D Aijaz Ahmed that had been marked by Leavis, but re-mapped that territory in highly original, radical and persuasive ways. By the time Williams died, in 1988, he had re-vamped the very terms in which English Studies had conceived of the relation between literature, culture, society and history. I do not mean that Williams ever came to command the kind of power that, let us say, Eliot had once commanded—and continues to command in some circles. One could safely say, however, thatbetween Leavis' Tory populism and Williams' increasingly Marxist perspectives—and the kinds of thinking these two represented—it simply was not possible that all the 119 Professors of English in Britain would treat poems and novels as fetishized objects, existing beyond society, politics, etc. America was a different matter, however. There was no working-class culture of the kind that England had had since at least the Chartists. The origins of English Romanticism are inseparable from the anti-capitalist passions of a Blake, and it had the Cromwellian radicalism of Milton in its past; even Wordsworth and Coleridge had been, before their Tory conversion around 1805, radical supporters of the Jacobin content in the French Revolution. American Romanticism was, by contrast, oracular and transcendalist, optimistic and confident. The experience that produced this Romanticism was not the experience of industrial capitalism, as in England, but the society of independent petty commodity producers which was the predominant mode of existence for the middling classes of New England up to the middle of the nineteenth century. There is more excruciating pain in any set of Blake's drawings than in the collected works of Walt Whitman, who seems to have believed that America was potentially the perfect society, the ongoing materialization of Heaven on Earth. The greatest poet of the American nineteenth century, one of the finest intelligences ever born in the United States, Emily Dickinson, wrote her greatest poems in the years of the American Civil War, and yet, except for a couple of oblique references and metaphors, that decisive experience of her generation is entirely absent from her work. I do not mean that either Whitman or Dickinson was by any means conservative by persuasion, in the way that British Tories always are; nor do I mean that other currents weren't there, even within the dominant tradition. There is the overwhelming presence of Mark Twain, for example, in the latter part of the nineteenth century. And, if you step out of the dominant tradition, there is of course a large body of writings by women who tell us much about the stresses of embourgeoisment in a gendered society, not to speak of Black literature—above all the oral tradition of the slave songs—which tell us a great deal about the pain and cruelty upon which the splendour of America has been built. What I do mean, however, is that the tradition of letters which American Modernism inherited from its own elite past had never been informed by the energies of the working class; was dominated largely by the boundless and somewhat philistine optimism of New England's petty commodity producers; had made a truce, by and large, with the racism and mercantilism of its own society; and even at its best, as in Dickinson, had come to experience its deepest pains in a privacy that had been radically separated, in order to be understood, from the social. Even as petty commodity production in New England, as well as the slave society of the South, gave way, in the latter half Numbers 17-18