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A Precarious Turning: Tennyson's Redemption of Literature and Life from Medievalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

William E. Buckler
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Extract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 8 , Spring 1980 , pp. 85 - 102
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

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References

NOTES

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