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

Abstract

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’.