Tennyson's Name: Identity and Responsibility in the Poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson (review)

When Alfred Tennyson's critical reputation began to be revived nearly fifty years ago, monographs on the poet often aimed to cover the whole arc of his long career. For the past few decades, however, this has been increasingly rare: critics have tended to focus on selected works or on portions of the oeuvre. But Anna Barton's fine study offers a narrative of Tennyson's poetic development from beginning to end, describing both his career and his careerism—his conscious desire to make a name for himself and then to live up to that name. Perhaps her chief claim is that this consciousness of his own celebrity, particularly after he became Poet Laureate in 1850, was not (as has often been assumed and asserted) detrimental to Tennyson's poetry. "It might be expected that the transformation of the poet's name into a material, marketable product would be restrictive to his or her artistic development" (106); but in fact, Barton writes, such success was liberating: "Tennyson's commodified name provided the Laureate with a secure site within which he could dissolve himself into the aesthetic" (111).

Most of the book's chapters first appeared as articles that have already won Barton a high reputation (have, indeed, begun to make her name) among scholars of Victorian poetry. As a result, each chapter has a clearly developed argument, and the readings of individual poems are excellent. At its best, the book enriches these readings by putting them into a broader context, either of Tennyson's career as a whole or of contemporary ideas about naming. The fourth chapter is exemplary: Barton discusses Maud (1855), with its unnamed speaker and obsessively named eponymous heroine, in connection with mid-century debates about journalistic anonymity, and she persuasively concludes that the speaker's acceptance of responsibility at the poem's end marks a similar acceptance of a public role on the part of Tennyson.

The following chapter, on Idylls of the King (1859–85), is similarly lucid and engaging. Yet even here a weakness appears that recurs elsewhere—namely, an inability or unwillingness to explain the relation between text and context. In this chapter, Barton notes suggestive parallels between the importance of name recognition in Camelot, the rise of brand names in the later nineteenth century, and Tennyson's establishment as a household name. But having drawn our attention to these parallels, she does not draw any clear conclusions from them. This problem is even more evident in other chapters and is characteristic of the book as a whole. Tennyson's Name begins and ends abruptly. It has no conclusion, and the very brief introduction provides little historical or critical context to explain why Tennyson's onomastics are particularly worthy of attention. Barton does claim that the tensions around naming in Tennyson's poetry are "peculiarly Victorian" (4). But this assertion is not systematically defended and finds only desultory support in references to contemporary concerns in some of the chapters. (It does not help that two of the six chapters—those on The Princess [1847] and In Memoriam [1850]—seem only tangentially connected to the topic of names.) When historical context is provided, moreover, it is not always explained how the particular example of Tennyson relates to the general trend. As regards critical context, Barton does a good job positioning her analysis of specific poems in relation to earlier, or to standard, readings, but the overall argument of the book is less clearly distinguished. In the end, we are never told exactly how the study of Tennyson's names affects our understanding of his poetry as a whole. This is not to say that the topic is insignificant, or that the book does not have implications beyond those of its constituent parts, but simply that readers are largely left to determine those implications for themselves.

Even if the stakes are not always evident, however, this...