Esther Schor
Vol. 17, No. 2 (Fall 1998), 305-324

This essay documents the ways in which Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem Casa Guidi Windows (1851) dramatizes the potential influence of literary models on national politics. Concerned with Italy in the revolutionary years of the late 1840s, Casa Guidi Windows claims that traditional sources of poetic inspiration, such as the legacy of the great poet Dante, contain the means for constructing an enlightened popular consciousness so crucial to nation building. Barrett Browning produces a distinctive poetics of politics that takes shape as a praxis of agency. In this view, the poet and the political revolutionary are both makers rather than the Foucauldian subjects that dominate so much literary criticism. Moreover, the capacity to be a maker defines Barrett Browning’s vision of an enlightened popular consciousness in which all, not just poets, partake of the “divine effluence.”