Epistolary Tennyson: The Art of Suspension

Probably only Tennysonians know a group of his poems that may loosely be called verse epistles, and as less than a Tennysonian I discovered them myself fairly recently. The occasion was a small course I taught in Victorian writers where Tennyson was the first poet considered and where the students, bright enough ones, seemed to be having trouble with him. We worked hard with some of the poems of 1842, then with In Memoriam and parts of Maud, but whatever they made of “major” Tennyson, they did not much appear to be enjoying him. So it seemed a good idea to suggest that along with poems in the grand style (“Ulysses,” “Tithonus”) and of psychological-moral debate (In Memoriam), there existed a more “social” Tennyson, conveyed in a poetic voice from whose register urbanity and humor were not excluded. Here the Norton Anthology (The Victorian Age) was of absolutely no help, since except for parts of Maud and a couple of the Idylls, post-In Memoriam Tennyson pretty much consisted of “Crossing the Bar.” Fortunately I made use of Christopher Ricks’s critical biography in which he considers, trenchantly though briefly, some of the poet’s epistles. I brought four or five of them into class, reading parts aloud so as to demonstrate a different Tennyson from what the students had experienced so far. However much or little they made of the examples, I was delighted with the discovery that, with Ricks’s invaluable help, I had made.

The index to Ricks’s edition of Tennyson lists thirty-five poems, almost all with “To” in their title, that qualify as one or another sort of epistle. Of these, this essay will concern itself with the following, listed in chronological order: “To J.S.,” “To the Vicar of Shiplake,” “The Daisy,” “To the Rev. F. D. Maurice,” “Prologue to General Hamley,” “To E. FitzGerald,” “To Ulysses,” “To Mary Boyle,” and “To the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava.” Some decades ago, a critic offered the following definition of the verse epistle, which I have not seen bettered:

that kind of poem, presented as a letter, which discusses serious matters of individual, social, or political conduct in an intimate or middle style. On its discursive level, such a work attempts to persuade a recipient —and, through him, its public readers—of the wisdom in a certain attitude or course of action.¹

By this definition we may rule out certain epistles, such as “To Virgil,” “To Dante,” “To Princess Frederic on her Marriage,” or “To the Queen,” in which the figure addressed is one of the august dead, or so far above the poet socially that an intimate or middle style is inappropriate. By contrast, the poems listed above, plus a few others, represent the most engaging examples of Tennyson’s “familiar” epistolary style.

W. H. Auden, in his essay on Tennyson, made the too-often quoted remark that he was “undoubtedly the stupidest” of English poets.² It was a stupid remark, since truly stupid poets lack the sense of humor Tennyson held in esteem when he wrote to his wife-to-be in 1839, “I dare not tell how high I rate humour, which is generally most fruitful in the highest and most solemn human spirits.”³ He adduced Dante, Shakespeare, and Cervantes as among those “pregnant with this glorious power.” His good friend, the architect James Knowles, detected “a great abundance of playfulness under the grimness of his exterior,” and declared that his humor “was all-pervading and flavoured every day with salt. It was habitual with him.”⁴ As a splendid example of Tennyson’s grim playfulness, Eric Griffiths quotes, from Sir Charles Tennyson’s biography, a great confrontation between the poet, “stumping along in his cloak and sombrero,” and two girls on the beach at Freshwater Bay, Isle of Wight. One of the girls says, “Look . . . There goes Tennyson,” and the other exclaims “What . . . did that old man write Maud?” (How well-read the young people were in those days!) In reply, “Tennyson, whose hearing was always extraordinarily acute, stopped, turned round to them and...