Tennyson’s ‘Tithonus’ and the Revision of Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’

This chapter examines the Wordsworthian echoes and borrowings in the 1860 dramatic monologue ‘Tithonus’, revealing ‘Tithonus’, and, in part the earlier ‘Tithon’ on which it is based, as a rewriting of the relationship between mind and nature, of the self reencountering itself in time, as it appears in Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ (1798). In reworking Wordsworth’s interaction between mind and nature, ‘Tithonus’ is consolidating a new poetic alongside revising what has ostensibly become an outdated poetic trope. The revisions, in part, free Tennyson from the universal subjectivity of the lyric speaker, thereby strengthening the strategies of the monologue. Yet, Tennyson’s borrowings and echoes create effects that the poet cannot fully control, feeding, compromising, directing, and, ultimately, supporting the poem.

‘“She has a lovely face”’:1 Tennyson and ‘The Lady of Shalott’

This chapter examines Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’, a poem that met with intense criticism from its reviewers when it was first published in 1832, arguing that the poem prefigures the movement Tennyson is to make in the English ‘Idyls’ of 1842 toward a simplicity of diction and gaining the sympathies of a wide audience. The poem absorbs a Wordsworthian language and poetics from which Arthur Henry Hallam somewhat artificially separates it in his 1831 review of Tennyson’s Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, ‘On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry, And on the Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson’. Wordsworth’s presence is clearly felt in the 1832 version of ‘The Lady of Shalott’, feeding Tennyson’s discussion of some of the poem’s major themes, although the level of borrowing from Wordsworth increases in the 1842 version of the poem, suggesting that Tennyson draws even more deeply from Wordsworth in 1842, both to assuage the critics and to search for a new poetic. The second part of the chapter briefly explores the linguistic and thematic connections between ‘The Lady of Shalott’ and Tennyson’s English ‘Idyls’, specifically ‘Dora’ and ‘The Gardener’s Daughter, Or, The Pictures’.

Crossing the Wordsworthian Bar

This chapter confirms the book’s findings through an analysis Tennyson’s late poem, ‘Crossing the Bar’ (1889); in ending with Tennyson’s valedictory lyric, the book also substantiates the claim that Tennyson did not move away from Wordsworth in his later years, drawing out the literary-historical implications of Tennyson’s echoing of Wordsworth’s language and phrasing. In studying the echoes that sound through poems, the book validates the notion that historical and cultural context cannot fully account for the author’s poetic and literary associations, as ‘literature itself has a history […] and manifests authors’ own histories of reading and writing’. Implicit in the summary is an acknowledgement of the dangers inherent in limiting the study of Tennyson’s Romantic influences simply to one, albeit toweringly important, poet. Yet the conclusion also implicitly acknowledges how the book’s concentration on Tennyson’s echoing of Wordsworth reveals compelling things about the later poet’s poetic relationship with Wordsworth, making a timely intervention in the field of Romantic and Victorian literary continuities and discontinuities, and expanding critical understanding of Tennyson’s poetic relationship with Wordsworth and with his own poetry.

Monodrama and Madness: Maud and the Shrieking of the Wainscot Mouse

This chapter examines Tennyson’s Maud, published in 1855. The poem was met with sustained criticism, not least because of its ‘innovatory’ form, a ‘drama in lyrics’ as Tennyson himself terms it. Maud displays a variety of influences, including, most conspicuously, Hamlet, and a variety of metrical forms, in its attempt to render the speaker’s successive phases of passion; the latter include ballad, heroic couplet, alexandrines, and epithalamion. It has also been claimed that Maud, Tennyson’s first non-occasional poem as Laureate, is the result of an Oedipal rivalry with Wordsworth, largely as a result of his inheritance of the Laureateship in 1850. However, Wordsworth’s presence in Maud is more complex than Harold Bloom’s somewhat monolithic model would allow, creating a multiplicity of effects: some borrowings allow Tennyson to remodulate Wordsworth, allowing him to define himself in relation to his predecessor; others define him in turn, underlining the trajectory of the poem and questioning its narrative form; others allow Tennyson to address issues which the poem ostensibly avoids; yet others allow Tennyson to question his role as public poet and as poet of ‘sensation’.

‘The dead man touched me from the past’:1 Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Wordsworth

This chapter examines Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850). Tennyson was open about the difficulties he sustained in writing the poem, and this chapter argues that the Wordsworthian borrowings in the poem help the later poet to work toward finding a form of consolation, however tenuous this consolation subsequently proves to be, and therefore to make his accommodations with his faith, with the claims of nineteenth-century science and religion, but also with the loss of Arthur Henry Hallam, the direct subject of the poem. It also examines how the Wordsworthian language in In Memoriam helps Tennyson both to stabilise his ‘public’ voice and to develop the pastoral elements of elegy. The borrowings from Wordsworth form a chamber of echoes that Tennyson harnesses, reworks, reconfigures, replays in a different context and in a different time. At times the later poet is unable fully to transfigure and rework Wordsworth’s language, but is constrained, limited, inhibited by it, and these effects make themselves manifest in the poem too.

Introduction

This chapter sets out the scope and methodology of the book, revealing how it moves beyond existing accounts of Wordsworthian influence in Tennyson to uncover new and revealing connections and interactions in some of the most emblematic poems of Tennyson’s career – ‘The Lady of Shalott’, ‘Ulysses’, In Memoriam, Maud, and ‘Tithonus’. It explains the book’s use of the term ‘echo’ to track the sometimes loud, sometimes faint, yet always audible Wordsworthian resonances within Tennyson’s poetry, as well setting its analysis of Tennyson’s poetry in relation to the intertextual and allusive process in general and Harold Bloom’s theory of intra-poetic rivalry in particular. It gives an overview of Tennyson’s recorded relationship with Wordsworth, as set out in Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, I and II, edited by Hallam Tennyson, Tennyson’s son. It gives an overview of relevant critical work in the field, and chapter summaries of the five chapters to follow, including a brief acknowledgement of how the book will conclude with an analysis of Tennyson’s valedictory lyric, ‘Crossing the Bar’.