Tennyson Among the Poets: Bicentenary Essays PDF
Preview Tennyson Among the Poets: Bicentenary Essays
Tennyson 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
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