Revising Alfred, Lord Tennyson: A Closer Look at Two Color Line Stories “The Wife of His Youth” and “Cecily’s Dream” by Charles W. Chesnutt

This article explores an African American writer’s revision of a famous English poet Tennyson whose versified medieval portrait of the Arthurian legend appears in Idylls of the King as well as other poems. The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line (1899), a story collection by African American author Charles Chesnutt (1858–1932), addresses parameters contextualized in the aftermath of slavery such as esthetic notions of beauty tied to whiteness and intra-racial inequality. The final failure of two protagonists, a man and a woman, to fulfill their romantic aspirations of whiteness connects the collection’s titular story to “Cecily’s Dream.” In addition to the color-line theme, however, Chesnutt is motivated to refer to the poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892), including moments in which chivalric codes of honor, whiteness and flawed courtly love are idealized. Tennyson’s parabolic poems provide Chesnutt’s intertextual scheme to engage the implied reader by renewing, transforming and also subverting the motif of courtly love in these Arthurian idylls.

The Epic Tradition

Epic occupied a prominent position as the highest test of poetic genius, yet any poet imprudent enough to attempt an epic would be faced with a daunting challenge. For a Victorian poet the attempt to rival Homer or Virgil involved complex considerations of form, theme, and history. The genre was traditionally associated with heroism and masculine strength, mythology, and the shaping of national identity, religion, and war, and with the poet’s own desire to compete with and surpass his predecessors much as epic heroes seek to prove their own supremacy. The reception of ancient epic was an ongoing concern in the period, since Homer in particular was cited as a model in literature, politics, and morality. Matthew Arnold’s prescriptions for translating Homer conveyed a sense of the responsibility involved in disseminating classical texts to a new readership. The Iliad was appropriated in debates on divorce, masculinity, authorship, and the historical criticism of the Bible. The Odyssey offered an alternative, novelistic version of Homeric epic, one which prioritized domesticity and highlighted the poem’s female characters. Some of the most influential creative responses to the epic tradition were not poems in twelve or twenty-four books but verse novels, dramatic monologues, or theatrical burlesques. Others took up the challenge of writing at epic length and addressing national concerns. For aspiring epic poets, there were many choices to be made: should poetry inhabit a mythological world, whether Arthurian (Tennyson’s Idylls of the King or Swinburne’s Tristram of Lyonesse) or Norse (William Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung), or a contemporary domain like that of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh? Might the epic be used to intervene in religious controversies or political conflicts such as Chartism? Could a modern poet be the Virgil of the British Empire? Facing strong competition from the novel, ambitious Victorian poets chose to approach such questions and an astonishing range of themes in a form which evoked vast expanses of time and space, extraordinary physical and intellectual achievement, and literary renown. Yet to achieve recognition as an epic poet remains an unusual distinction. Despite recent critical attention to the proliferation of Victorian poems with epic aspirations, a small number of poems by Tennyson, Barrett Browning, and William Morris have continued to dominate accounts of the genre.

Victorian Mages: Robert Browning’s “Pietro of Abano” as a Critical Corollary to Alfred Tennyson’s Merlin

Against the backdrop of Victorian celebrity culture, Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson conjure the literary trope of the magician in order to convey their poetic choices and to examine the relationship between the poet and his audience. Whereas Browning’s magician, “Pietro of Abano” of Dramatic Idyls (1880), is subversive, odd and persecuted, the Poet Laureate’s Merlin of the Idylls of the King (1859–1875) is acknowledged and well admired. This essay will explore Browning’s Pietro as a critical response to Tennyson’s Merlin, reflecting the complex personal relationship between the two poets, their stylistic differences and their dissimilar reception by their contemporaries.

O revivalismo medieval pelas lentes do gênero: as fotografias De Julia Margaret Cameron para a obra the Idylls of the King e outros poemas de Alfred Tennyson

Pioneira na arte da fotografia, Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) produziu centenas de retratos e tableaux vivants. Estes últimos, embora inseridos no movimento Pré-Rafaelita então em voga na Inglaterra, davam mostra de uma visão da Idade Média um pouco distinta da que seus contemporâneos ajudaram a construir: menos heroica e mais íntima, com grande quantidade e protagonismo de mulheres. A fim de estudar suas ideias a esse respeito, analisaremos neste artigo um conjunto de imagens feitas por ela em 1874 para a obra The Idylls of the King, de Alfred Tennyson, com histórias da corte do rei Artur (além de cinco outros poemas também marcados pelo medievalismo), e faremos comparações com outro conjunto de imagens feitas para aquela mesma obra: as 36 gravuras que o ilustrador francês Gustave Doré publicou entre 1867 e 1868

The Victorian Verse-Novel

This book considers the rise of a hybrid generic form, the verse-novel, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Such poems combined epic length with novelistic plots in the attempt to capture not a heroic past but the quotidian present. Victorian verse-novels also tended to be rough-mixed, their narrative sections interspersed with shorter, lyrical verses in varied measures. In flouting the rules of contemporary genre theory, which saw poetry as the purview of the eternal and ideal and relegated the everyday to the domain of novelistic prose, verse-novels proved well suited to upsetting other hierarchies, as well, including those of gender and class. The genre’s radical energies often emerge from the competition between lyric and narrative drives, between the desire for transcendence and the quest to find meaning in what happens next; the unusual marriage plots that structure such poems prove crucibles of these rival forces. Generic tensions also yield complex attitudes toward time and space: the book’s first half considers the temporality of love, while its second looks at generic geography through the engagement of novels in verse with Europe and the form’s transatlantic travels. Both well-known verse-novels (Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, Arthur Hugh Clough’s Amours de Voyage, Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House) and lesser-known examples are read closely alongside a few nearly related works (Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book). An Afterword traces the verse-novel’s substantial influence on the modernist novel.

Circle-Squarers

Chapter 3, “Circle-Squarers: Tennyson’s and Browning’s Form-Things,” looks at Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Browning’s The Ring and the Book, two poems that worry about circling the square: creating lyric unity out of rectilinear narrative. Both tell of marriage and adultery, combining fractured narrative form with violent plots. And despite a historical remoteness at odds with the verse-novel’s modernity, they show the pervasive influence of the genre. The chapter considers how Tennyson and Browning embed into their poems two types of gem, diamond and pearl, that can be termed form-things: objects through which to express and explore generic affiliation. Finally, it moves from circular forms back to square books, to Browning’s The Inn Album, a verse-novel that consciously modernizes The Ring and the Book even as it embraces its own marginal generic status in an effort to sidestep the intractable geometry of circled squares.