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 As
many of you know, from time to time I write about specific poets
for these weekly pieces. Our most recent was Percy
Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822), who I discussed back in August.
He was from a period in English writing which was part of European
‘Romanticism’. This period began in the 18th Century, but in English
poetry it is considered to have begun in the late 1790s with the
publication of the Lyrical Ballads by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(1772 – 1834) and William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850); William Blake
(1757 – 1827) and Robert Southey (1774 – 1843) were also members
of this group in its early stages. Its second phase, which is
usually considered to extend from about 1805 to the 1830s, was
marked by what is sometimes called cultural nationalism, with
increasing awareness of folklore and previously ignored medieval
and Renaissance works. Shelley, together with George
Gordon, Lord Byron (1788 – 1824) and John Keats (1795 – 1821)
are regarded as the high points of this phase.
The period around
the accession of Queen Victoria (which was in 1837) to the British
throne marked a very considerable change in society in the most
general sense. The beginnings of the industrial revolution; the
societal changes of which the great Reform Law of 1832 was the
clearest example; and the abolition of slavery in Great Britain
in 1833 marked a great stabilization of the country and a remarkable
period of growth and prosperity. In literature, the Victorian
age was marked by the appearance of a number of important novelists,
notably Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870), George Eliot (1819 – 1880),
and William Makepeace Thackeray (1811 – 1863). The major figures
in poetry during this period included Elizabeth Barrett Browning
(1806 – 1861), Robert Browning
(1812 – 1889), and Alfred Tennyson (1809 – 1892).
Our subject this
week is Alfred Tennyson, who was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire.
He was the fourth of twelve children, and after a brief period
at school received his early education at home from his father,
the Reverend George Clayton Tennyson, the rector of Somersby.
George had been virtually disinherited by his father in favor
of a younger brother, and Tennyson’s youth was overshadowed by
this family feud between the Tennysons of Somersby and his grandparents
with their favored son (later Charles Tennyson d’Eyncourt) of
Bayons Manor.
 When
he was twelve, Alfred composed a 6,000 line epic poem; and when
he was seventeen, he collaborated with two of his older brothers,
Frederick and Charles, in writing a collection of poems which
was published in 1827 under the title Poems by Two Brothers. (OK,
so there were three of them. Frederick contributed only a few
poems.) He entered Trinity College, Cambridge University in 1827,
again following his older brothers. There were two important events
during his stay there: in 1829 he won the Chancellor’s Prize for
his poem Timbuctoo; and he met Arthur Henry Hallam, who eventually
became his best friend. On a visit to Somersby in December 1829,
Hallam met and later became engaged to Alfred’s sister Emily.
In 1830, for a brief period, he joined the insurgent army in Spain
with Hallam.
Interestingly, Tennyson’s
eyesight was always very poor, and he was accustomed to composing
his poems in his head, seldom writing them down. One of his important
early poems was The
Lotos-Eaters, which he declaimed to a club called The
Apostles, to which he had been elected: the text is available
because Hallam wrote it down as Tennyson delivered it.
In 1830 he published
Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, which contained the poem Mariana.
In 1831 his father died, and he left Cambridge without graduating.
In 1832, he published Poems; the date was given as 1833,
and this included The
Lotos-Eaters and The Lady of Shalott. In 1833,
Hallam died suddenly; and Tennyson was severely shocked. He began
writing a series of poems which was eventually published as In
Memoriam in 1850. In 1842 he republished Poems,
with some additions; and this essentially established his fame.
 In
1836 he began his courtship of Emily Sellwood, whom he eventually
married in 1850; the reasons for the long delay were partly that
Alfred lost essentially all of his money as a result of an unwise
investment, and partly that Emily was unconvinced of the strength
of his religious commitment; they consequently canceled their
engagement. It was not until in 1845 when he received a Civil
List (Government) Pension of £200 per annum, providing him
with a living income that he felt able to renew his engagement
to Emily; she apparently felt that he had discovered his faith.
His eldest son was born in 1852, and in March of 1854 his second
son Lionel was born. In April 1886, Lionel died, aged thirty-two,
while returning from India.
In 1850, Tennyson
was appointed Poet Laureate,
following the death of William Wordsworth. The Prince Consort,
Albert, was a great admirer of his poetry, and when the Tennysons
were moving into a new house on the Isle of Wight, Albert dropped
in unannounced. Tennyson had been contemplating a series of poems
on the Arthurian legends, which was eventually published as Idylls
of the King in 1859 and he dedicated the volume to the Prince.
(This was an incredibly successful book -- 10,000 copies sold
in a single month!)
In 1883 he finally
accepted the title of Baron at the personal urging of Queen Victoria;
he had previously turned down repeated offers of a baronetcy from
both Gladstone and Disraeli. His full title was then ‘Alfred Tennyson,
1st Baron Tennyson of Aldworth and Freshwater’. The name we all
know him by, ‘Alfred, Lord Tennyson’ thus came late in his life,
and well after the writing of the poems by which he is best known.
He smoked heavily
all his life, and in his later years he was accustomed to drinking
a whole bottle of port in the evening. He seemed capable of staying
up very late, and when his guests had gone or retired to bed he
would go out and look at the stars. In spite of all this (or perhaps
because of it! -- Ed.), he lived a long life, and was still writing
until the last year or so.
In 1889 he wrote
a famous short poem, Crossing
the Bar during a crossing to the Isle of Wight. He died,
after a long illness, in 1892
So much for the history.
As with any other poet, his work was not altogether admired! In
the early part of his career, some of those who had detected the
real possibility that he might indeed become a great poet were
concerned about the effect of some of his friends. In particular,
it was thought that he might become influenced by “the Cockneys”
which was the disparaging title used by critics for Keats, Shelley,
William Hazlitt (1778 – 1830), and Leigh Hunt (1784 – 1859).
Thus, in February
1832, the critic Professor John Wilson, writing as ‘Christopher
North’ in Blackwood’s Magazine wrote:
CHRISTOPHER NORTH:
From what region of man’s spirit shall break a new day-spring
of song? . . .The future is all darkness.
TICKLER. . . .Are there no younkers?
NORTH. A few–but equivocal. I have good hopes of Alfred Tennyson.
But the Cockneys are doing what they may to spoil him–and if
he suffers them to put their birdlime on his feet, he will stick
all the days of his life on hedgerows, or leap fluttering about
the bushes. I should be sorry for it–for though his wings are
far from being full-fledged, they promise now well in the pinions–and
I should not be surprised to see him yet a sky-soarer. His “Golden
Days of good Haroun Alraschid” are extremely beautiful. There
is feeling–and fancy–in his Oriana. He has a fine ear for melody
and harmony too–and rare and rich glimpses of imagination. He
has–genius.
TICKLER. Affectations.
NORTH. Too many. But I admire Alfred–and hope–nay trust –that
one day he will prove himself a poet. If he do not–then am I
no prophet.
Actually, to be honest,
I don’t really understand what North means by the ‘Cockneys’ here,
since Shelley and Keats were dead well before Tennyson wrote his
first book with his brothers, and Hazlitt by the time his first
collection appeared; all before North wrote his article. I imagine
that he refers to their successors.
In October 1833, Edward
FitzGerald (the translator of the Rubáiyát)
wrote: “Tennyson has been in town for some time: he has been making
fresh poems, which are finer, they say, than any he has done.
But I believe he is chiefly meditating on the purging and subliming
of what he has already done: and repents that he has published
at all yet. It is fine to see how in each succeeding poem the
smaller ornaments and fancies drop away, and leave the grand ideas.”
Over the succeeding
years, the ebb and flow of comment, acceptance, and disenchantment
is very interesting. A range of comments and correspondence is
on a Tennyson website: tennysonpoetry.home.att.net.
 Ezra
Pound (1885 – 1972) was not keen on much English poetry – going
back many years. He hated Milton, for example. He was not too
keen on the Lake Poets, and he really appeared to have loathed
the Cockneys. He once remarked that poetry in England ended when
Walter Savage Landor (1775 – 1864) “packed his bags and left for
Italy” in 1814. He did have some good things to say about Robert
Browning, but he didn’t like Tennyson at all, so far as I can
tell. I recently read an excellent book on the manuscript collection
of Eliot’s poems written in the period 1909 – 1917: Inventions
of the March Hare, edited by Christopher Ricks. The interesting
thing here is that a considerable number of Eliot’s phrases and
usages show a significant influence of Tennyson, particularly
Maude; other
poems to which links are shown include Locksley Hall, In Memoriam,
The Beggar Maid, and Crossing the Bar.
One of Tennyson’s
characteristics was his great sensitivity to criticism: he would
rework his poems and republish them. Apparently he hated his own
work when he first saw it in print, although it is clear from
his willingness to recite it to visitors that he overcame this
quickly!
Browning, on the
other hand, ignored criticism altogether; and in 1845 he remarked
that “For Keats and Tennyson to ‘go softly all their days’ for
a gruff word or two is quite inexplicable to me, and always has
been. Tennyson reads the “Quarterly” and does as they bid him,
with the most solemn face in the world–out goes this, in goes
that, all is changed and ranged. Oh me!”
Tennyson hated interaction
with people, particularly in crowds. He envied Shakespeare, because
essentially nothing is known of his life; the work stands by itself.
I think this comment
by Walt Whitman (1819 – 1892) is of great interest, because of
the enormous difference between the two men and their poetry:
“To me, Tennyson shows
more than any poet I know (perhaps has been a warning to me) how
much there is in finest verbalism. There is such a latent charm
in mere words, cunning collocutions, and in the voice ringing
them, which he has caught and brought out, beyond all others–as
in the line,
And hollow, hollow,
hollow, all delight,
in ‘The Passing of
Arthur’, and evidenced in ‘The Lady of Shalott’, ‘The Deserted
House’, and many other pieces. Among the best (I often linger
over them again and again) are ‘Lucretius’, ‘The Lotos-Eaters’,
and ‘The Northern Farmer’. His mannerism is great, but it is a
noble and welcome mannerism. His very best work, to me, is contained
in the books of The Idylls of the King, all of them, and all that
has grown out of them. Though indeed we could spare nothing of
Tennyson, however small or however peculiar–not ‘Break, Break’,
nor ‘Flower in the Crannied Wall’ nor the old, eternally-told
passion of ‘Edward Gray’:
Love may come and
love may go,
And fly like a bird from tree to tree
But I will love no more, no more
Till Ellen Adair come back to me.
Yes, Alfred Tennyson’s
is a superb character, and will help give illustriousness, through
the long roll of time, to our Nineteenth Century. In its bunch
of orbic names, shining like a constellation of stars, his will
be one of the brightest. His very faults, doubts, swervings, doublings
upon himself, have been typical of our age. We are like the voyagers
of a ship, casting off for new seas, distant shores. We would
still dwell in the old suffocating and dead haunts, remembering
and magnifying their pleasant experiences only, and more than
once impelled to jump ashore before it is too late, and stay where
our fathers stayed, and live as they lived.”
 In
1892, after Tennyson’s death, William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939)
reviewed The Death of Œnone: “As years passed over him
the poet grew not less and the man grew incomparably greater,
and this growth was accompanied ever by a shedding off of hopes
based upon mere mechanical change and mere scientific or political
inventiveness, until at the last his soul came near to standing,
as the soul of the poet should, naked under the heavens.”
The choice of poems
to illustrate Tennyson is far from simple. I said at the beginning
that Tennyson was an example – perhaps the major example among
poets – of the Victorian age, and these lines from Locksley Hall
illustrate that:
Men, my brothers,
men the workers, ever reaping something new:
That which they have done but earnest of the things that they
shall do:
For I dipt into
the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens
fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens
fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;
Far along the world-wide
whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging thro’ the thunderstorm;
Till the war-drum
throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.
Before in this series
I have quoted from Maud,
and although it was probably Tennyson’s own favorite I will not
use it again. I have also used
The Charge of the Light Brigade recently, which was
written much later, in his ‘Laureate’ phase; and Break, Break,
Break on thy Cold Gray Rocks. I think I will select Mariana,
from his earliest collection, as my first poem of this week. One
cannot really ignore In
Memoriam, not only because of its importance in Tennyson’s
life, and because of the slow growth in its acceptance over the
years, but also because it was a very important poem to Queen
Victoria. Although it is presented as though it is a single long
poem, we know from the way it was written that it is in fact a
collection of separate poems; and I will select just a few of
the well over one hundred sections. I have also quoted from The
Lady of Shalott before, and although it is very popular, I
have decided not to include it again. Instead, I thought I would
use the poem that Arthur Hallam copied down in Cambridge as Tennyson
declaimed it in his great booming voice: The
Lotos-Eaters.
Finally, here is
one of the last poems he wrote, Crossing the Bar:
Sunset and evening
star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide
as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening
bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
For tho’ from out
our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.
I hope you enjoy this
glimpse of a striking man and a great poet!
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