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The Three Modes in Tennyson's Prosody
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Artist first, then Poet,' some writer said of me. I should answer, 'Poeta nascitur non fit'; indeed, ‘Poeta nascitur et fit.‘ I suppose I was nearer thirty than twenty before I was anything of an artist.“ Tennyson, here reconstructing his early literary biography for his son's Memoir, mentions the metrical experiments à la Thomson, Pope, Scott, and Shakespeare with which he amused himself between the ages of eight and fourteen, commenting apparently on what one must do before beginning to become ”anything of an artist.“
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1967
References
1 Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, A Memoir (New York, 1897), p. 12.
2 The Formation of Tennyson's Style: A Study, Primarily, of the Versification of the Early Poems (Madison, Wis., 1921).
3 Pyre, pp. 25, 23, 27.
4 This is true for the work excluded from Poems by Two Brothers as “too much out of the common for the public taste,” as well as for that which was published in it. See Pyre, pp. 14–16, 18–22, 72–76; and Jerome Hamilton Buckley, Tennyson (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), pp. 9–10.
5 Texts are from John Churtin Collins, ed., The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson (London, 1900). Except where noted, quotations follow the first published form.
6 Charles Tennyson, Six Tennyson Essays (London, 1954), pp. 129–130, conjectures that these were experiments in the vein of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English accentual verse. If so, they were unsuccessful experiments. But All Things Must Die has metrical and verbal echoes of Thomas Nashe's Litany in Time of Plague, e.g.:
Tennyson:
We are called—we must go
Laid low, very low,
In the dark we must lie …
Nine times goes the passing bell,
Ye merry souls, farewell.
Nashe:
Swords may not fight with fate.
Earth still holds ope her gate;
Come! come! the bells do cry.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us.
7 Essays, Ancient and Modern (London, 1936), p. 178.
8 A Memoir, i.
9 George Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody (London, 1910), iii, 197.
10 A Memoir, i, 16.
11 As Edgar Finley Shannon, Tennyson and the Reviewers (Cambridge, Mass., 1952) records the tale, hostile and friendly critics alike informed Tennyson that if he meant to be famous, he must eschew romantic extravagance and pretty-prettiness, and produce more noble, wholesome, and edifying work. For early criticisms of Tennyson's prosody, and their effects, see Chs. i and ii, passim, but especially pp. 42–45.
12 Saintsbury, iii, 194.
13 Pyre discusses this stanzaic verse in detail, pp. 102–106.
14 The 1832 stage of The Lover's Tale is published in J. C. Thompson, ed., Tennyson's Suppressed Poems (New York, 1903).
15 Saintsbury, iii, 196.
16 Spedding's comment, noted in Hallam Tennyson, ed., Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson (London, 1907–08), i, 392. But Wordsworth thought so too; see A Memoir, i, 265.
17 Fitzgerald, quoted in notes to Hallam Tennyson, ed. Works, i, 394.
18 Letter from Sara Coleridge to Moxon, quoted in A Memoir, i, 215.
19 See Jerome Hamilton Buckley, The Victorian Temper (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), p. 76; Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge, Mass., 1937), p. 214; and Harold Nicolson, Tennyson (New York, 1925), p. 129.
20 Saintsbury, iii, 200.
21 W. H. Auden, Tennyson, an Introduction and Selection (London, 1946), p. x.