Delirious Bulldogs and Nasty Crockery: Tennyson as Nonsense Poet

Abstract

In concluding his 1833 essay Two Kinds Poetry, John Stuart Mill turns to role critic and suggests that, just as a person must be possessed a certain amount feeling and philosophy to be poet, so a critic must be possessed those same qualities to be able to recognize poetry: When, ... after reading or hearing one or two passages [of writing], we instinctively and without hesitation cry out, is a poet! probability is that passages are strongly marked with peculiar quality. And we may add that in such a case a critic who, having sufficient feeling to respond to poetry, is also without sufficient philosophy to understand it though he feel it not, will be apt to pronounce, this is but this is this is or this is (1) Mill's remark about how an ill-equipped critic is likely to respond to poetry is a return to his essay What is Poetry?, published earlier that year, in which he agrees with Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads that opposite poetry is not prose, but matter fact or science. (2) In both instances, Mill's explicit exclusion prose from his discussion poetry bespeaks his conviction that poetry is a form or a genre, but a mode knowledge. By replacing prose with science as poetry's opposite Mill admits sameness poetry and science as well as their difference: they are polar extremes a common spectrum. In same way, by suggesting that poetry is most likely to be mistaken for exaggeration, mysticism, or Mill implies, perhaps unwittingly, common life poetry and nonsense. To say that nonsense is poetry that has been recognized, or that poetry is nonsense with a sympathetic readership, would be wilfully to misread Mill. However, Mill's belief that, on first encountering a piece writing, a reader might recognize its poetry before being fully confident its meaning does that poetry stands at a certain remove from sense, that a poem might make nonsense before it makes sense. article seeks to explore relationship suggested by Mill between poetry and nonsense through a discussion Edward Lear's reading Tennyson. When Lear, after reading poem that Tennyson dedicated to him, wrote a parody it that pronounced This is nonsense, he was accurately identifying in Tennyson want sense that makes room for poetry. In reviewing Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1833), Mill takes up role feeling and judicious critic that he describes in Two Kinds Poetry. After pouring scorn on reviews Tennyson published in Blackwoods and Quarterly, he makes a claim for Tennyson's considerable, though yet fully realized, poetic talent and writes that of all capacities a poet, that which seems to have arisen earliest in Mr. Tennyson, and in which he most excels, is that scene painting. (3) He goes on to qualify assertion, writing that Tennyson's power lies, in mere landscape description, but in creating scenery (p. 86). Mill's example choice is Mariana. Perhaps first many critics to address question Tennyson's epigraph to poem, Mill writes: The subject is Mariana, Mariana Measure for Measure, living deserted and in solitude in grange. The ideas which these two words suggest, impregnated with feelings supposed inhabitant, have given rise to following picture.... To place ourselves at right point view, we must drop conception Shakespeare's Mariana, and retain only that a grange, and solitary dweller within it, forgotten by mankind. (p. 87) Mill places Shakespeare's words at generative heart poem, but requires that reader empty these words, already more or less divorced from Measure for Measure by brief (mis)quotation, meaning provided by its original context, so that moated grange may house instead the ideas which these two words suggest (Critical Heritage, p. …