Alfred Tennyson: The Critical Legacy (review)

In this thorough and insightful reception study, Laurence Mazzeno shows that critical esteem of Alfred Tennyson's oeuvre shifted perhaps more radically than that of any other Victorian poet during the twentieth century. Influenced by new critical perspectives such as new historicism, cultural materialism, Marxism, and reader response theory, Tennyson's literary stock has fluctuated in value many times in our own memory. Each time a new generation reviews the critical reception of a poet, it reevaluates that history in light of its own moment. Past disparagements become foolish and worn; past praise becomes empty and invalid. The reassessment is part of an essential process if we care enough about literature to continue reading. Mazzeno claims that the future of Tennyson studies is uncertain, but he nevertheless indicates that Victoria's poet laureate is here to stay, enduring attempts by critics from one fin de siècle to the next to discredit him because of his political views, stylized sentimentality, or perceived lack of sensitivity to class, race, or gender. Thus we have a need for a review of criticism, if only to see ourselves set in relief against past perspectives.

Mazzeno is well qualified to produce such a review, having published similar bibliographic studies on Matthew Arnold, Herman Wouk, the Victorian novel, Victorian poetry, and the British novel. He proceeds chronologically, evaluating critical responses and clarifying the political landscape within which each generation of critics works. One chapter discusses reception by Tennyson's contemporaries until his death in 1892, including criticism written in both Britain and the United States. Since US publishers prolifically reprinted Tennyson's poetry, saturating the market, such evaluations are unequal and thus perhaps somewhat undependable. In this chapter Mazzeno repeats the discredited belief about Tennyson's "ten year silence," a period when Tennyson was supposedly only revising short lyrics without seeking publication. Yet he published poems in literary annuals (which Mazzeno ignores), and a review of critical responses to these early publications would be helpful to understanding the later works.

In his next two chapters, Mazzeno chronicles reactions to Tennyson, from the 1870s to the 1960s. Detractors of the Tennyson myth included Harold Nicholson, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and F. L. Lucas, among others. Along with Jerome Buckley and others, Charles Tennyson led the movement to improve Tennyson's reputation among university intellectuals during the 1960s. Scholars of this decade inspired the creation of the Tennyson Society and the Tennyson Research Bulletin, while Christopher Ricks's 1969 standard scholarly edition of The Poems of Tennyson helped to establish Tennyson firmly in university canons. This was an important decade for Tennyson studies—dubbed the "height of critical acclaim" by Mazzeno—during which influential monographs were produced by Ricks, Alan Sinfield, D. J. Palmer, Robert B. Martin, and June Steffensen Hagen. Mazzeno views Hagen's Tennyson and his Publishers (1979) as comprehensive, but many Tennyson scholars view it as inadequate.

As Mazzeno shows, Jerome McGann further opened Tennyson studies during the 1980s by urging us to appreciate the historicity of Tennyson's poetry and promoting scholarly self-examination for traces of our own ideology. Gerhard Joseph, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, F. B. Pinion, Isobel Armstrong, Donald Hair, Herbert Tucker, Marion Shaw, Elaine Jordan, and others introduced interesting feminist, poststructuralist, and Marxist approaches, proving once again that close, perceptive readings of Tennyson's poetry will always reap rich intellectual rewards. The 1990s continued the trend of theoretical interpretations, and Mazzeno confidently assumes, from the sheer quality and number of critical studies, that Tennyson's reputation as one of the great English poets is safe. To demonstrate this claim, Mazzeno notes Adam Roberts's Oxford edition of Tennyson's major works (2000), an edition that doubles Auden's 1944 selections. Mazzeno suggests that we now know Tennyson's weaknesses, and we unapologetically accept them as challenges and literary curiosities. Yet, as Mazzeno notes, the Tennyson Society has not had a panel at the Modern Language Association in many years. And I fear that Tennyson...