Introduction: The Enigma of Englishness

Abstract

Critics and reviewers identified Tennyson as an English poet from the first reviews of his published poems. Early critics discerned in his work a ‘desire to imitate the old English lyrical poets’,¹ hailed him as successor to ‘the great generation of poets which is now passing away’,² and considered the poet’s influence on ‘national feelings and character’.³ A kindly review of Poems by Two Brothers (1827) welcomed ‘a graceful addition to our domestic poetry’.⁴ In this study I examine Tennyson’s ‘domestic poetry’ — his portrayals of English nature and landscape, the monarchy, medievalism and the ‘English Empire’,⁵ written throughout his career and in their changing nineteenth-century context — to consider whether Tennyson’s representations of England and the English were idealized portrayals, hence fabrications, and to consider whether and in what ways his representations reflected, shaped or subverted, established or emerging ideas of Englishness in the nineteenth century.