Language and Structure in Tennyson’s Poetry by F.E.L. Priestley (review)

HUMANITIES 3!S9 tribute to the site of the Lovenjoul collection - one should read 'Ia vicomtesse de Chamilly' which was, incidentally, the pseudonym used by Loeve-Veimars (and others) for a collection of Scenes contemporaines. The bibliography is not done as carefully as one would expect: missing are the subtitles for the studies by Dedinsky, Lotte, and Lynes; it is not indicated that Canfield's monograph was edited by Edward B. Ham, whose note The Vimont Chouans' (Romance Notes 1 [November 19591 2- 6), should be added; the key word (pp 47", 484) in Jeanne RebouI's article should be vestignomonie. But these are minor blemishes indeed in such a handsome - and indispensable - volume. (WAYNE CONNOR) F.E.L. Priestley, Language and Structure in Tennyson's Poetry. The Language Library, Eric Partridge and Simeon Potter, editors. London: Andre Deutsch "973,"88, $7·95 This is an important book on Tennyson, though its importance is camouflaged by an apparently old-fashioned approach to Tennyson's poetry. We have become so conditioned these days to critical theories inflated to unnatural and monstrous proportions, and to critics who keep a wary eye on other critics, that we don't quite know how to respond to the virtues of a perceptive reader confronting the literary text itself. Reading, as F.E.L. Priestley demonstrates in this book, involves sensitivity to diction, a sense of structure, and an understanding of thought. In the analysis of these three as parts of the whole work of art the strength of this book lies. This sense of wholeness is particularly important for a poet like Tennyson, who has suffered as much as other Victorian poets from changing tastes in criticism. His contemporaries were primarily interested in him as a philosophical and religious teacher, and extracted his thought from techniques that were often admired and often criticized. In the general reaction against the great Victorians, Tennyson was reduced to an elegant versifier whose sensitivity to language was so exquisite that he devoted himself to exotic hothouse growths that quickly went limp when exposed to fresh air. The problem with these approaches was that they were so exclusive. It was as if Tennyson were a thinker and nothing else, or a craftsman and nothing else. This book demonstrates in an exciting and illuminating way that the thought and the technique are inseparable, that Tennyson was concerned both with what he was saying and with how he was saying it. And it deals, too, with an aspect of Tennyson's work that is just now coming to be recognized as important: his sense of structure and of genre. Lest one should foolishly assume that such an interest is only the critical taste of the 1970s, Priestley sets his comments on genre in a firm historical context, so that one comes to 390 LETTERS IN CANADA understand Tennyson's work in terms of both innovation and continuity. A considerable critical achievement, this, in a relatively short book which offers primarily a reading of the poems. 'Primarily a reading of the poems' - and yet Priestley does not read the poems at random. His theme is 'experiment and exploration in Tennyson's verbal art ...' (p 7) and his purpose is 'to trace some of the major directions of Tennyson's development and experimentation ..: (p 7). To study the development of Tennyson's art is not, of course, to do something new. Indeed, it has been done admirably by Jerome Buckley and (for the early poems) by John Pettigrew. But Priestley focuses steadily on the art with little reference to the biography, and he relies to a greater extent on analyses that carefully relate style, structure, and thought. The result is an unusually clear account of the essential features of Tennyson's development. The first phase of this development is the discovery of, and the attempt to master, the immense resources of language. Tennyson's experiments at this stage centre 'on exploring various styles, metres, stanza forms, tonal patterns, and on conveying vividly his own rich and exciting experience.... His eye is inevitably more on detail than on total pattern' (p 8). Here Priestley leads us through Tennyson's youthful experiments, particularly the astonishingly energetic...