Tennyson’s Style by W. David Shaw (review)

HUMANITIES 425 W. David Shaw, Tennyson's Style. Cornell University Press. 347· $12.50 The pages of this book are thick with analysis, argument, illustration, and allusion. Displaying an extraordinary range of reference, Professor Shaw massively documents his case against T.S. Eliot's charge that Tennyson was deficient in subtlety and surprise and that his blank verse was comparatively crude. He wins an acquittal for the Victorian Laureate by concentrating his brief on rhetoric and syntax in the major poems, though he comments with great perception on tone, genre, and prosody as well. His book succeeds unquestionably in demonstrating that Tennyson 's grandeur is compatible with indirection and his ornament with subtlety, and that his style is refined, 'not simply because it is polished, but because it is finely faceted.' Of course, no new poet emerges from this study. What Nicolson, Buckley, Pitt, Ricks, and Priestley have portrayed, Shaw presents here: a lyrical poet wavering among multiple roles, yet longing for a stable identity, finding 'illusion, flux, self-concealment, and withdrawal' to be his most congenial subjects, and expressing them in verse which is essentially elegiac. But what is added to this familiar portrait is the best analysis of Tennyson's style ever made, an analysis made richer and sounder by Shaw's recognition that 'any study of Tennyson's poetry is also concerned with human experience in its broadest sense.' What makes Shaw's analysis particularly valuable is the wealth of his illustrations. Again and again he illuminates Tennyson's major poems: the two 'Marianas: 'The Palace of Art: 'Oenone: 'Ulysses: the songs from The Princess, In Memoriam, 'Maud: 'Lucretius: 'Demeter and Persephone : the late elegies, 'To Virgil: and 'Frater Ave atque Vale: and such late lyrics as 'In the Garden at Swainston' and 'Crossing the Bar.' Occasionally he will also rescue a neglected minor poem like 'On a Mourner.' Even when dealing with 'the spare obliquity' of a well-known early lyriclike 'Break, break, break' he adds much to our understanding. Aimed at the professional student ofTennyson, this book will perhaps be criticized for what seems to be an excessive use of Renaissance rhetorical terms, not merely chiasmus, metonymy, oxymoron, and synecdoche, but also hyperbaton, isocolon, parataxis, polysyndeton, and paralipsis. (Those who dislike analysis of a poet's grammar should be reminded that literature is made from only two materials -words and silences.) Shaw anticipates objection by defining these rhetorical terms when he introduces them. Moreover, though he concedes in his highly useful critical bibliography that it is very unlikely that Tennyson would have been able to identify and name most of the rhetorical devices that occur in his poems, Shaw rightly declares that this must not be allowed to discourage critical inquiry. The point is that these devices and 426 LETTERS IN CANADA 1976 techniques really are discoverable in Tennyson's verse; many of them he no doubt absorbed from Milton - the poet, Shaw tells us, whom Tennyson alludes to more often that any other, ancient or modern. This volume is valuable for its scholarship. Shaw has profitably turned over whole libraries to refer pointedly to Augustine and Aquinas, Hobbes and Hume, Blair and BagellOt, Bradley and Bloom, Ferrier and Frost, Hegel and Heidegger, Kant and Keble, Newton and Newman, Spencer and Stevens, Whitehead and Wheelwright. Rarely is this learning ostentatious . He has also examined to our profit volumes in Tennyson's library and manuscripts on two continents. But there is much else here to attract the professional student: the fresh early pages on Tennyson's critical context and stylistic models, the excellent analysis of the 'confession : the exposition of motion-picture techniques in 'Maud: the informative remarks on Tennyson and Idealism, for instance. Tennyson and Pope, states Shaw, are the two absolute masters of English style. He himself demonstrates here a complete mastery in analysing the style of Tennyson's endlessly fascinating art. (ROBERT H. TENER) Robert Q'Driscoll. All Ascendancy of the Heart: Ferguson and the Beginnings of Modem Irish Literature in English. Macmillan of Canada. 84· $9.95 Robert O'Driscoll's Ascendancy of the Heart concerns the emotional conversion of the Ulster Protestant poet and translator Samuel Ferguson to the study and...