Chapter 8 Alfred Lord Tennyson
Alfred is the fourth son in a family of twelve children. He is certainly the most representative, Victorian poet. His poetry voices the doubt and the faith, the grief and the joy of the English people in an era of fast social changes. Tennyson is a great Victorian poet conscious of the situation of his age. He is the first major writer to reveal the perception of the vast extent of geological time that has haunted human consciousness since Victorian scientists exposed the history of the Earth’s crust. Tennyson has the natural power of linking visual pictures with musical expressions, and with strong feelings. He also has perfect control of the sound of English, and a sensitive ear, an excellent choice of words. His poetry is rich in poetic images and melodious language, and noted for its lyrical beauty and metrical charm. His works are not only the products of the creative imagination of a poetic genius but also products of a long and rich English heritage. His wonderful works manifest all the qualities of England’s great poets.
Critical Perspectives
1.Comparative Study
Ebtihal Elshaikh, in “Dialogical Self in Tennyson’s Ulysses and Farooq Guwaida’s A Star Looking for an Orbit”, argues that Dialogical Self Theory sees the self as a complex system consisting of several other selves or “I-positions”. The theory is an important technique to study the narrative discourse, especially in literary genres like drama and novel; but rarely applied to poetry. The aim of this paper is to apply the theory of Dialogical Self to two poems: Ulysses by Alfred Lord Tennyson, and A Star Looking for an Orbit by Farooq Guwaida. The paper is going to discuss how these two writers use two mythical figures that have much in common, Ulysses and Sinbad, to represent two different experiences of Victorian England and Postmodern Egypt. Both writers reflect the psychological conflict and the identity crisis that are the outcome of such societies at crossroads. In Ulysses and A Star Looking for an Orbit, we face a multi-layered identity, or what Hermans calls different I-positions in a dialogue with each other. Tennyson is known to be one of the speakers of the Victorian age. His poetry comes to reflect the Victorian interests and issues. In his poem, Ulysses, Tennyson expresses, through his use of the Greek myth of Ulysses, the social and political dilemma of the Victorian society and the conflict that rises between an individual identity and a social one. Throughout the poem we confront many I-positions that represent Tennyson’s self and his contemporary culture. Guwaida, likewise, and through his use of the oriental myth of Sinbad, represents the psychological conflict that tears the contemporary Egyptian self apart. The I-positions that we meet in Guwaida reflect the difficulty of dialogue between the two realms of the poet’s self: the external realm representing the harsh postmodern reality, and the internal realm representing the adventurous romantic self.[1]
Christina Henderson, in “A Nation of the Continual Present: Timrod, Tennyson, and the Memorialization of the Confederacy”, discusses the connections in the works of American poet Henry Timrod and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Maud Dickson, in his 1886 article, described Timrod as the Tennyson of South Carolina while in a 1893 The Sewanee Review by Henry E. Shepherd, Timrod’s writing was compared to that of Tennyson in the latter’s In Memoriam. Timrod’s version of Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table follows the same formula as the southern warriors also do observe a code of behavior like honor and truth without stain, which echoes the values in Tennyson’s work. According to Christina, the works of Timrod speak on behalf of the white South and immortalize not only himself, but also his South.[2]
2.Poststructuralism
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ra Edman, in “Power in Jeopardy: A Poststructuralist Reading of the Arthurian Legend from Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur and Tennyson’s Idylls of the King to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings”, discusses that the days of the classical heroes are over, as the days of romance or chivalric romance and epic that depict the hero in quest of the ideal are. A typical romance situates the hero in a succession of challenges, each of which is overcome by him, who finally defeats the dark, evil force and brings peace and order to his community, thus offering to it the opportunity of living in a system defined by the norms of universal morality and enlightenment. The hero becomes a model of universal justice and stability, and he towers above all of his fellow men as a symbol of perfection and endurance of will against the powers of darkness. This plot of one-man challenge and task has been much fruitful in the creation of the stories of the pre-Christian times, the times of the foundation and expansion of Christianity, and the Medieval Age. During these eras such legendary figures as Osiris, Prometheus, Moses, Jesus Christ, and King Arthur of England have emerged as representative perfect super heroes and as universal and absolute role models. Known as monomyths, such stories have shown parallelism regarding the character and plot structure, all yielding similarities as dictated by Romance; this is mostly obvious through the continuous clash of good and evil. The clash creates a sustained tension in the reader whose moral understanding and conscience are kept busy in wondering whether the hero will lose the battle of righteousness or win it, announcing that human dignity has once again been victorious over evil forces. As suggested above, the days of such heroes are over, together with their references to super human qualities which have long been referred to as universal symbols that stand for ideal models for humanity. Such symbols, signifiers, refer to a sign both in Semiotics and Linguistics. Simply, it can be defined as something which has a meaning other than itself. Therefore, conventionally, a sign is assumed to transmit information to the one who understands or deciphers it and signified elements. Signifiers intended or ultimate logos to be reflected through signifiers have become clichés. Henceforth, this situation hinders the creativity of the contemporary writer, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, who has experienced both modernism and postmodernism. An updated deconstruction of romance and epic and their referents by J.R.R. Tolkien in his The Lord of the Rings is a strong anti-thesis of the old principles of authorship. The signifiers Tolkien uses do not yield a single conventional signified, although they refer to the sub-creation, in which unique characters and events were created in a peculiar world, that is, Middle-earth. Besides, Tolkien, inspired by Camelot and the Arthurian legends of both Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur and Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, deconstructs the conventional signifiers in his works.[3]
3.Psychoanalytical Criticism
Andrew Hamilton, in “On Remembering Poems”, discusses the potential challenges and benefits of remembering poetry, whether correctly or with difficulty, focusing on his experiences remembering poems from poets such as Alfred Lord Tennyson, Walt Kelly, and Ogden Nash. Topics include poems about aging and poems such as The Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour, by Wallace Stevens.[4]
4.New Historicism
Allison Adler Kroll, in “Tennyson and the Metaphysics of Material Culture: The Early Poetry”, presents an exploration into the early poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson and its engagement with contemporary 19th-century debate over material culture and the preservation of the cultural past in England. Poems cited and analyzed regarding their thematic discussion of memory, relics, and the metaphysics of history include Le Morte d’Arthur, Nothing Will Die, and Ode to Memory.[5]
5.Narratology Study
Veronica Forrest-Thomson, in “Pastoral and Elegy in the Early Poems of Tennyson”, presents an attempt to come to terms with aspects of English poet William Empson’s thought. It also identifies Lord Alfred Tennyson’s neglected early poetry a curious combination of pastoral with elegy. Tennyson argues that this invented genre enables a distinctive kind of “fictionalization” in which landscape and object and character tend to blur. Elegiac pastoral transforms directed grief into generalized mood.[6](https://www.daowen.com)
Jerome J. Mcgann, in “Literature by Design since 1790”, explores the role of design in 18th and 19th century poetry. It notes the control exercised by poet William Blake through creating the books entirely by himself, poet Emily Dickinson’s equally total control through refusal to publish, poet Walt Whitman’s close involvement with printers, and the interest of Alfred Lord Tennyson in the look of his poems in print. Poems by Dickinson, Whitman and Tennyson are analyzed for the role of textual design in their meanings.[7]
6.Canonization Study
Ben Glaser, in “Polymetrical Dissonance: Tennyson, A. Mary F. Robinson, and Classical Meter”, discusses how the Greek translator A. Mary F. Robinson influenced the use of meter in English poetry through her research of Greek poetry. The experimental poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson, in which he played with quantitative verse, is also examined. The versification that Robinson used in her 1881 translation of the play Hippolytus, by Euripides, is explored. Tennyson’s poem De Profundis is also analyzed in terms of its use of meter.[8]
【注释】
[1]Elshaikh E. “Dialogical Self in Tennyson’s Ulysses and Farooq Guwaida’s A Star Looking for an Orbit”. The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, 2010, 5(9):393-404.
[2]Henderson C. “A Nation of the Continual Present: Timrod, Tennyson, and the Memorialization of the Confederacy”. The Southern Literary Journal, 2013, 45(2):19-38.
[3]Edman T B. “Power in Jeopardy: A Poststructuralist Reading of the Arthurian Legend from Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur and Tennyson’s Idylls of the King to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings”. Journal of History, Culture and Art Research, 2015, 4(2):88-102.
[4]Hamilton A. “On Remembering Poems”. New Criterion, 2013, 31(10):88-90.
[5]Kroll A A. “Tennyson and the Metaphysics of Material Culture: The Early Poetry”. Victorian Poetry, 2009, 47(3):461-480.
[6]Forrest-Thomson V. “Pastoral and Elegy in the Early Poems of Tennyson”. Chicago Review, 2011, 56(2/3):48-76.
[7]Mcgann J J. “Literature by Design since 1790”.Victorian Poetry, 2010, 48(1):11-40.
[8]Glaser B. “Polymetrical Dissonance: Tennyson, A. Mary F. Robinson, and Classical Meter”. Victorian Poetry, 2011, 49(2):199-216.