Chapter 2 - Dialogue and the Idyll: Tennyson and Landor

Summary

Chapter 2 focuses on the idylls of Tennyson and Landor as they explored in verse the conversations of friendship, responding to the difficulties of social relations with other beings by figuring and configuring voices other than themselves to put them – and their readers -- in dialogue with one another. Romantic and Victorian poets turned to the example of the Hellenistic poet Theocritus, whose poetic fictions of conversation and song helped the later poets to imagine something like a Levinasian ethical social order amid political disorder. Following Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley, Tennyson’s English Idyls and Landor’s Hellenic Idylls took up the ethical and political challenges of conversing across deepening divisions they perceived around them, not only between persons but also between persons and the non-human natural world. Implicit in their efforts is an optimism that later poets, not least an older Tennyson, would find difficult to sustain.