Lord Alfred Tennyson
Lord Alfred Tennyson’s work does not appear in our class syllabus nor in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (Volume 1). Tennyson died in 1892, meaning he was alive as romanticism dwindled and modernism began to rise; writing alongside the likes of Whitman, Hardy, and Dickinson. He had a very successful literary career, becoming one of the most popular poets in Britain, and championing later in life as the poet laureate of England. So why is a famous poet like Tennyson, excluded from the category of modernism? Was there something about him that was just not modern and living in the past?Well, to be frank, yes. Tennyson loved revisiting old classics and continuing their legends with a twist of his own creative command, “Ulysses,” for example. Tennyson also wrote stories of knights, princesses, maidens, and exotic mystical places, embellishing in fantasy. This is very different from the modern idea that for something to be considered good modern work it needs to be true to some form. Truth is reality, and reality was a large focus of the modern movement.
However, if one tried to look at Lord Tennyson’s work with a sense of rhetoric and irony, there is the possibility that he used imagination as a tool to encourage his readers to look for the unexpected in life. The different and unusual. Yet, reality’s presence is perhaps too gentle in his unconventional works when compared to the writings of modern american poets at the time. Poems of his like:“A Character” ,“The Poet’s Mind”, and “Circumstance”, all have layerings that speak in the words of reality just not the tone. Often known for the silliness in his poems, modern poets wrote with a seriousness diligent in conveying the new. Tennyson too played with form, and tried to illustrate the depth of things labeled “simple.” Whitman, Hardy, and Dickinson made very bold stirs in the literary world on multiple fields of craft. Tennyson’s strides towards the new were heard as whispers rather than shouts, as he remained too much in the past.
I like how you put that–whispers rather than shouts. We can undoubtedly assume that Dickinson read Tennyson deeply, and Whitman not at all. And Whitman, in turn, treasured a letter he had from Tennyson, carrying it in his pocket wherever he went for a span of time. And given Hardy’s own borrowing of Victorian forms and combining them with more of the “reality” you describe here, he surely looked to Tennyson as an important craftsman and poet. But despite all that, he did make the cut. I would have like for you to give us a taste of some of the poems you mention. What makes them perhaps more modern than we–or Ramazani, our anthology editor–might admit? Where do you sense those real words, even if their tone seems to distance itself from reality? Very interesting questions that you’ve presented here!