(Download) "What the Laureate Did Next: Maud (Critical Essay)" by Victorian Poetry ~ Book PDF Kindle ePub Free

June 20, 2021

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Title: What the Laureate Did Next: Maud (Critical Essay)
Author : Victorian Poetry
Release Date : January 22, 2009
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
Pages : * pages
Size : 221 KB

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When Tennyson was appointed poet laureate in 1850, soon after the protracted composition and triumphant publication of In Memoriam, the event might have struck him--indeed, might now strike us--as a pattern-confirming and thus suggestively providential moment of arrival, of just the kind that the speaker-poet of In Memoriam urgently hopes to discern in his own unfolding history and in the history of the species. More than any poet laureate before or after, Tennyson in 1850 had earned his appointment by speaking at once to and for the deepest anxieties of his culture, and there was thus a tantalizing fitness to the fact that the position should have fallen vacant just as he was proving his claim to it by gathering together his exemplary narrative of doubtful affirmation. Tantalizing fitnesses, moreover, were just what the exemplary first person of that poem ("'I' is not always the author speaking of himself, but the voice of the human race speaking thro' him") (l) was persistently seeking out. Averring at the end of section 128 that "I see in part / That all, as in some piece of art, / Is toil cooperant to an end," (2) the arranging intelligence of the piece of art that is In Memoriam looked out hopefully (but with all the honest if quiet reservations of that ambiguous "in part") for the interpretable signs of a redemptive and enclosing order. Amid the evidences of entropy, decay, and despair in the world at large, the historical scriptor, Alfred Tennyson (not yet a Lord, but suddenly on course to become one), found himself living an apparently scripted life, a life that had delivered him in a single year into marriage, celebrity, centrality. Before the "wild and wandering cries" (IM, Prologue) of Tennyson's elegy for Arthur Hallam had taken shape as the confirming evidence of this centrality, they had begun in sorrowful privacy and, apparently, with no conception that they would end either in the anticipation of the "far-off divine event" of the Epilogue to In Memoriam or in the immediate culminating event of the laureateship. Only in the years after 1850 could Tennyson have written with the certainty that he was speaking to a wide audience and with the nudging sanction of the laureateship to speak for as well as to them. Tennyson took seriously his vocation as laureate, but we have little documentary or epistolary evidence to tell us to what extent that vocation was present to his mind in the composition of individual poems. It is clear that he wrote deliberately as the poet laureate in the "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington," published in 1852; almost as clear that he was doing so in "The Charge of the Light Brigade" in 1854. He also wrote in this period a number of militantly and now embarrassingly patriotic poems--"Britons, Guard Your Own," "Hands All Round," "The Penny-Wise ("Four hundred thousand slaves in arms / May seek to bring us under; / Are we ready, Britons all, / To answer them with thunder? / Arm, Arm, Arm!" [ll. 5-9])--poems designed to fortify the nation for armed struggles to come. Curiously, though, he declined to sign his name to these public-themed poems, perhaps considering them too evidently partisan to qualify as laureate-work. But what of Maud, his first major work and thus his first great act of poetic self-presentation after In Memoriam and the laureateship? It will not revolutionize our view of Maud to think of it as deliberately discharging the duties of the poet laureateship, but it will alter and enrich it, I think, and that is the exercise I would like to conduct in this essay.