Abstract
Carlyle’s despair over Alfred is also evident in his dismissal of the one work that is often regarded as Tennyson’s greatest; I have already cited his comments on the Idylls, and it is obvious that his dislike of that poem is based on his moral aesthetics. To Carlyle, Tennyson in the Idylls was again simply ‘spinning rhymes’ and talking of ‘Art’; Alfred had forgotten that the times demanded not mere aestheticisms but poetry that dealt with truth, the truth that Carlyle had seen in some of Tennyson’s earlier idyls. He had failed to image the age.1
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Notes and References
See especially Pitt, Culler, and Donald S. Hair, Domestic and Heroic in Tennyson’s Poetry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), esp. pp. 47–102.
Caryl Emerson, ‘The Tolstoy Connection in Bakhtin’, PMLA, 100 (1985), 68.
George O. Marshall, Jr., A Tennyson Handbook (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1963), p. 136.
W. E. Gladstone, ‘W. E. Gladstone on the Idylls of the King [1859] and Earlier Works’, in John D. Jump (ed.), Tennyson: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), p. 259.
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© 1988 Michael Timko
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Timko, M. (1988). The Idylic Vision of Idylls of The King . In: Carlyle and Tennyson. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09307-6_25
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09307-6_25
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