‘Mr. Tennyson’s Truly English Spirit’: Landscape and Nature in Poems (1842)

Abstract

The two-volume edition of Poems, published by Edward Moxon in May 1842, laid the foundation-stone of Tennyson’s fame. The volumes were favourably reviewed in a wide range of contemporary periodicals, many of whose critics comment approvingly on the poet’s ‘keen eye for the beauties of nature’.¹ In Chapters 1 and 2 I examined how reviewers of the early volumes attempted to define and shape Tennyson as an English poet in the context of contemporary concerns, and considered how poems selected or rejected by reviewers reflect changing aspects of nineteenth-century Englishness. In this chapter I argue that in Poems (1842) Tennyson constructs himself as a more English poet by changing from the sublime settings of earlier poems to a recognizably English landscape, and by using the English forms of popular ballad, and blank verse for the English Idyls, and suggest that he draws on a medieval past as a way of rejecting contemporary England’s industrial landscapes. I also examine how poems contained in the two volumes embody new and emerging concepts of Englishness current in the mid-nineteenth century, and consider contemporary reviewers’ responses to Poems (1842). Reviewers agreed that Tennyson had grown in poetic strength since his previous publication, but were less concerned with changing English society than reviewers of the early volumes.