Tennyson

Following a hiatus the year once again saw publication of a full-length monograph devoted to Tennyson. James W. Hood's Divining Desire: Tennyson and the Poetics of Transcendence (Ashgate) explores Tennyson's preoccupation with art and eroticism as complementary means of transcending human limits, interests derived from Arthur Henry Hallam and through him Dante. Hood acknowledges Gerhard Joseph's Tennysonian Love as an important precursor of his project, but Hood's particular interest is what he terms "divined desire," desire fulfilled cognitively, spiritually, or physically yet never sated. Tennyson's poems as such typically succeed in divined desire better than his characters or speakers, for only the poem satisfies readers aesthetically yet never exhausts their desire to know meaning better. Hood's study thus discloses the fundamental connection of two elements long noted in Tennyson's poetry, infinite evocativeness and the themes of love and desire.

Hood's study, cogently and freshly (if also repetitiously) argued, makes an especially strong case for the centrality of Tennyson's 1830 female portraits. Not only do these portraits enact unceasing desire as an ideal, he argues, but Tennyson's frequent recourse to the Renaissance pun on "dying" also demonstrates their underlying carnality, particularly in "Eleanore": "I would be dying evermore." As art these poems perpetuate (without fulfilling) male desire, yet poetic form also acts to contain coquettes who lure men to them, art thus frustrating and furthering the act of (carnal, epistemological) knowing. Hood shows how consistent the preoccupations of major poems like "Mariana" and "The Lady of Shalott" are with "Isabel," "Adeline," or "Lisette," though "Mariana" is an antiphonal voice stressing the crippling imprisonment desire can bring rather than transcendence. Hood's Mariana, intriguingly, is an active agent rather than passive sufferer, an artist figure who may fail to imagine alternatives to erotic frustration but who may also be refusing the consolation of spurious hope (and facile epistemology). "The Lady of Shalott" gestures toward the possibility of transcending human limits (signified by the lady's imprisonment) through the mirror that is a medium both of artistic inspiration and erotic desire, though like most readers of the poem Hood ultimately emphasizes its enactment of art's ability to elicit and baffle the desire to know.

Hood's chapters on In Memoriam and Idylls of the King are also fresh and illuminating. In Memoriam, he argues, is atypical rather than representative in the sheer hubris of its claim to have created through language a presence--Hallam--with whom divined desire is achievable (and endlessly consummated). Rather than resuscitating the question of physical love between Tennyson and Hallam, Hood takes for granted the homosexual overtones of "descend, touch, and enter" but links the passage to the Dantean framework he sees operative throughout Tennyson's career, so that homosexual union is another trope of and means to union with the divine. Given the pervasive interrelation of sexual, epistemological, and spiritual knowing in the Idylls, Hood argues that "The Lady of Shalott" rather than "Morte d'Arthur" must be seen as the epic's germ. Camelot as symbol of the quest for transcendence is Arthur's artistic creation, not Merlin's; Camelot fails when it is literalized into a mere place by Arthur's followers, failures common to the artistry of Elaine's shield cover and the Lady of Shalott's mirror.

I have perforce simplified, in summing, Hood's treatment of a pervasive theme. Hood's own study satisfies least when it seems to subordinate poetry to thematic analysis. Hood's discussion of The Princess is excellent in tracing the genealogy of Lilia (in the prologue and frame) to the coquettes of the female portraits and in clarifying the medley form's enactment of the difficulties of knowing while inciting interpretive desire. But his remarks on spiritual transcendence in The Princess tell us more about his framework than the poem. Even when Hood's argument seems forced, however, his sensitive engagement with the poetry recuperates the merits of his study, and Divining Desire...