Tennyson

Last year my survey included two books on Tennyson published in 2017, Leonée Ormond’s The Reception of Alfred Tennyson in Europe and Jim Cheshire’s Tennyson and Mid-Victorian Publishing; I also noted Daniel Hack’s Reaping Something New, which touches on African American responses to Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” and The Princess. Here I address two other 2017 books, one focused solely on Tennyson, the other devoting more than one hundred pages to The Princess and In Memoriam. Tennyson’s relation to science, poetic form, and cultural attitudes were all recurring frames of reference in 2017 scholarship.

Tennyson and Geology: Poetry and Poetics (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan) by Michelle Geric contends that Victorian science and poetry did not represent “two cultures” as C. P. Snow argued in the mid-twentieth century but were interactive and dialogic, keenly aware to draw on each other (especially given the continued high prestige of poetry) to advance thought and engage readers. They also shared interests in the origins of words. Geric’s sixth chapter draws largely from her earlier article on Maud in Victorian Poetry (2013) in which she compared Lyellian geology (which set aside teleology), William Whewell’s commitment to teleology in his own scientific writing, and Richard Trench’s “Adamic” language theory (premised on a fixed natural order from the moment of creation, though some “fossil” words gradually dropped away from usage). If Maud enacted Lyellian uniformitarianism socially, ontologically, and literarily, Geric further argued, Tennyson also represented the nightmarish qualities of a uniformitarian, nonteleological universe in which there is no ultimate fixed, certain meaning and transformation is ever ongoing. In essence, she suggests, poetry enabled Tennyson to think through the implications of Lyellian geology versus teleology, which he had perceived more optimistically in In Memoriam. If Geric referenced Mikhail Bakhtin in 2013, he and other poststructuralists assume greater roles in Geric’s book. As she suggests, Tennyson’s realization in Maud of potential discontinuities between a sign (whether a fossil or a word) and its signification unloosed strands of thought that would eventually lead to poststructuralist theory and to the disunion of poetry and science in the twentieth century.

Geric approaches Tennyson’s three long midcentury poems as a trilogy, all deeply informed by geology and rich in implication for gender, class, and human development over time. Her analysis of In Memoriam’s “uniformitarian poetics” and reading of Maud in relation to geological, fossil, language, and human remains are especially impressive. As Geric establishes in chapter 3 and her introduction, four principles of argument structured Lyell’s Principles of Geology: his careful division between natural processes and teleology, the repetition but also displacement of organic and nonorganic forms resulting from geological process (especially erosion and uplift) over time, nonprogression overall, and a present that manifests the result of process over time but is also cut off from a prior past. Lyellian uniformitarianism is baked into the form of In Memoriam, she asserts: its more than seven hundred quatrains are a poetic counterpart to Lyell’s model of repeated small actions over time that generate great change, while the ongoing dialectic within and across sections from despair to faith and back again exemplifies the steady state of a nonteleological, nonprogressive system. Tennyson can resolve endless process only by adapting Lyell’s strategy of division, strictly separating material, natural process from human meaning, which, as does the poem, requires some teleology, some “end” toward which all preceding moments are “coöperant” (129.24).

The very process of writing the poem in small increments over years, Geric asserts, was the means through which Tennyson came to realize the incommensurateness of Lyellian geology and human meaning, which led to Maud five years later. Geric’s reading links geology, human and fossil remains, and the overpowering presence of the red hollow in the speaker’s mental tableau. He sees in his father’s bones mangled and crushed into the ground the same uniform process at work that turned prior organic life into stone fossils and that will ultimately do the same to all humanity living and future. His inferences pose existential threats to...