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Poe and Tennyson

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Gerhard J. Joseph
Gerhard J. Joseph*
Affiliation:
Herbert H. Lehman College of the City University of New York, Bronx, New York
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Abstract

Considering the way Poe and Tennyson admired each other's work, it is strange that the tonal and thematic convergence of two such major nineteenth-century writers has scarcely been sensed in Anglo-American (as contrasted to French) literary criticism. The quality that most obviously tempts the reader to link them, their extraordinary delight in sound for its own sake, became a comparable strategy in the service of an undogmatic philosophical idealism, the attempt of the spirit to escape the gross materiality and cloying passions of the world's body. The symbolic situations in Tennyson's early poetry and in Poe's stories and poems suggest the dream-shrouded entrapment of the poetic soul within the world's “deserted” (Tennyson) or “haunted” (Poe) houses. Even when Tennyson rejects, ambiguously enough, the self-entombments of Poe-like hyperesthetic souls, he hardly suppresses what Poe called his unequaled “etherisity” and “ideality.” Tennyson's resultant treatment of angelism (to apply to his protagonists Allen Tate's term for the hypertrophied state of Poe's heroes) and the concomitant evolution of a Poe-like Fatal Woman are most clearly evident in such Classical monologues as “Lucretius” and in the conception of Lancelot and Guinevere in the Idylls of the King.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 88 , Issue 3 , May 1973 , pp. 418 - 428
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1973

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References

Notes

1 “Poe at Home and Abroad,” The Shores of Light (New York:Farrar, 1952), p. 183.

2 See esp. Henry M. Belden, “Observations and Imagination in Coleridge and Poe: A Contrast,” Papers . . . in Honor of. . . Charles Frederick Johnson (Hartford: n.p., 1928), pp. 131–75; Floyd Stovall, “Poe's Debt to Coleridge,” University of Texas Studies in English, 10 (1930), 70–127; and Clark Griffith, “Poe's ‘Ligeia’ and the English Romantics,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 24 (1954), 8–25.

3 Quoted by John Eidson, Tennyson in America: His Reputation and Influence from 1827–1858 (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1943), p. 43, from an unsigned review in the Broadway Journal, 2 (29 Nov. 1845), 322, confidently attributed by his biographers to Poe, the “sole editor and proprietor” of the Journal.

4 Quoted in Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son (London: Macmillan, 1897), ii, 292–93; hereafter cited in the text as Memoir.

5 May E. Phillips, Edgar Allan Poe: The Man (Philadelphia: Winston, 1926), ii, 1517.

6 Quoted in Phillips, ii, 1517. These lines may, however, be spurious. Phillips cites no source, and I have been unable to discover a citation of this tribute outside of her work. The following letter from Poe's mother-in-law to Tennyson makes for an interesting postscript to an account of the poets' faint biographical connections:

Alexandria Va. 7 Feb. / 60

Dear Sir

I have often heard of your speaking with appreciation of my beloved son E APoe. And I think you will sympa-size with me when I tell you I have suffered much privation since his death, and am now without a home. I have friends in Louisiana who have offered me a permanent one, but I cannot avail myself of their kindness for want of means to take me to them. Will you contribute a small portion of the requisite sum to enable me to accomplish it. It may appear strange that my literary friends here cannot assist me. I have made the appeal to them, but, without success except in two instances. I feel a great delicacy in making my situation known to you. But when I think a Poets mother is writing to a Poet, I feel it less.If you reply to this please direct to me Alexandria Va. and I will receive it safely. Respectfully,

Maria Clemm

This letter is pinned to a page in the earliest of several bound copies of Hallam Tennyson's Materials for a Life of A. T. (v, “1860 Etc.” p. 16), now at the Tennyson Research Centre in Lincoln (the director of which has kindly permitted publication). Appearing in the first printed version of Materials (II, 257–58), the letter is crossed out in pencil (Hallam's habitual practice when editing material out) and does not appear in the Memoir which grew out of the Materials. (The date on the letter is crossed out in pencil and was therefore not printed in Materials.) George O. Marshall, Jr., who generously called the letter to my attention, has looked through Tennyson's check stubs at the Research Centre (which, to be sure, are mostly for household accounts) and has found no evidence that Tennyson sent Mrs. Clemm any money.

7 For a full account see Sidney P. Moss, Poe's Literary Battles (Durham, N. C: Duke Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 108, n., 157–59, 205. Poe's letters to Lowell appear in The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John Ostrom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1948), I, 246–47, 253–54. Poe attributed the anonymous article to Dickens, Lowell (probably more correctly, according to Moss) to John Forster.

8 See H. M. McLuhan, “Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry,” and “Tennyson and the Romantic Epic,” in Critical Essays on the Poetry of Tennyson, ed. John Killham (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), pp. 67–85, 86–95.

9 Stephane Mallarme, CEuores completes, Pleiade ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), pp. 527–31, 703–04, 1590, 1621–23. Baudelaire's comparison appears in his CEuvres completes (Paris: Levy, 1870), vi, 22, as quoted in translation by MarjorieBowden, Tennyson in France ( Manchester, Eng.: Manchester Univ. Press, 1930), p. 101.

10 The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 17 vols., ed. James A. Harrison (1902; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1965), xiv, 289; xvi, 28; and xii, 180 respectively. All further references to this edition appear in the text.

11 Quoted in Phillips, ii, 833.

12 According to Thomas Holley Chivers' account of a conversation with Poe in the summer of 1845, quoted inGeorge E. Woodberry, “The Poe-Chivers Papers,” Century Magazine, 65 (Jan. 1903), 447.

13 Quoted in Christopher Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson (London: Longmans, Green, 1969), p. 187. Quotations from Tennyson's poetry follow this text.

14 “Our Cousin, Mr. Poe,” The Forlorn Demon: Didactic and Critical Essays (Chicago: Regnery, 1953), p. 85.

15 “The House of Poe,” Library of Congress Anniversary Lecture, 4 May 1959; rpt. in The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Eric W. Carlson (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1966), pp. 255–77.

16 For comparable treatments of the concept in Tennyson and Poe, see Gerhard Joseph, “Tennyson's Death in Life in Lyric and Myth: ‘Tears, Idle Tears’ and 'Demeter and Persephone,' ” Victorian Newsletter, 34 (1968), 13–18; and Darrell Abel, “Coleridge's 'Life-in-Death' and Poe's ‘Death-in-Life,‘ ” Notes and Queries, NS 2 (1955), 218–20.

17 “The Angelic Imagination: Poe as God,” pp. 56–78; and “Our Cousin, Mr. Poe,” pp. 79–95, in The Forlorn Demon. The quotation appears on p. 77 of the former essay. Tate acknowledges Pascal as his classical and Jacques Maritain (in The Dream of Descartes) as his modern sources for the doctrine of angelism.

18 1 have argued in Tennysonian Love: The Strange Diagonal (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1969) that Tennyson examined such a conception of woman in the Idylls and may have derived it in part from two of Arthur Hallam's essays—“The Influence of Italian upon English Literature” and “Remarks on Professor Rossetti's ‘Dis-quisizioni Sullo Spirito Antipapale.‘”

19 Quoted in G. M. Young, “The Age of Tennyson,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 35 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1939), 127.