from the explicitly engaged editors of this journal.

Humanists were brought up with the same Christian beliefs as scholastics. Many of them received a scholastic training and became members of the clergy, either regular or secular. True, humanists had a different attitude towards non-Christian sources. Yet for both humanists and scholastics the Bible remained a fundamental text. We may thus wonder why it took so long before the Scriptures were submitted to a scholarly and philological treatment and why the somewhat misleading term Christian humanism is applied only to the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century.

The problem was, in fact, formulated at an early stage by Petrarch. He himself seems to have realized the importance of the Scriptures only relatively late in life, when he was over forty. For what he described as this 'damnable lateness', he felt he should apologize. He had, he said, been led back to the Bible by reading the Church Fathers, particularly his own favourite, Augustine, who appears as a character in one of his dialogues, but also by Ambrose, Gregory, Lactantius and, of course, Jerome, the saint to whom the accepted Latin translation of the Bible, the Vulgate, was attributed. What made the Church Fathers so attractive to Petrarch and later humanists was that they reconciled classical and Christian views of human life and morals, and that they presented them in an elegant style. Rather than use a Father such as Augustine as the source of a theological system in the way that scholastics were accustomed to do, humanists saw him as a model of rhetorical skill, a Christian counterpart to Cicero. Petrarch regarded Augustine as a master of self-analysis and followed him in his itinerary from worldly concerns and classical texts to a state of spiritual enlightenment and repose in God.

There was no humanism without books. They were the prime material on which the movement was founded and the natural medium through which it was transmitted. All humanists were consumers, and usually also producers, of books in manuscript. Many humanists first gained a reputation by seeking out and accumulating books. Humanists early associated themselves with the printing press when it came into being in the mid-fifteenth century and provided authors, editors and market for its products. Some, preeminently Erasmus, so thoroughly harnessed the great power of print that they were able to project themselves on to a European stage. In a less controlled way, this had happened a century and more before with the manuscript diffusion of the works of the early Italian humanists. Throughout the Renaissance, secular and ecclesiastical princes with cultural pretensions built themselves up with libraries as much as any other trappings of civilization. A book was often the vehicle of an alliance between culture and power, in the form of translations or dedications of original works, commissioned or unsolicited.

The common bond of humanism, uniting many disparate strands of interest, was the study, absorption and imitation of the classics, and the common style was a classicizing humanistic Latin. What was distinctive about the humanistic book? In the first place, it was a new manner of the preparation and writing of manuscripts: new in that it turned against current practice in these matters, but backward-looking in its attempt to recover classical virtues of clarity and purity.

Despite the many changes which were made during the Renaissance, humanist Latin represented a development of both the forms and the functions of medieval Latin. Latin was the language of the educated and of, if not the ruling, at least the governing classes. Not knowing Latin demonstrated that one did not belong to these social groups. In the Middle Ages, Latin was the international language of secular and ecclesiastical administration, of diplomacy, of liturgy and of the educational institutions where students were prepared for positions in these spheres. Interest in Latin was motivated by practical concerns. Official correspondence in Latin was the most important task of those engaged in church and secular administration. The ars dictaminis, of art of letter-writing, had been a central feature of late medieval education in Italy, but less so north of the Alps, where university education was directed towards theological rather than legal training. In post-medieval Italy, Latin retained all these functions, and the art of writing letters and composing orations remained important aspects of Latin education.

In no area were prestige and presentation of greater importance than in matters of state. International affairs were transacted in Latin through the exchange of letters and through orations delivered by envoys. Humanist Latin emerged in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries in Italy among men in the highest ranks of ecclesiastical or civil administration. Chancellors of Florence, such as Leonardo Bruni and Poggio Bracciolini, both of whom had also served as secretaries to the pope, were prominent exponents.

Constantijn Huygens was one of the most virtuous of the seventeenth-century virtuosi who collected antiquities, devised scientific instruments and cultivated a taste for natural curiosities. He painted, wrote poetry in several languages and played the lute for the king of England. The most modern English thinkers and writers appealed to him: he translated John Donne into Dutch and copied out Francis Bacon's theories about progress. He loved the humanist art of Rubens, but recognized the young Rembrandt's supremacy as a history painter. His unfinished classic in Dutch, the Dagwerck, celebrated the discoveries of the new science, which he tried to connect with the domestic life of the Dutch Golden Age, the sunny world of scrubbed tile floors, tables covered by rich rugs and crystalline windows so memorably depicted by Vermeer.

Huygens came honestly by his wide range of skills and interests: he was raised to have them. His father had him taught to speak French by the direct method as a child and encouraged him to study science, music and painting. As a teenager he enrolled at Leiden, the most modern university of his day.

In the Renaissance the discipline of philosophy was based on ancient systems of thought: Aristotelianism predominantly, and to a lesser extent Platonism, Stoicism, Epicureanism and Scepticism. This continued to be the case well into the seventeenth century. As specialists in the study of classical antiquity, humanists were therefore able to make an important contribution to philosophy in this period: rediscovering ancient philosophical texts that had been lost or neglected for centuries and supplying editions, translations and commentaries both for these works and for other classical texts which had been part of the philosophical curriculum since the Middle Ages.

Though philosophers and humanists shared an interest in the same texts, their methods of approaching this material differed radically. Humanists believed that philosophical discourse, like all forms of learned communication, should be composed in a Latin style modelled on the best classical authors. The stress they laid on clarity, persuasiveness and, above all, eloquence was a deliberate challenge to the scholastics, who monopolized university teaching of philosophy and who wrote in a technical, jargonladen language, incomprehensible to non-philosophers. More importantly, humanists studied philosophical works in the same manner that they dealt with literary or historical texts, that is, as philologists.

Before the beginning of the sixteenth century, the humanist movement produced no political thinkers who could be ranked with figures like Plato or Thomas Hobbes. This is not surprising. Unlike modern political scientists or medieval scholastic philosophers, Renaissance humanists were not occupied with political theory as such. Professionally, humanists acted as teachers, diplomats, political propagandists, courtiers and bureaucrats. The writings they produced on politics were not cast in the form of summae or professional monographs intended for specialized audiences. Rather, they fell into the ancient tradition of moral-rhetorical literature aiming at the reform of individuals and society. Their models were Cicero and Seneca, not Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas; their virtues stylistic elegance, urbanity and learning, not subtlety. Such writings were intended for a general audience of liberally educated readers, which under Renaissance conditions meant mostly wealthy merchants, professionals and aristocrats. But 'political reflection need not be systematic analysis, and rarely is', as Sir Moses Finley has remarked. Though the humanists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries produced no great work of political philosophy, they did change fundamentally the intellectual world within which political thought would henceforward have to live. Their importance lay in producing not a system of thought, but a climate of thought.

In 62 BC Cicero defended in court a Greek poet, Archias, whose citizenship had been challenged. The version of his speech that he later circulated expatiates on the service that poets render to the state by conferring immortality on heroes and thereby encouraging public spirit. Even historians, he says (Pro Archia 24), achieve less: Alexander the Great took many on his campaign, and yet, when he came to the tomb of Achilles near Troy, he exclaimed: 'lucky young man, to have had your prowess advertised by Homer!' - and he was right, because without the Iliad the tomb would have closed not only over his body but over his name.

William of Malmesbury, who died about 1143, tells the same story about Alexander. Had he read it in Cicero's speech for Archias? Though the Latin literature of republican and imperial Rome spans over 600 years (from about 200 BC to the early fifth century), not a single autograph survives; and the poems of Virgil, the plays of Terence and Livy's account of the war against Hannibal are unusual in being preserved by manuscripts even as old as the fourth or fifth century, written for collectors not obviously affected by the conversion of the empire to Christianity. After that, the historical record dwindles until the end of the eighth century, when Charlemagne created a successor to the Roman empire in the west and ruled it from the lower Rhine. In ways hard to trace, monastic and royal libraries then began to acquire old manuscripts, not least of pagan texts, and to make copies, usually in a new script that modern printers have inherited with little change.

This chapter will examine the ways in which Italian literature was influenced by the humanist movement in the crucial period in which the studia humanitatis dominated the intellectual agenda in Italy, broadly speaking from the time of Petrarch to the age of Lorenzo de' Medici. The two centuries surveyed here embrace a period which begins with the embryonic 'medieval' humanism of Dante Alighieri and terminates in the early sixteenth century, when Italian humanists ceased to form part of the mainstream of creative literature in Italy and the studia humanitatis became institutionalized in the university system.

At the outset it is important to distinguish between the classical tradition in general and the humanist movement in particular. To consider every Italian work inspired by the legacy of antiquity in this classicizing age of Italian literature is beyond the scope of this chapter and this book. Instead, I shall focus on vernacular literature in Italy which was either written by humanists or informed by humanist values.

Although Dante is not usually regarded as a humanist, the Divina commedia (c. 1307-18) presents a number of features which indicate that to a certain extent the poem derives from a humanist matrix. In a sense Dante 'discovered' the Aeneid, in that he was the first to make Virgil talk again to his age after centuries of silence. As he himself was aware, he was the first Italian writer to read the Roman poet in both a political and intertextually creative way - the latter is alluded to in Dante's famous address to Virgil when he meets him in the first canto of the whole Commedia: 'You are the single author from whom I derived the fine style which has brought me such honour' (Inferno 1.86-7).

The scholar-diplomat John Florio, translator of Michel de Montaigne's Essais into English (1603), copied this sonnet of his friend Matthew Gwinne into a presentation-copy of his Italian-English dictionary (1598) destined for the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal of England, Sir Thomas Egerton. The language used points to a late humanistic context. The central idea is still the discovery and use of ancient wisdom, compared here to the gathering of secrets by 'inteligence'. Humanist logic's classification of the two aspects of all intellectual activity is prominent: the finding and storing, or inventio ('invention'), of philosophical matter; and the choice and deployment, or iudidum ('judgement') of that matter in specific contexts - the whole process amounting to the successful mediation of ancient wisdom (lines 8-11).

Any account of the past is necessarily coloured by the preconceptions, the aspirations and, above all, the knowledge or ignorance of the scholar who produces it. The terms and concepts that historians use to order and explain the objects of their inquiry are neither fixed nor value-free, but are evolving and often highly subjective elements in that process of revealing the past that gradually leads us to a better understanding of it. Labels such as Dark Ages or Renaissance, which are affixed to whole periods of European history, while they are convenient for the purposes of historiographical exposition, may tell only part of the truth about those segments of the past that they purport to characterize. The more we learn about the period following the decline of Rome, the less dark and uncultured it appears; the more we inquire into what was reborn in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the more we become aware of vital continuities with the past.

The history of humanism exemplifies both those continuities and a sense of renewal. The term itself owes its origin to the Latin humanitas, used by Cicero and others in classical times to betoken the kind of cultural values that one would derive from what used to be called a liberal education: the studia humanitatis constituted the study of what we might now think of as 'arts' subjects - language, literature, history and moral philosophy in particular. Even if Cicero was not widely read in the Middle Ages, he and his terminology were well known to certain fourteenth-century scholars (notably Petrarch, who regarded him as his favourite author); by the following century, the studia humanitatis were firmly enshrined in the university curriculum.

Two phenomena are always seen as central to the Renaissance, particularly in Italy: one is the new interest in classical Latin and Greek associated with humanism; the other the dramatic change that occurred in the visual arts, characterized by Giorgio Vasari in his Vite ('Lives', 1550 and 1568) as a process of rebirth and development to a level unsurpassed even by the ancients. Historians have often supposed that the two were closely related, yet it is not immediately obvious why this should be so. Humanism, after all, was an intellectual movement whose origins lie in the fourteenth century; it was principally concerned with texts which few if any artists would have read, not least because they did not possess adequate knowledge of Latin. By contrast, the revival of the arts began in the late thirteenth century; and Renaissance writers tended to parallel it not so much with humanism as with the birth of vernacular literature, especially given that Cimabue and Giotto were both mentioned in Dante's Divina commedia and Simone Martini featured in two famous sonnets of Petrarch. Nor is there much reason to suppose that the preoccupations of humanists would have had direct bearing on the normal activity of artists: the production of paintings and sculptures on religious themes and the design of traditional types of building, such as churches and palaces.