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CODA: Tennyson’s Idylls, Pure Poetry, and the Market
- State University of New York Press
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CODA Tennyson’s Idylls, Pure Poetry, and the Market To generalize: it was the peculiar genius of Tennyson to light on the tired, moderate, unconscious ideologies of his time and class, and by the force of his investment in them, and his gorgeous lyric gift, to make them sound frothingat -the-mouth mad. —Eve Sedgwick, Between Men IF POETRYWAS, INDEED, PERCEIVED AS PERVERSE IN THE NINETEENTH century, as we saw in Byron, how exactly does one account for the equally pervasive tendency to represent poetry as an antidote to the ills of a prosaic age, as we saw in Scott? Why do we see such wildly opposing (if equally outrageous) claims for the poetic act? Both characterizations—curse and cure— are tied, I believe, to the nineteenth-century fantasy that one could define poetic form outside of market or political influence. Both characterizations were designed to obscure the highly politicized and popular maneuvers of the two poets most commonly invoked by late Romantic and earlyVictorian critics as the epitome of the Romantic poet of genius, Byron and Scott. Instead of acknowledging the complexity and market influence of romance poetry, an emergent Victorian ideology responded to the rise of the novel, to the implementation of a mass market, and to the political threat of an emergent lowerclass readership by separating poetry altogether from market circulation. Indeed, we could say that, as a result, a new generic preoccupation developed in perfect coincidence with, and perhaps as a direct result of, the emergent literary market of the nineteenth century. I am speaking not of those popular narrative forms that were being ingested at an ever-increasing rate by a growing body of readers and that are generally associated with the growth of a mass market—gothic tales, medieval ballads, historical romances, sensationalist fiction, the domestic novel—but of an arch-generic form that, while not so popular (even self-consciously not marketable), can be said to orbit popular narrative realism as the opposite that attracts it:“pure poetry.”1 Both defenders and assailants of poetry contributed to the development of this concept: defenders argued that a “perfect” or “pure” poetry, untainted by the demands of the market, provided an antidote to the enervation, sensationalism, commodification, and tastelessness of a prosaic age; assailants, on the other 143 144 the perversity of poetry hand, seeking in part to refigure Byron’s critique of the status quo and his influence on nineteenth-century radicals, argued that poetry, precisely insofar as it was defined against market concerns, was no longer able to have any effect in the world, that its very oppositionality divorced it from the social concerns of the day, from a public demanding a realistic representation of those concerns , and from the governing ideology of nineteenth-century society—political economy.“Purity” in this formulation is akin to onanistic self-involvement. In short, both defenders and assailants can be said to discover in verse’s versus an inherent or natural reason for what was, in fact, a gradual if persistent historical change: poetry’s sway with the reading public was decreasing, its uncertain orbit—newly caught in the growing pull of the novel—was sending it farther and farther into obscurity.2 Tennyson’s Idylls of the King can be read as a last-ditch effort to accommodate the conflicting demands that were being directed at poets in the period as critics variously attacked or defended the writing of poetry. As I will show, poets were faced with an apparently paradoxical injunction in the Victorian period: realize but idealize; be like the novel, although not too sensational or “low”; at the same time, be “poetic,” although not too Byronic or politically idealistic. The very fact that Tennyson managed not only to crack a difficult market but to appease critics from various journals and political affiliations suggests that, for the 1860s at least, the Idylls surmounted the contradictions inherent in these conflicting demands and managed to be all things to all people. I also wish to suggest, however, why Tennyson’s Idylls could succeed so well in the sixties yet be so reviled by critics only a decade later.The reason, this chapter will argue, is that Tennyson disclosed, even while attempting to resolve, the contradictions inherent in both the dialectical injunctions directed at poets at mid-century and in the rhetorical strategies used by reviewers to contain, if only figuratively, the perceived dangers of the...