How to Exist Where You Are: A Lesson in Lotos-Eating

Abstract

Ever let Fancy roam, Pleasure is at --John Keats For over thirty years critics have tried Tennyson as an imperialist of To summarize their case: from a young age Tennyson immersed himself travel literature to imagine a life far away from unhappy, violent household Somersby. This interest remote experiences became a signature of his poetry, and his early works particular abound exotic details that we can trace back to his wide travel reading. In this Tennyson seems aesthetic analogue of imperial capitalist, venturing out mind to some faraway land and returning with foreign resources to enrich his poetic hoard at And yet--as critics acknowledge--in using exotic imagery, Tennyson differs little from poets who influenced him, such as Byron, Shelley, and Keats. What makes Tennyson's case distinct from theirs court of literary criticism is not his exoticism per se but rather his politics, which are as elusive his early poems as they are hard to miss his later. Thus case against Tennyson depends part on a developmental reading of his poetry, which detects his later commitments to British imperial policy as latent his early reliance on exotic imagery. As Alan Sinfield alleges trial's opening argument, for Tennyson the poetic spirit is advance guard of capitalism and imperialism, and cannot escape this involvement. Subsequent critics, most recent being David Riede, have developed or qualified Sinfield's accusation, but majority verdict returns same: guilty as charged. (1) This essay is not a deposition for defense. Tennyson himself admitted a fascination with things remote (The words 'far, far away' had always a strange charm for me) that is hard to read as politically innocent. (2) And he did use exotic imagery for his own ideological convenience, as Sinfield accuses him of doing--this essay is partly about one of ways he did so. But his situation is complicated: what Sinfield and later critics miss is that Tennyson was also deeply critical of an imaginative bias toward far away--albeit primarily on aesthetic rather than political grounds. This aesthetic critique is my subject. By getting a better purchase on Tennyson's early aesthetics, we can more fully appreciate unusual formal choices that have been missed critical effort to discover a coherent political position his early poetry. We will also come to suspect developmental reading of his career. developmental reading states that before British was imagination. That is, before imperialism became a recognizable political construct mid-Victorian era, groundwork was laid by an aesthetic ideology that emphasized imagination's preference for what lay apart from familiar experience: for exotic, etymological sense of word as demarcating what is outside. Pleasure, as Keats's epigraph to this essay has it, never is at home. Tennyson's early poems, which fly from Persia to Peru without ever obviously alighting poet's native Lincolnshire, would seem implicitly to further Keats's claim. But very obsessiveness with which Tennyson imagines faraway places and stages and restages scenes of travel, discovery, or imperial conquest should make us hesitate. For if Tennyson's poetry can be read as logical outcome of a particular imaginative ideal, it can also be read as a sustained investigation of that same ideal: that is, as challenging rather than confirming it. I take up a set of interrelated early poems that critically analyze attraction of far away and counter it with a pleasure Fast-rooted, in its place (The Lotos-Eaters, 11. 83, 81): The Merman, The Mermaid, and The Sea-Fairies Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) and The Lotos-Eaters Poems (1832). In reforming aesthetic pleasure around nearby rather than remote, these poems discredit after all, although not along overtly political lines on which Sinfield and others would have them proceed. …