Tennyson

Abstract

Tennyson Linda K. Hughes (bio) Amidst inescapable news coverage of a divisive war in Iraq, it is perhaps not surprising that Tennyson's war poetry is receiving renewed attention. Trudi Tate's "On Not Knowing Why: Memorializing the Light Brigade," Literature, Science, Psychoanalysis, 1830-1970: Essays in Honour of Gillian Beer, ed. Helen Small and Trudi Tate (Oxford Univ. Press, pp. 160-180), is among the year's best work, both for its historical scholarship and the deep thoughtfulness Tate brings to the subjects of war's meaning within a culture and the complexities of representing it. As Tate demonstrates, newspaper reports and poems about Balaclava, like the military action itself, were involved in larger social debates about class, tradition, and cultural authority. In an increasingly commercial culture, aristocratic predominance within officer ranks looked outdated and wasteful when deployments increasingly relied on the commercial skills of organization and efficiency. Yet aristocratic valor, duty, and glamour were culturally useful [End Page 409] models of self-sacrifice and what Tate shrewdly terms the fantasy element of war, whether in the form of vicarious participation (which sustained support at home) or the entertaining spectacle circulated by the periodical press. Interpreting the charge of the Light Brigade was inseparable from these class tensions, since the charge was at once an example of horrific waste of life to no discernible military purpose and an astonishing example of courage and discipline against overwhelming odds. Internal tensions within print culture paralleled those involving the military. Poetry was in some respects archaic, since the daily press could relay information more efficiently and poetry had no directly utilitarian purpose. But poetry was a form of cultural action insofar as it inspired readers. If poetry relied on the press for its matter, its detachment from daily business enabled it simultaneously to critique and circulate the fantasy element of war. Tennyson's treatment of the charge thus, according to Tate, resonates with contemporary class rivalries, a pervasive press, and cultural ambivalence: Tennyson both deplores the waste of life and celebrates ideals of heroic bravery and self-sacrifice. Like the aristocratic brigade that at once resolutely acted yet passively accepted botched orders from above, the poem also actively probes the charge's meaning only to retreat at the end into a refusal to think ("not to reason why") in favor of spectacle ("All the world wondered" [l. 31]) and the imperative of tribute ("Honour the Light Brigade" [l. 54]). Cammy Thomas more briefly discusses ambivalence and cultural authority in "Old Poet, Old Soldier" (TRB 8, no. 2: 127-131), while Timothy J. Lovelace, whose 1999 dissertation was selected for publication in the Routledge Outstanding Dissertations series, devotes an entire book to The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson's Battle Poetry. Lovelace cogently argues that the fifty-four poems Tennyson devoted to battles over his lifetime indicate the subject's importance to Tennyson, and that his immersion in Homer and Virgil shaped his heroic treatment of the warrior and bard, who in memorializing valor himself performs a deed. Lovelace traces in Tennyson counterparts to the classical warrior's battle frenzy (at once an inspired act of bravery but also a potential source of excess), recurring Homeric battle motifs of fire and shouting, and classical characters. Like Achilles, for example, Sir Galahad (in his eponymous monologue) seeks honor beyond the conventional rewards of war, while Maud's military ballad has much the same effect on the unnamed speaker that Athena has on Achilles in the Iliad. In Idylls of the King, according to Lovelace, Arthur exemplifies the necessity of balance between reason and the passions; disaster follows when knights forsake this balance and capitulate to the various excesses of violence (The Last Tournament), carnal desire (Lancelot), and mysticism (The Holy Grail). Insofar as he discusses the role of newspapers and bardic commemoration as a form of noble deed, Lovelace's study [End Page 410] parallels Tate's essay. But he excludes cultural contexts from his study, apart from classical tradition and "Victorian uplift" (p. 165). His discussion of Ossian's influence on Tennyson's early battle poems takes up none of the nationalist complexities that Katie Trumpener explores in Bardic Nationalism (Princeton Univ. Press...