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Victorian Poetry 38.3 (2000) 456-464



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Guide to the Year's Work

Tennyson

Linda K. Hughes


The renascence of interest in literary form continues in this year's work on Tennyson. Studies focused on form may be outnumbered by those adopting cultural and historical analysis, but the newer strand of inquiry is substantive and significant. The year's work also suggests a reconsideration in tandem with formal analysis of models of selfhood and agency. That something new is afoot is clear when, after several years when no one was particularly concerned about such matters, two separate essays on the In Memoriam stanza appeared in 1999. Both also address the relation of the stanza to conceptions of selfhood. Sarah Gates's essay in VP, "Poetics, Metaphysics, Genre: The Stanza Form of In Memoriam," argues that the abba quatrain is ideally suited to represent (and embody) both narrative vacillations and lyric moments of concentrated emotion. On one hand, the abba form continuously opens onto new vistas as it shifts rhyme pattern from the first to second line and from the third to fourth; yet insofar as the fourth line returns to the starting point (via intervening difference) it also achieves a qualified equilibrium. Gates interweaves this formalist insight with Jean Starobinski's theory of autobiography, whereby the narrating I typically negotiates a "double deviancy," that is, the "I" explains how the present self came into being in relation to a former but no longer extant self. Similarly, Gates argues, Tennyson's lyric-narrative mode sets before readers a present self who in the very moment of utterance is confronting the impasses of grief sparked by past loss and desire for a future self--both an enhanced self-to-be and the self joined with Hallam in the future: "Just as the first line raises the anticipation of its partner in the fourth line but then fades into a faint echo as that partner spins past closure, the mourner's hopes for himself and Hallam anticipate their reunion, although when it comes, the 'reunion' differs from the original anticipation" (p. 516).

Denise Gigante takes an approach more indebted than Gates's to New Historicism in "Forming Desire: On the Eponymous In Memoriam Stanza" in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Issues of form and desire played out in separate strands of recent criticism on the poem, she argues, are in fact two sides of an intrinsic relationship between the tetrameter abba quatrain and desire dating back to 1640, when Ben Jonson--not Tennyson--invented the form in his Elegy 22. Elegy 22 differs from other elegies, all in Propertian elegiac meter, in Jonson's series because Propertius' elegies addressed a prostitute, whereas Elegy 22 praises the [End Page 456] virtues of a beloved with whom the speaker can never be joined. To avoid associations with Propertian elegy, Jonson created a new form out of the sonnet, which he loathed, by truncating one foot of each line and the sestet, leaving an unspecified number of quatrains with no emotional or formal resolution. Thus form and unending desire could coalesce. He created another crucial precedent for Tennyson in typing love (Eros) and the beloved as masculine: "love, to acquit such excellence, / Is gone himself into your name. / And you are he" (p. 489). Equally important was Jonson's abandonment of pentameter for tetrameter meter, which, Gigante argues, resulted in an abstracting rather than personalizing of voice. Derek Attridge and Antony Easthope have linked pentameter to individuality because of pentameter's counterpoint: the playing off of metrical feet fundamentally alien to English speech rhythms against the accent and intonation demanded of English syntax and diction means that lines may be read in distinct ways according to the individual writer and reader. Tetrameter, in contrast, has long been associated with the traditional, anonymous ballad, hence a collective tradition.

The voice of the In Memoriam stanza, too, Gigante asserts, is inevitably more diffused and so distances Tennyson from the personal expression of erotic desire and loss while simultaneously providing a form in which desire is unending. Because there is no real structural principle of division in the poem...

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