Tennyson Echoing Wordsworth, by Jayne Thomas

Abstract

Reviewed by: Tennyson Echoing Wordsworth by Jayne Thomas Andrew Elfenbein (bio) Tennyson Echoing Wordsworth, by Jayne Thomas; pp. vi + 210. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019, $100.00. Scholars have often recognized William Wordsworth's importance for Alfred Tennyson. In Tennyson Echoing Wordsworth, Jayne Thomas addresses major issues in this relationship by focusing on familiar works: "The Lady of Shalott" (1832, 1842), "Ulysses" (1842), In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850), Maud (1855), and "Tithonus" (1860). Her general approach [End Page 295] balances Harold Bloom's antagonistic understanding of influence against Christopher Ricks's more cooperative understanding of poetic allusion. Chapter 1 examines the 1832 "The Lady of Shalott" and its 1842 revision to describe Tennyson's impatience with what Arthur Henry Hallam called the poetry of sensation and Tennyson's revision of Wordsworth's "Elegiac Stanzas" (1807) and "The Green Linnet" (1807), among others. In Thomas's view, Wordsworth enables Tennyson's "concerns between the demands of a poetry concerned purely with private experience and poetry that moves away from the self and engages with life, politics, and generalised humanity" (40). Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" (1807) is perhaps the inevitable focus for a chapter on "Ulysses," stressing the lack in Tennyson's work of the compensations and recovery found in Wordsworth. In Memoriam A. H. H. may represent Tennyson at his most Wordsworthian, and Thomas argues that "echoes and allusions" in the poem "create a pattern of both independence from and dependence on Wordsworth, a desire for unity and filiation with the older poet, alongside a desire to re-engender and reinvent" (82). I found the chapter on Maud the least convincing, mostly because Tennyson's engagement with other authors in the poem seems so much more salient. "Tintern Abbey" (1798) (again, among others) is appropriately at the core of the discussion of "Tithonus," which "draws from the language of reflection" and "employs the language of sensation, thereby dissolving the arbitrary separation of the two forms of poetry" (166). Discussing influence in such poems, some of which are not obviously Wordsworthian, requires guidelines for understanding and evaluating it. As Thomas's title reveals, "echoing" is her core concept. Usually, for a piece of language to be the source of an echo, that language must be so distinctive as to have no other possible source. In the jargon of linguistics, such language is a low-frequency collocation, or a rare grouping of words. The echo of an earlier author in the work of a later author may appear at the level of just a single word. Yet the existence of the same word in two authors' works is not enough to prove an echo. Thomas claims that the Lady of Shalott's "glassy countenance" (24) echoes Wordsworth's "glassy sea" in his "Elegiac Stanzas" (25). Such a claim has to contend against other possible uses of "glassy" by Tennyson's precursors, such as Percy Bysshe Shelley's "glassy quiet" in Alastor (1816) (393), Lord Byron's "glassy gaze" in Parisina (1816) (334), or Felicia Hemans's frequent uses of the word glassy to describe bodies of water. Without acknowledging such competing possibilities or providing reasons for why a Wordsworth poem might be especially relevant to a given Tennyson poem, Thomas's treatment of echo sometimes feels murky. It also restricts her argument by hiding the broader intellectual and poetic stakes in Tennyson's originality: while he is indebted to so many other writers, he sounds like nobody else. The phrase "glassy countenance" is striking not because it revises Wordsworth but because it renovates a formulaic adjective by extending its reach. Before Tennyson, "glassy" described poetic bodies of water or, less often, the watery organ of the eyes. Tennyson unforgettably, and even creepily, extends what "glassy" and "countenance" might mean by turning the Lady's face into metaphoric glass, thereby stressing both its link to her magic mirror and its frozen fragility. I was also unsure that Thomas's opposition between Bloom's antagonistic theory of influence and Ricks's cooperative one worked successfully. Such an opposition is too likely to produce the conclusion that we see a little of both. A deeper engagement both [End...