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Tennyson's Optics: The Eagle's Gaze

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Gerhard Joseph
Gerhard Joseph*
Affiliation:
Herbert H. Lehman College City University of New York, New York, N. Y.
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Abstract

The visual focus in Tennyson's poetry moves between particularized objects and hazy vistas. His particularist bent, arising in part from myopia, coincided with the bias of an age that both exalted the Symbol and revered empirical observation. But Tennyson's fears of psychic entrapment within the object and of nature's uncontrollable prolixity inclined him alternatively toward the receding “past” and the distanced “picture.” This tendency reinforces itself through the correlative temporal and spatial frames of his poetry: “modern frames” enclose his “pasts”; “casements” focus his “pictures.” Tennyson thus exemplifies the Victorian attempt to reconcile particulars and universals, and the “telescopic dualism” of nineteenth-century painting and poetry, wherein detailed foregrounds and indefinite, receding backgrounds are discrete. In Tennyson such a division distinguishes a material world precisely apprehensible through sight and a spiritual one that fades toward diaphaneity. The paradigm for Tennyson's unattainable goal of optical (and epistemological) inclusiveness is “The Eagle.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 92 , Issue 3 , May 1977 , pp. 420 - 428
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1977

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References

1 Quoted from a letter in Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1897), i, 512. Hereafter cited as Memoir.

2 The Princess v.196-97. All citations of Tennyson's work are from The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longmans, Green, 1969).

3 For an excellent discussion to which my formulation is indebted, see Carol Christ, The Finer Optic: The Aesthetic of Particularity in Victorian Poetry (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1975). Where, however, Christ emphasizes a categorical Tennysonian penchant for stark individuation, I see a dialectical movement between particularity and indefiniteness.

4 The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James H. Harrison, 17 vols. (1902; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1965), xvi, 28. I have compared the ideals of vagueness in the two writers in “Poe and Tennyson,” PMLA, 88 (1973), 418-28.

5 James Knowles, “Aspects of Tennyson, ii: A Personal Reminiscence,” The Nineteenth Century, 33 (1893), 170. The syntax of this oft quoted sentence is somewhat confusing. John Dixon Hunt, for instance, in “The Poetry of Distance: Tennyson's Idylls of the King,” Victorian Poetry, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer (London: Edward Arnold, 1972), pp. 89-90, reads “the landscape, the picture and the past” as three elements in a “curious alliance” that intimates Tennyson's lifelong interest in “landscape, painting, and history.” To this reader, on the other hand, “picture and past” seem to be in apposition to “distance” rather than to “landscape.” Transformationally, that is, “distance,” “picture,” and “past” are subjects of a sentence in which “in the landscape” has an adverbial force. For the purposes of the present argument the important point is the certainty that a spatial-temporal convergence links “picture and past” with either of the two other terms.

6 See Carl R. Sonn, “Poetic Vision and Religious Certitude in Tennyson's Early Poetry,” Modern Philology, 57 (1959), 83-93; and David Goslee, “Spatial and Temporal Vision in the Early Tennyson,” Victorian Poetry, 11 (1973), 323-29.

7 Lectures on Greek Poetry (London: Longmans, Green, 1910), p. 219.

8 Tennyson and “The Princess” (London: Athlone, 1958), p. 64.

9 Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, ed. H. D. Traill, Centenary Edition (London: Chapman & Hall, 1896-1901), p. 274.

10 Quoted in G. M. Young, The Age of Tennyson, Proceedings of the British Academy, 25 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1939), p. 127.

11 Zeitler's work, Die Kunst des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Proylaen Verlag, 1966) is summarized in Praz's Mnemosyne: The Parallel between Literature and the Visual Arts, Bollingen Series, 16 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1967), xxxv, 58-74.

12 The quality is fully defined in G. Robert Stange, Matthew Arnold: The Poet as Humanist (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 281-91.