Tennyson

Two books focused entirely on Tennyson appeared early in 2019 (except where noted, all else that I discuss is dated 2018). Another four books devote substantial attention to Tennyson, and fifteen articles and book chapters offer detailed analysis.

Sonic features—sounds, echoes, reverberations—and the kindred issue of textual echo dominated the year’s scholarship. Though not disputing that Tennyson echoed Shelley and other precursors, Jayne Thomas’s Tennyson Echoing Wordsworth (Edinburgh: Univ. of Edinburgh Press, 2019) zeroes in on Wordsworth’s presence as a pervasive, stabilizing force in Tennyson’s oeuvre as he attempted to move away from alignment with the poetry of sensation identified by Arthur Henry Hallam (“Some Characteristics of Tennyson,” 1831), craft a public voice, gravitate toward the “poetry of reflection” (which Hallam associated with Wordsworth), and affirm the power of transcendent imagination. In this contention, Thomas diverges from 2018 commentaries on Tennyson that explore Tennyson’s poetry in relation to the materiality of embodied sensations and the pull inward of a poet attending to the mind-body’s response to sensory pulsations and beauties (see Leighton and Miller later in this essay). It is not, Thomas argues, that Tennyson uncritically embraced Wordsworth, for he also defined his mature poetics by resisting or critiquing Wordsworth yet, in that process, demonstrating Wordsworth’s looming presence.

In each chapter, Thomas probes an intricate interlace of Wordsworthian echoes—especially from “Tintern Abbey,” “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” An Evening Walk, “A Solitary Reaper,” and “Elegiac Stanzas . . . Peele Castle”— in five key poems of Tennyson: “The Lady of Shalott” (1842), “Ulysses,” In Memoriam, Maud, and “Tithonus” (1860). Even a brief Wordsworthian phrase, for example, the “glassy sea” of “Elegiac Stanzas” (l. 4), could flower into new poetry, as when the Lady of Shalott acquires a glassy countenance on her journey to Camelot and is likened to a seer—echoing the “Seer blest!” of the “Intimations” ode (l. 114)—so that, in a sense, her shattered mirror formerly “glassing” beautiful images gives way to intimations of greater poetic powers. Thomas adopts an ironic reading of “Ulysses” through its Wordsworthian echoes of “Intimations” and “Tintern” (also noted by Herbert Tucker), which form a counternarrative to Ulysses’s utterance. The complex allusion coalesces in the echoing “arch” and “gleams” of lines 19–20: “Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’ / Gleams that untraveled world.” Here Ulysses articulates his quest for recovered transcendence of mortal limits, but the echo of Wordsworth’s “visionary gleam” (“Intimations,” l. 56) and indirect reference to rainbows (“My Heart Leaps Up,” l. 2) subvert Ulysses, for whom the noumenal “gleam” of transcendent imagination fades from essence to action; and he instead sails into “gloom” as he follows a “sinking star” (ll. 45, 31). At the same time, Tennyson’s recourse, unlike Wordsworth, to dramatic monologue implicitly questions the sufficiency of Wordsworthian lyric, so that Tennyson marks off his poetic independence even as he echoes his precursor.

Thomas’s densely detailed book lights up many other previously untraced echoes, for example, the relation of Maud to Wordsworth’s Lucy poems and of “Tithonus” to the leech gatherer of “Resolution and Independence.” Yet some adduced echoes seem strained. Thomas posits Wordsworth’s “whirl blast” that overtakes the poet with a sudden hailstorm (“A Whirl-Blast,” 1800, l. 1) as a source for Tennyson’s “whirl’d / About empyreal heights” in section 95 (ll. 37–38) of In Memoriam, yet for me the violent hailstorm jars against the calm solitude of the summer night and “silent-speaking words” of the dead (In Memoriam, l. 26) rather than illuminating the section. And though her alignment of Dorothy in “Tintern” and Aurora in “Tithonus” with nature is entirely persuasive, there is an important distinction: Dorothy is a naïve child, so that only the male poet has knowledge and power, whereas the goddess Aurora radiates power in contrast to the “gray shadow” at her side (“Tithonus,” l. 11). Nor would I equate “The still sad music of humanity” (“Tintern,” l. 93) that Wordsworth hears in nature’s presence with “malevolence,” which Thomas then links to Aurora’s thoughtless giving (p. 168). Perhaps a larger question is the...