No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
Tennyson is not only breaking out of the pedestrian clichés and frozen critical expectations that for so long enshrouded him; he is gradually but steadily emerging as a poet of arbitration, as one of the poet-practitioners by whose work the nature of poetry must itself be defined and against which the work of poets habitually preferred to him will more and more be measured.
1. The particular reference is to the poetic tradition as it evolved subsequent to Tennyson, but the frame is very much larger than that. The Tennyson canon is so grand and distinctive that, when it is added to the Indo-European poetic hierarchy, it moves that hierarchy into imaginative (perceptual, structural, linguistic) spaces that it would not occupy without the addition of his work.
2. Preface (1853), in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. Super, R. H. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), iGoogle Scholar(On the Classical Tradition), 7.Google Scholar
3. Hardy, , Preface to The Dynasts (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965), p. xxv.Google Scholar
4. My dating throughout follows that of Ricks, Christopher, ed., The Poems of Tennyson (London: Longmans, 1969).Google Scholar All references to Tennyson's poetry are to this edition.
5. Literature and Dogma, in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, vi (Dissent and Dogma), 275.Google Scholar
6. On the Study of Celtic Literature, in The Complete Works, iii (Lectures and Essays in Criticism), 361.Google Scholar
7. See Ricks, , p. 1276.Google Scholar
8. Titanism was also identified by Arnold as a mark of Celticism. See Celtic Literature, pp. 370–73.Google Scholar
9. Collins, , Illustrations of Tennyson (London: Chatto & Windus, 1891), p. 4.Google Scholar My ultimate valuation of Tennyson is very different from Collins's.
10. See, for example, McLuhan, H. M., “Tennyson and the Romantic Epic,” in Critical Essays on the Poetry of Tennyson, ed. Killham, John (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1960), pp. 86–95,Google Scholar and McLuhan, 's more helpful treatment in his introduction to Alfred Lord Tennyson: Selected Poetry (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1956), pp. xvi–xxiv.Google Scholar
11. Mackail, J. W., Lectures on Greek Poetry (London: Longmans, Green, 1910), p. 219.Google Scholar
12. McLuhan, , Selected Poetry, p. xviii.Google Scholar
13. Pater, Walter, “Conclusion,” The Renaissance, first paragraph.Google Scholar
14. Translation by Robson, W. W., in “The Dilemma of Tennyson,” Critical Essays, ed. Killham, , p. 156.Google Scholar
15. Selected Poetry, p. xviii. Malory's unconscious return to Homer may have provided substantial motivation for Tennyson's conscious return.
16. Carlyle, , Past and Present and Heroes and Hero-Worship (London: Chapman & Hall, 1893), pp. 97–8.Google Scholar