Tennyson

Abstract

To write merely of the voices of ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON (1804–1892), their music and their demonstration of ‘the finest ear of any English poet’ (T. S. Eliot, 1936), would be irrelevant to this book; but if it can be shown that this varied music tapped the many linguistic resources of our language, then it is straight to our point. In Memoriam (1849), to lovers of theological and philosophical niceties, may appear to have a confused thesis, and this is all the more marked through being conveyed in such a cleared air; for here is the first sustained, deliberate use of a stark (which in Old English meant ‘strong’ or ‘stiff’) style, cold and dead in sound for the most part, but often fevered and intense. It is economical in diction, and markedly Old English; whole stanzas, and almost whole cantos, will be without Romance words, and the movement is thus staccato and monosyllabic, as in the line that T. S. Eliot admired, ‘On the bald street breaks the blank day’. With this goes an almost affected simplicity of sentence-structure, without grammatical fireworks or abuses of word-order; not that revolutionary quirks of language are to be expected in 1849, but the diction here has what must be a studied, self-conscious return to something less obviously clever than the unending influence of Milton or the infection of the early Romantics. It is work to a formula.