Douglas-Fairhurst Robert - Tennyson Among the Poets

Bicentenary Essays

EDITED BY

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
and Seamus Perry

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

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THE editors are grateful to the Publications Board of the Tennyson Society, who first suggested the idea of this volume; and to Andrew McNeillie and Jacqueline Baker, our editors at the Press, who took it up with such enthusiasm. We would also like to thank Daniel Mallory for compiling the index.

Oxford R. D-F., S. P.

January 2009

CHAUCER reported of his Clerk of Oxenford: And gladly would he learn, and gladly teach. Tennyson learnt gladly from his poet-predecessors. That, he knew. Moreover, he taught his poet-successors gladly, even when he was no longer alive to know so, and even when what he taught had to do not with gladness but with sadness and madness. Auden said of him, notoriously, that there was little about melancholia that he didnt know; there was little else that he did.

He was of Cambridge, but it was Oxford that signally garlanded him, five years after he had been made Poet Laureate, with an honorary degree, Doctor of Civil Law. The occasion was graced by an affectionate incivility, a youthful cry (it bantered The May Queen, You must wake and call me early, call me early, mother dear): Did your mother call you early, dear? But then to Make It New by courtesyor by comic discourtesyof Tennyson proved to be one of the continuing respects in which his art was respected. The very parodies of him (Lewis Carroll), or the turns upon him (Max Beerbohm), never forget his unique unignorability. There is the friend who, seeing Tennyson light up his pipe first thing in the morning, delighted in The earliest pipe of half-awakened bards. (We are not amused.) There is the enemy who held it true that Tis better to have loved and lost | Than never to have lost at all. Perhaps even Nabokov may eventually be forgiven for remarking of an initial reading of a famous, though not very good, poem by Tennyson, Break, break, break, that For all we know, it might be a boxing referee talking in his sleep.

How Tennyson himself created afresh, thanks to earlier and other creation (To which the whole creation moves), and succeeded in doing so repeatedly yet not repetitively, is a subject to which I tried to do justice in a chapter in Allusion to the Poets. That Tennysons art subsequently not only lends itself but gives itself to such eventualities and events, some of them far off in the future and many of them divine, is the subject to which the present collection of essays does justice.

There may be two energies at work. The first, then, is Both a borrower and a lender be. The second that may be operative in Tennysons fertile case, as it would not be in (say) Audens, would be the enlarged freedom that later poets have enjoyed as a result of one manifestation of Tennysons genius, a self-knowledgeable abstention of his. For the crucial critical fact about Tennyson is that, almost alone of our great poets in the last two centuries (almost alone, because of Thomas Hardy, for one?), he abstained from literary criticism. This, without the proud humility that a poet who was valuably beholden to Tennyson was to manifest in 1911. Whether the faculty of literary criticism is the best gift that heaven has in its treasuries I cannot say, but heaven seems to think so, for assuredly it is the gift most charily bestowed. Orators and poets, sages and saints and heroes, if rare in comparison with blackberries, are yet commoner than the appearance of Halleys comet; literary critics are less common (A. E. Housman).

Tennyson left no critical essays, let alone books; his letters are all but entirely vacant of criticism, whether of his own poems or of others; and though there are certainly some piercing aperus about poets and poems recorded in Hallam Tennysons life of his father as well as in William Allinghams supreme Diary, the best of them are connected in some way with the making of the greatest of anthologies, Palgraves Golden Treasury, which was where such potentialities of Tennysons came to find realization. The poet-critic is a great exemplar: Jonson, Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Arnold, Hopkins, Eliot, Empson, Davie But Tennyson is a different wonder, the poet who is not a critic except (except!) in the practice of his art. So that when he presents to his successors this distinctive freedom, as against their having perhaps to come to uneasy terms with a predecessors critical strictures and ex cathedra dicta, Tennyson may be seen to offer a most unusuala differently ampleopportunity, one that has again and again (as this book demonstrates) been diversely and gladly seized.

Christopher Ricks

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

Peter McDonald

Dinah Birch

Christopher Decker

Aidan Day

Daniel Karlin

A. A. Markley

Eric Griffiths

N. K. Sugimura

Michael ONeill

Donald S. Hair

Marion Shaw

Matthew Bevis

Richard Cronin

Kirstie Blair

Linda K. Hughes

Samantha Matthews