Stateliest Measures: Tennyson and the Literature of Greece and Rome (review)

Toward the close of Stateliest Measures: Tennyson and the Literature of Greece and Rome, A. A. Markley reminds his readers that, for Tennyson, "an old tale should not be retold unless given a modern frame and context" (147). This concern for contemporary relevance in the revising of old tales applies as much to Tennyson's appropriation of classical material and formal structures—the subject of Markley's book—as it does to Markley's own methodological approaches. Throughout Stateliest Measures, Markley demonstrates the continued significance of formal analysis in the field of Victorian literary studies. Like Tennyson, who saw "profound potential in reviving and refashioning the voices, rhythms, and themes of a glorious past for the foundation and enrichment of a new era" (164), Markley invites us to consider how reviving and refashioning techniques often relegated to ancient history—the mid-twentieth century, say—could very well enrich the present state of literary studies.

We have, of course, not been at a loss for studies that productively exhume the artifacts of Greek and Roman culture as they make their way into Victorian literature. Tennyson studies in particular has seen its fair share of such work, dating back to some of the poet's earliest reviews. Edmund Clarence Stedman's 1875 Victorian Poets dedicates an entire chapter to "Tennyson and Theocritus," and as early as 1841 Henry Alford's Chapters on the Poets of Ancient Greece praises "Œnone" (1832) for its elegant adaptation of classical material. Most compelling among recent studies, Robert Pattison's Tennyson and Tradition (1979) elaborates the ways Tennyson incorporated into his life's work a revised understanding of the Greek idyll tradition.

Markley's project importantly distinguishes itself from these predecessors in its attention to Tennyson's formal engagements with Greek and Roman poetics. Markley suggests that Tennyson was committed to thinking of meter as quantitative (as in Greek prosody) as well as accentual (as in the English tradition), a complex interweaving of formal structures apparent in Tennyson's own "highly idiosyncratic" style of recitation, which was "heavily characterized by emphatic sound effects" (91). In his fourth chapter, Markley analyzes in detail Tennyson's efforts to "approximate" in English "the sound and rhythms of classical meters" (100). He walks readers through an oft-ignored body of Tennyson's poetry—poems such as "Hendecasyllabics" (1863) and "Leonine Elegiacs" (1830)—to demonstrate the poet's sonic echoing of classical meters. While these are perhaps not the most striking of Tennyson's compositions, Markley urges readers to think of these "classical poems" as both "a unified body of work" and, more importantly, "a career-long aspiration" on the part of Tennyson "not only to serve the Crown as a poet of the nation, but to answer the call for a Victorian literature that would spiritually nourish his readership" (10).

Markley addresses Tennyson's canonical works as well, with a chapter on In Memoriam (1850) and then, later, a chapter on "Ulysses" (1842), "Tithonus" (1860), and "Tiresias" (1885). For each of these poems, Markley attends to Tennyson's translation of classical sounds into English verse. Sonic effects are especially important in "Tiresias," Markley argues, given the speaker's own loss of sight: "In recounting the memories of his blind adulthood, [Tiresias] has only auditory images on which to draw." Tennyson amplifies his protagonist's sonic memories through "auditory references" to Aeschylus' Seven against Thebes, and in particular "the clashing and clattering sounds of the impending war" (134). Tennyson thus echoes the sounds of Aeschylus much as Tiresias renders what he hears into written language, a doubling of sonic effect not readily heard by the modern ear.

Perhaps the most suggestive chapter of Stateliest Measures is the last, which deals with the later poems "Lucretius" (1868), "Demeter and Persephone" (1889), and "The Death of Œnone" (1892). It is in these works, according to Markley, that Tennyson's framing of classical material...