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The Motivation of Tennyson's Reader: Privacy and the Politics of Literary Ambiguity in The Princess
- Victorian Studies
- Indiana University Press
- Volume 43, Number 2, Winter 2001
- pp. 201-227
- 10.1353/vic.2001.0011
- Article
- Additional Information
Victorian Studies 43.2 (2001) 201-227
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The Motivation of Tennyson's Reader: Privacy and the Politics of Literary Ambiguity in The Princess
Daniel Denecke
With the publication of "The Motivation of Tennyson's Weeper," Cleanth Brooks's essay on "Tears, Idle Tears" in The Well Wrought Urn (1947), a fragment of The Princess (1847) appeared at the source of what would become a major debate in English literary criticism between formalists and antiformalists. 1 There, Brooks performed an exemplary close reading of Tennyson's lyric without any analysis of the surrounding text or context, and with no mention of The Princess as the place where the lyric gem first appeared before being salvaged from the wreck of the longer poem by later anthologists. 2 If Brooks's essay represents the extreme of formalist discussions of The Princess, antiformalist criticism of the poem has tended to ignore the lyrics altogether. Critics such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick have sought rather to decode the ideological work performed by the verse-narrative, where a complex interplay of gender and class dynamics reveals the poem to be either a liberal or a conservative political tale of the triumph of domesticity and the consolidation of the state. 3 Even when critics do tackle both the lyrics and the verse-narrative, they frequently maintain the parallel distinction between formalist aesthetic and antiformalist sociological concerns. 4 So Laurence Lerner, in a study of competing ideologies in The Princess, writes: "[I]n relating a poem to its society we ought never to ignore what makes it poetry," that is, elements of "pure technique" of sound and image (210). The fact that the lyrics and verse- narrative have attracted two different kinds of critics has blinded both to the extent to which The Princess constitutes a defense of poetry, in the sense that it explores the distinctive political effects of lyric and song.
By situating the lyrics within a verse-narrative about women's higher education, Tennyson developed an argument about the political effects of poetry with a degree of sophistication not recognized by either fans of his fine ear or critics of his social agenda. The lyrics serve [End Page 201] several public purposes. For example, they serve as strategic techniques for generating group identities, as forms for the expression of sentiments and ideals that conflict with the demands of group identity, and as public occasions for readers to occupy a space that is irrevocably private. Additions that Tennyson made in 1850 further illustrate his commitment to representing poetry as a public activity. These include a debate in the frame about what form the published version of the verse-narrative should take and a number of new songs which the women in the frame sing to give "breathing space" (Prologue 234) to the men narrating the verse-tale. Throughout the verse-narrative and the frame, then, Tennyson represents the production and reception of poetry as activities that take place within a distinctly public arena. Tennyson's interest in poetry as a public activity has been overlooked by critics like Brooks who have treated extracts such as "Tears, Idle Tears" as versions of what we have come to recognize as the "romantic lyric," as expressions of a solitary speaker providing a revelatory account of the self. This way of reading his lyrics reflects the persistence of modernist appraisals of Tennyson as a gifted lyric poet, but an at-best inarticulate, and at-worst insidious social thinker. T. S. Eliot delivered such a divided verdict, for example, when he admiringly shored up lyrical fragments from The Princess to conclude The Waste Land (1922) but dismissed Tennyson's thought as mere "ruminat[ion]" (248). And this forked evaluation took its strongest form in W. H. Auden's famous claim that while Tennyson "had the finest ear [. . .] of any English poet; he was also undoubtedly the stupidest" (222).
If Tennyson's insistence on the public uses of lyric should prompt us to resist tendencies to treat extracts from the poem as versions of the romantic lyric...