Tennyson. - book reviews

Contemporary Review, June, 1993 by Betty Abel

Alfred Lord Tennyson was born at Somersby Rectory, Lincolnshire, in 1809. His father was an embittered, almost paranoid clergyman whose wife and 10 children all suffered as a result of his frequent melancholic, sometimes violent, outbursts. Alfred was the third child and his sense of responsibility for the others lay heavily upon him almost all his life though tempered by a strong and abiding affection. His father's death affected him deeply. Not unusually for the time, family cohesion was fostered through their common interest in poetry. All the children wrote verses continually and read aloud the results, especially Alfred, Charles and Fred who were particularly skilled. Not surprisingly, all were troubled by melancholy: Edward at 18 went mad and spent the rest of his life in an asylum, Arthur became alcoholic and Septimus seriously depressed, while Charles succumbed to laudanum, although he seemed at first to be a more promising poet even than Alfred. Alfred, however, recalled rather their happy comradeship and remained at heart a Lincolnshire countryman, strong accent, 'loud organ-notes' and all. He stood out amongst his peers.

Peter Levi has written a remarkable book. He knows the spirit of the man and sees through many of Tennyson's subterfuges designed to protect it. But he takes the life in conjunction with the poetry, discussing poems without any assertions in connection with specific events. An excellent poet himself, he understands the rarity of such concatenations. Tennyson was an extraordinarily complicated man, far-ranging in his acquaintances, eclectic in artistic matters and overpowering in his enthusiasm. Of the many biographies, the earliest being his son Hallam's Memoir, this one reads like a continuous conversation with the poet in the midst of his normal social concerns. It enters also into his preoccupations, particularly work in progress. It slides naturally into cogent critical analysis of the most important poems when Levi illuminates details of their quality and their relation to his whole output.

One such impressive discussion is of Morte d'Arthur, a good example of the critic's expertise. 'There had been nothing in English to touch Morte d' Arthur since Milton', he says, and shows how Tennyson, with the backcloth in mind of Malory's narrative in 1485, 'came as close to Homer as Virgil had ever been'. Tennyson himself had doubts about any attempt to reconstruct chivalric themes in epic form but they do not interfere with his serious intent to develop his own epic repertory in all its varied moods and rhythms, from ballad metre to blank verse.

Matthew Arnold envied him his natural assets; a painterly eye, strong decorative facility and a musical grasp of metre. But Tennyson's poetry also reflects, willy nilly, the familiar mood of intense sadness which only briefly ever left him. 'His inner sense of loss and ruin', says Peter Levi, 'did find an objective correlative in one great narrative poem ... his Morte d'Arthur'. Again, 'The mysterious fit of quite pure grief with tears is attested in literature and well known in psychology but Tennyson's is one of its classic statements'. So Tennyson even had two separate sources of grief to draw upon.

He had published his first book of poems before he went to Cambridge in 1827. Thackeray and Edward FitzGerald were already there, and he made a wide circle of friends. He met here his closest friend of undergraduate days, Arthur Hallam, whose untimely death five years later inspired In Memoriam, the masterpiece he revised, added to and rearranged for almost 20 years. Levi judges this as perhaps his greatest work although an 'entangled shipwreck, a many time started and incoherent lament ...' in which his deepest emotions were engaged and, most significantly, his many styles are embedded. All poetic experimentation, it seemed, had compulsively to be hammered out on the touchstone of this, his deepest fount of grief. For 10 years he published nothing, writing incessantly, until at last, in 1850, it was published and he was made the Poet Laureate (probably at Prince Albert's percipient suggestion, for the Prince had read it).

He also felt free to marry Emily Sellwood, who had waited 11 years, never doubting his final word. There followed forty years of happy, if dramatic, domestic life, with two sons and a fine house in the Isle of Wight, where Tennyson was lionised until he could stand no more. But we owe the brilliant photographs reproduced in this book to one of the more eccentric of his admirers, Julia Cameron, who indulged his taste for drama and extravagant clothes, as well as her own. Emily's diaries came infallibly one pace behind, so that pictorial and verbal accounts justified one another in depicting the lifestyle at Farringford.

This book possesses its own intoxicating quality for it brings to life a major poet whose star has subsequently fallen from a great height. Avid for poetry, the Victorian public made him their idol. The Queen confided in him and Prince Albert recognized his scholarly gifts. Most rewarding are Peter Levi's observations on classical influences, particularly on Tennyson's poetic affinity with the Hellenic Greek bucolic poet, Theocritus. No other English poet could sustain the Hellenic style and form better, either pastoral or elegiac. Even so, he is ignored in the new Oxford Dictionary of Classical Literature in their entry under Elegy, although Keats, Shelley and Matthew Arnold are there. But Peter Levi has placed Tennyson in his intellectual context, showing where his poetry is overwrought and consisted, as Carlyle said, of 'superlative lollipops', and where it is awe inspiring. His book is full of learning and humour, his references impeccable.