Tennyson

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Tennyson
• Linda K. Hughes (bio)

No book-length study of Alfred Tennyson appeared during 2022, but The Crimean War in Victorian Poetry by Tai-Chun Ho (Peter Lang, 2021) offers sustained engagement with Tennyson’s poetry. This sociohistorical, intertextual literary study considers the troubled role of the noncombatant poet (or “armchair” poet) in an era of war correspondents, telegraphs, and mass print. Faced with current reports of Crimean troubles on one hand, Victorian poets faced on the other their legacy of war poetry, including the Iliad, that glorified war and heroism. Poets who invoked glory or patriotism while sitting snugly at home when British soldiers far from home faced inadequate supply chains, insufficient medical attendance, and officers’ blunders could invite condemnation. Yet realist representations of soldiers’ suffering in war could repel or distress prospective readers. Ho’s achievement, which builds on earlier studies by Stefanie Markovits and Trudi Tate, is to set these questions in a broad poetic as well as transmedial context that illuminates evolving traditions of war poetry as well as Tennyson’s own diction and perspectives. Ho claims the [End Page 407] status of double poems for much of what he examines, since Victorian war poetry presented “the armchair poet’s struggle to voice the unspeakable and to depict a war that was being reported in newspapers” while also incorporating “a socio-political critique that require[d] the reader to explore the dramatized speaker’s engagement with the conflict as an object of analysis” (p. 45).

Ho sets the stage by examining the Tyrtaean tradition of war poetry, so named from Tyrtaeus, the Spartan warrior poet. Thomas Campbell’s translation of Tyrtaeus’s martial elegy opens, “How glorious fall the valiant, sword in hand, / In front of battle for their native land!” (p. 219). These lines are echoed, Ho suggests in chapter 5, in Tennyson’s monodrama, when the speaker describes Maud’s military ballad—an echo likely recognized by Tennyson’s readers. Newspaper poems by civilian poets Tom Taylor, Louisa Shore, and Tennyson shifted war poetry from Tyrtaean glory to soldiers’ suffering (Taylor), their bravery that left a civilian poet little to say by contrast (Shore, in a Spectator poem that first rhymed “thunder” and “wonder”), or soldiers’ suffering and bravery (Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade”). Civilian poets were inherently unable to accommodate roles of warrior-poets; hence, Tennyson subtly distanced his point of view from battle in “Charge” so that readers never see the soldiers, only their swords flashing in air (ll. 27–28), leaving civilians back home to “wonder.”

Thomas Campbell’s “The Soldier’s Dream” (1804) was an alternative influence on Victorian war poetry. In it a sleeping sentinel dreams of his family back home only to awaken to the wounded and another prospect of death for himself. Crimean armchair poets appropriated this use of dream visions, which contextualized Maud, part III when the lately mad speaker dreams not of a family back home but of Maud tricked out in the accoutrements of war, raising questions of the war’s efficacy. War poems by Gerald Massey, Tom Taylor (e.g., “Balaklava”), and the intriguing radical poet Robert Brough criticized government oversight of war or civilian “patriotism” that enabled complacency tantamount to complicity in government mismanagement. Their work, too, formed a backdrop for the doubtful aspects of war and suggested potential critique in the Tennysonian madman’s enthusiasm for war.

Sonnets on the War by Alexander Smith and Sydney Dobell (1855) contextualized Maud differently. Dobell’s “Home” presented the stark reality of death when a young woman thinking of her lover is roughly juxtaposed to his body now serving as “carrion” to ravens (l. 14); and in “Wounded” an army surgeon must pass over one man’s now-limbless trunk to try saving the life of a widow’s son. In “War,” Smith’s speaker bluntly addresses a wife back home, “The husband from whose arms you could not part / Sleeps among hundreds [End Page 408] in a bloody pit” (ll. 1-2). Such circulating imagery, combined with war journalism, Ho suggests, meant that the “dreadful hollow” of Maud would have resonated with the circulating lexicon of war references (l. 1). Thus...