6 - Tennyson Among the Poststructuralists: 1981–1989

Summary

In “Tennyson and the Histories of Criticism” (1982), a lengthy review article surveying a half-dozen studies of Tennyson published between 1979 and 1981, the distinguished critic Jerome McGann charts a course for Tennyson studies that many would follow during the next two decades. McGann warns that “ideology is not an aesthetic problem for a poem, it is a critical problem” (231). The real danger is for critics to read poems in the way made popular by New Criticism: as if the essential elements of poetry were somehow ahistorical and not affected by the cultural, political, and aesthetic assumptions — often unspoken and assumed — that undergird the practice of such criticism. At the same time, in a strong statement of self-awareness and recognition of self-limitation, McGann challenges critics who find difficulty accepting Tennyson's works “because we are uninterested in or hostile to the ideas they express”; this attitude, McGann says, is “as much a judgment upon our own ideas and their limitations as it is upon Tennyson's” (235). McGann attacks both New Critics and new theorists alike for imposing ideologies onto texts. He insists that to fully appreciate Tennyson's poems — or anyone else's — “we must grasp them in their historical uniqueness” (251). Doing so, he implies, demands both hard work and sharp attention to the assumptions one brings to reading — especially reading Tennyson.