Divining Desire: Tennyson and the Poetics of Transcendence (review)

Abstract

The title of James Hood's new book, Divining Desire: Tennyson and the Poetics of Transcendence, harbors a double entendre. Expounding the ways in which Tennyson's poetry interprets or makes known the mysteries of desire, the book also shows how Tennyson "divinizes" or renders godlike what Arthur Hallam calls "erotic devotion" (qtd. 9). In Hood's words, the book looks "both at attempts to perfect desire in divine fashion and at the means by which Tennyson's poems try to 'divine' the nature of desire itself" (8). It is the first and less common of these two meanings of the verb "divine" that links Tennyson's exploration of desire and eros to the book's subtitle, "the poetics of transcendence." Hood wants to show how the mourner in In Memoriam (1850) makes his grief for his dead friend into a "divine despair" ("Tears, idle tears," line 2). How do the Prince in The Princess (1847) and the Byronic speaker in Maud (1855) make desire for the women they love transcendent? Can Tennyson ennoble Guinevere's love for Arthur and Lancelot as a divine love? Or does her sexual betrayal throw transcendence into reverse gear? How does it precipitate the black comedy of "Pelleas and Ettarre" and the decline of love into lust in "The Last Tournament"?