Tennyson

Abstract

Tennyson Linda K. Hughes (bio) This year's survey of Tennyson scholarship fittingly begins with the Summer 2021 special Tennyson issue of Victorian Poetry (59, no. 2) edited by Michael [End Page 407] Sullivan.1 It is titled "Tennyson and the Poetic Imagination" and, according to Sullivan, offers diverse approaches to Tennyson's imagination, including poetry's visionary possibilities, fancy, and sensory experience registered in language. A recurring feature of the issue's excellent essays is attention to the suggestibility of Tennyson's poetry, an ability to exceed meaning beyond what his lines immediately express. Ewan Jones in "Tennyson's Phantom Ballads" (VP 59, no. 2: 201–221) arrives at Tennyson's suggestibility beyond the explicitly stated by way of the philosopher Andy Clark's Surfing Uncertainty and Clark's model of predictive processing. Predictive mental processing postulates a dynamic agential activity in which an inferred predictive pattern is constantly self-correcting in the face of fresh sensory input. Jones couples this model with Derek Attridge's contention of a dominant four-beat measure in Anglophone poetry and applies this framework to Tennyson's two-volume Poems (1842) to posit a kind of phantom balladic measure at play. "Break, break, break" is a telling example in Jones's analysis. Though a three-beat measure seems dominant, a phantom fourth foot that is intuited but not heard gives way to actual tetrameter that surfaces in lines 11 and 15 ("But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand"; "But the tender grace of a day that is dead"). These lines reference elements of an unrecoverable past, thus materializing and simultaneously effacing (through the lexical reference to death) the once-living, once-expected ongoing human life in tandem with a ghostlike meter, now here, now vanished. "Break, break, break" is thus a hybrid lyric haunted by ballad measure without conforming to it. A. J. Nickerson alternatively takes up the "gleam" in "Tennyson and the Gleam" (pp. 223–241)–not the imaginary gleam of the autobiographical "Merlin and the Gleam" so much as a persistent yet ineffable crux of Tennyson's poetic imagination and poetics. Stated reductively, the poesis of the "gleam" is irreducibly liminal, hovering always between the known and unknown, life and death, the nearly or partly glimpsed and oblivion. The quest to grasp the nature of the relation between life and death, identity and a beloved other, or the nature of time always fails, but in that failure and through Tennyson's verbal melody, the poetry always implies more than itself. This mode is exemplified in In Memoriam, which constantly pushes to exceed the limits of consciousness and death, falls back unto and into the self, yet leaves a glimmer of half-light glimpsed and conveyed through the work's resonating constancy of verbal music. Alison Chapman emphasizes deixis, along with prosody, in "Placing Tennyson, Tennyson's Place: Memory, Elegy, and Geography in 'Frater Ave atque Vale'" (pp. 243–258). She draws attention to the suggestive duality of [End Page 408] any geo- or spatiotemporal settings in Tennyson insofar as a "here" always signals an "away," a distant prospect of memory and space. If the trochaic octameter catalectic meter of Tennyson's elegiac tribute to his brother and to Catullus in "Frater" propels the poem forward to some arrival, the rhyming catalectic syllables all feature the same open o that suspends forward motion. Similarly, as the boat lands on Sermio, so Catullus arrives in Tennyson's poem in direct quotation, even as the Catullan "Lydian laughter" recalls Catullus's homecoming after serving in Asia Minor far away and evokes by association the Etruscans colonized and ousted by Roman settlement. Even the poem's first publication under a monthly time signature on the cover of James Knowles's magazine Nineteenth Century signaled a specific "now" yet simultaneously revived an ancient past by surfacing Catullus's voice, so that the publication's materiality simultaneously inscribed decay and loss as well as going forward from the past. Jane Wright looks back to Tennyson's classical inheritance as well, specifically his early immersion in Horace from childhood onward ("The Charm of Tennyson," pp. 141–160). Whereas Northrop Frye and Herbert Tucker associate "charm...