Reading Poetry, Writing Genre by Silvio Bär Emily Hauser

Author:Silvio Bär,Emily Hauser
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350039346
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2018-11-26T16:00:00+00:00

Tennyson’s classical poems and their relation to classical scholarship

Tennyson’s poems on classical subjects include ‘The Hesperides’ (1832), ‘Oenone’ and ‘The Lotos-Eaters’ (first published in 1832, and revised in 1842), ‘Ulysses’ (written after Arthur Hallam’s death in 1833 and published in 1842), ‘Tithonus’ (1860), ‘Lucretius’ (1868) and ‘Tiresias’ (1885). Some of these poems, such as ‘Tithonus’ and ‘Tiresias’, were partly written at the same time as ‘Ulysses’ and redrafted many times. He also wrote a ‘Specimen of a Translation of the Iliad in Blank Verse’ and ‘Achilles over the Trench’ (Tennyson 1987: 2. 651, 653–7). While Tennyson was fascinated by Homer, some contemporary readers stressed that his own poems were more closely aligned with a writer of literary epic such as Vergil than with what Matthew Arnold described repeatedly in On Translating Homer as Homer’s ‘perfect plainness and directness’ (1960: 116). Arnold describes Tennyson’s poetry as ‘un-Homeric’ in its ‘extreme subtlety and curious elaborateness of expression’ and thought: ‘In Homer’s poetry it is all natural thoughts in natural words; in Mr. Tennyson’s poetry it is all distilled thoughts in distilled words.’ He quotes lines 16–17 of ‘Ulysses’ as an example of verse that has been ‘quoted as perfectly Homeric’ but argues that the ‘subtle sophistication of the thought’ lacks the ‘perfect simplicity’ of Homer (Arnold 1960: 204–5). The critic John Churton Collins, in Illustrations of Tennyson (1891), described Vergil and Tennyson as ‘the most conspicuous representatives’ of a ‘school which seldom fails to make its appearance in every literature at a certain point of its development’, poets who derive their material ‘not from the world of Nature, but from the world of Art. The hint, the framework, the method of their most characteristic compositions, seldom or never emanate from themselves’ (1891: 6). Although Tennyson resented Collins’ laborious identification of classical parallels in his poems, Robert Pattison suggests that the source of his resentment was not the suggestion that Tennyson (like Vergil and Milton) incorporated many borrowings from earlier poets, but rather Collins’ failure to appreciate the art with which Tennyson employed his allusions to earlier texts (1979: 8).

Studies of Tennyson’s classical influences (Pattison 1979; Markley 2004; Markley 2015) demonstrate that the poet’s reading of ancient texts encompasses canonical poetry such as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Vergil’s Aeneid and Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, as well as less familiar works like Claudian’s De Raptu Proserpinae and Quintus of Smyrna’s Posthomerica.7 Tennyson’s pastoral inclinations derive partly from the Idylls of Theocritus and the Eclogues of Vergil; echoes of pastoral elegy and Greek and Latin lyrics are pervasive in Tennyson’s long elegiac poem In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850), in which the poet mourns the death of his friend Arthur Hallam. The ambivalence about epic that Graham finds in the Victorian period is anticipated and skilfully articulated by Greek and Latin poets; Tennyson’s epic ambitions are tempered by his partiality for Sappho, Catullus, and Propertius, who use elegiac conventions to provide a ‘cogent, if unsystematic criticism of the epic genre’ (Sullivan 1993: 145). Ovid’s irreverent

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