Table Of ContentTennyson Among the Poets
This page intentionally left blank
Tennyson Among
the Poets
Bicentenary Essays
edited by
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
and Seamus Perry
1
3
GreatClarendonStreet,Oxfordox26dp
OxfordUniversityPressisadepartmentoftheUniversityofOxford.
ItfurtherstheUniversity’sobjectiveofexcellenceinresearch,scholarship,
andeducationbypublishingworldwidein
Oxford NewYork
Auckland CapeTown DaresSalaam HongKong Karachi
KualaLumpur Madrid Melbourne MexicoCity Nairobi
NewDelhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto
Withofficesin
Argentina Austria Brazil Chile CzechRepublic France Greece
Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore
SouthKorea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam
OxfordisaregisteredtrademarkofOxfordUniversityPress
intheUKandincertainothercountries
PublishedintheUnitedStates
byOxfordUniversityPressInc.,NewYork
#Theseveralcontributors2009
Themoralrightsoftheauthorshavebeenasserted
DatabaserightOxfordUniversityPress(maker)
Firstpublished2009
Allrightsreserved.Nopartofthispublicationmaybereproduced,
storedinaretrievalsystem,ortransmitted,inanyformorbyanymeans,
withoutthepriorpermissioninwritingofOxfordUniversityPress,
orasexpresslypermittedbylaw,orundertermsagreedwiththeappropriate
reprographicsrightsorganization.Enquiriesconcerningreproduction
outsidethescopeoftheaboveshouldbesenttotheRightsDepartment,
OxfordUniversityPress,attheaddressabove
Youmustnotcirculatethisbookinanyotherbindingorcover
andyoumustimposethesameconditiononanyacquirer
BritishLibraryCataloguinginPublicationData
Dataavailable
LibraryofCongressCataloginginPublicationData
LibraryofCongressControlNumber:2009935894
TypesetbySPIPublisherServices,Pondicherry,India
PrintedinGreatBritain
onacid-freepaperby
theMPGBooksGroup,BodminandKing’sLynn
ISBN 978–0–19–955713–4
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The editors are grateful to the Publications Board of the Tennyson Society,
who first suggested the idea of this volume; and to Andrew McNeillie and
Jacqueline Baker, our editors at the Press, who took it up with such
enthusiasm. We would also like to thank Daniel Mallory for compiling the
index.
Oxford R. D-F., S. P.
January2009
This page intentionally left blank
PREFATORY NOTE
ChaucerreportedofhisClerkofOxenford:‘Andgladlywouldhelearn,and
gladly teach’. Tennyson learnt gladly from his poet-predecessors. That, he
knew.Moreover,hetaughthispoet-successorsgladly,evenwhenhewasno
longeralivetoknowso,andevenwhenwhathetaughthadtodonotwith
gladnessbutwithsadnessandmadness.Audensaidofhim,notoriously,that
‘therewaslittleaboutmelancholiathathedidn’tknow;therewaslittleelse
that he did’.
He was of Cambridge, but it was Oxford that signally garlanded him, five
yearsafterhehadbeenmadePoetLaureate,withanhonorarydegree,Doctor
ofCivilLaw.Theoccasionwasgracedbyanaffectionateincivility,ayouthful
cry(itbantered‘TheMayQueen’,‘Youmustwakeandcallmeearly,callme
early, mother dear’): ‘Did your mother call you early, dear?’ But then to
MakeItNewbycourtesy—orbycomicdiscourtesy—ofTennysonprovedto
be one of the continuing respects in which his art was respected. The very
parodies of him (Lewis Carroll), or the turns upon him (Max Beerbohm),
never forget his unique unignorability. There is the friend who, seeing
Tennyson light up his pipe first thing in the morning, delighted in ‘The
earliest pipe of half-awakened bards’. (‘We are not amused’.) There is the
enemywhoheldittruethat‘’TisbettertohavelovedandlostjThannever
to have lost at all’. Perhaps even Nabokov may eventually be forgiven for
remarkingofaninitialreadingof‘afamous,thoughnotverygood,poemby
Tennyson’,‘Break,break,break’,that‘Forallweknow,itmightbeaboxing
referee talking in his sleep’.
How Tennyson himself created afresh, thanks to earlier and other cre-
ation (‘To which the whole creation moves’), and succeeded in doing so
repeatedlyyetnotrepetitively,is asubjecttowhichItriedtodojusticeina
chapter in Allusion to the Poets. That Tennyson’s art subsequently not only
lendsitselfbutgivesitselftosucheventualitiesandevents,someofthemfar
viii / Prefatory Note
offinthefutureandmanyofthemdivine,isthesubjecttowhichthepresent
collection of essays does justice.
There may be two energies at work. The first, then, is Both a borrower and a
lender be. The second that may be operative in Tennyson’s fertile case, as it
would not be in (say) Auden’s, would be the enlarged freedom that later
poets have enjoyed as a result of one manifestation of Tennyson’s genius,
a self-knowledgeable abstention of his. For the crucial critical fact about
Tennyson is that, almost alone of our great poets in the last two centuries
(almost alone, because of Thomas Hardy, for one?), he abstained from
literary criticism. This, without the proud humility that a poet who was
valuablybeholdentoTennysonwastomanifestin1911.‘Whetherthefaculty
of literary criticism is the best gift that heaven has in its treasuries I cannot
say, but heaven seems to think so, for assuredly it is the gift most charily
bestowed.Oratorsandpoets,sagesandsaintsandheroes,ifrareincompari-
son with blackberries, are yet commoner than the appearance of Halley’s
comet; literary critics are less common’ (A. E. Housman).
Tennyson left no critical essays, let alone books; his letters are all but
entirely vacant of criticism, whether of his own poems or of others’; and
though there are certainly some piercing aperc¸us about poets and poems
recorded in Hallam Tennyson’s life of his father as well as in William
Allingham’s supreme Diary, the best of them are connected in some way
with the making of the greatest of anthologies, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury,
which was where suchpotentialities ofTennyson’s came tofindrealization.
The poet-critic is a great exemplar: Jonson, Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Words-
worth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Arnold, Hopkins, Eliot, Empson, Davie...
But Tennyson is a different wonder, the poet who is not a critic except
(except!)inthepracticeofhisart.Sothatwhenhepresentstohissuccessors
this distinctive freedom, as against their having perhaps to come to uneasy
terms with a predecessor’s critical strictures and ex cathedra dicta, Tennyson
may be seen to offer a most unusual—a differently ample—opportunity,
onethathasagainandagain(asthisbookdemonstrates)beendiverselyand
gladly seized.
Christopher Ricks
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations xi
A Note on Texts and Abbreviations xii
Notes on Contributors xiii
Introduction 1
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
1. Tennyson’s Dying Fall 14
Peter McDonald
2. Tennyson’s Retrospective View 39
Dinah Birch
3. Tennyson’s Limitations 57
Christopher Decker
4. Tennyson’s Grotesque 76
Aidan Day
5. Tennyson, Browning, Virgil 95
Daniel Karlin
6. Tennyson and the Voices of Ovid’s Heroines 115
A. A. Markley
7. On Lines and Grooves from Shakespeare to Tennyson 132
Eric Griffiths
8. Epic Sensibilities: ‘Old Man’ Milton and the Making of
Tennyson’s Idylls of the King 160
N. K. Sugimura
