|
|
|
|
Links | Bibliography | Author List (1809–1892) It is often said that Tennyson's greatness lay in eloquently presenting the anxieties and aspirations of his era. In poems such as Ulysses, In Memoriam, and Idylls of the King, he expressed the energy, resolve, faith, and idealism of an industrious society that was nonetheless racked by deep doubts about its materialism, the truth of the Bible, and the possibility of achieving a truly Christian society. But Tennyson was not just a mouthpiece for his age: in the early and mid-Victorian period Tennyson was one of its most progressive voices, espousing views that were all the more daring for a shy and sensitive man struggling to realize his dream of becoming "a popular poet." His assertion in The Princess (1847) that "the woman's cause is man's" anticipates Mill's The Subjection of Women by more than twenty years; in the course of writing In Memoriam (1850) he lucidly formulated some of the main principles of evolutionary theory well before Darwin's Origin of Species (1859); he called public attention to the industrialized misery and revolutionary anger of the poor during the 1840s while the contemporaneous works of Marx and Engels were virtually unknown; and in Locksley Hall (1842) he evoked the technological promise of the future as compellingly as any science fiction writer. read, "the words 'far, far away' always had a strange charm for me." After Tennyson's death in 1892 and his burial with great pomp in Westminster Abbey, his reputation suffered a decline that lasted till the end of the Modernist period around 1945. But Tennyson's lyric genius was admired by poets as various as the Pre-Raphaelites and Whitman, Poe and Hopkins. Auden and Eliot were in rare agreement that he had "the finest ear of any English poet since Milton." Critics continue to dispute whether the sense of Tennyson's poetry is equal to its magnificent sound, but any close reading of his work will reveal Tennyson's deep ambivalence about the world of which he gradually became both oracle and icon. Often beneath his harmonies we hear echoes of his favorite childhood sound, "voices crying in the wind." As Eliot observed, Tennyson was "the most instinctive rebel against the society in which he was the most perfect conformist." Top | Links | Bibliography | Author List
|