The Columbia History of British Poetry (94 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
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Page 376
societycold spectators of a colder spectacle repeatedly masked in the warm colors of dissimulating love. In such a world the distinction between a woman and a thing of beauty is continually collapsing, as one sees in Landon's wonderful lines "Lady, thy face is very beautiful," where we are never sure if the text is addressing a mirror, a painting, or a woman.
A poet of
dis
enchantments, Landon works by putting the vagueries of imagination on full display:
Ay, gaze upon her rose-wreath'd hair,
    And gaze upon her smile:
Seem as you drank the very air
    Her breath perfumed the while:
                              ("Revenge," 1829)
The enchanted i(s)land is equally under the spell of the assenting "Ay" and the gazing eye. The relation between the "Ay" and the eye is a recurrent preoccupation:
Ay, moralize,is it not thus
    We've mourn'd our hope and love?
Alas! there's tears for every eye,
    A hawk for every dove.
                                 ("A Child Screening a Dove from a Hawk, 1825)
Here Landon muses on a painting by Thomas Stewardson, which is triangulated by two fearful eyes (dove, child) and one cold eye (hawk). Studying the aesthetics of the painter's moralizing and sympathetic eye, the poem succeeds through its ironic and self-conscious appropriation of the hawk's point of view.
The cruelty of the poemnot to be separated from its sentimental sympathiesanticipates the equally cruel drama displayed in "Revenge," which retraces Blake's "torments of love and jealousy":
But this is fitting punishment
    To live and love in vain,
O my wrung heart, be thou content,
    And feed upon his pain.
In this world, love's "yes" is Joined to the spectacular eye ("Ay, gaze . . .") and the coupling proves disastrous. Landon's speaker succeeds by entering fully into the terms of the relationship. Identifying with
 
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both her rival and her false lover, the speaker overgoes Keats's
voluptas
of pain by an act of incorporation. The poem thus inverts Keats's "Ode to Melancholy," a work Landon seems to be specifically recalling. Her speaker "feeds" not on a fantasy lady's "peerless eyes'' but on the "pain" masked by such a relationship. Landon's speaker becomes a "cloudy trophy' hung in the atrocity exhibition of her own poem.
Tennyson's early poetry is an effort to put a more benevolent construction on the hollow and mordant writing that filled his world. Although deeply influenced by Byron and Landon, he never even mentions the latter, and he struggles to exorcise his Byronic melancholy throughout his life. "The Palace of Art" comes forward under the famous injunction of Tennyson's early friend R. C. Trench: "we cannot Eve in art."
This thought locates what would become a key nexus of Victorian ideologythe preoccupation with social improvement and the commitment to the ameliorative power of public institutions and culture. Tennyson's poem imagines the "art" that "we cannot live in"a specifically Romantic artas unlivably self-critical, desperate, voluptuous. Arnold's normative critique of Romanticism, first defined in the preface to his 1853
Poems
, is already articulated by the early Tennyson.
NN. Well, Baudelaire read Tennyson quite differently, as I recallas the third in his dark triumvirate of Byron, Poe, Tennyson. Trench's remark carries a deeper critique of art and the worthwhileness of living in what Wordsworth called "the very world which is the world / Of all of us" (
Prelude
XI). Baudelaire's work is written under that deeper, more atrocious sign: "Anywhere out of the world." He reads Tennyson as a kindred spirit.
Trench spoke to Tennyson as a well-fed wit of the bourgeois world that Baudelaire, like Byron and Poe before him, refused. Trench's distinction between art and the world poses a practical decision and assumes the absolute value of a quotidian life in society. Tennyson is a thoroughly Victorian writer partly because his life's work unfolds under the challenge laid down by his friend. Everywhere assuming the validity of that thought, Tennyson's work puts it to the test of his poetic imagination:
That he who will not defend Truth may be compelled to Defend a Lie, that he may be snared & caught & taken
(Blake,
Milton
, plate 8)
 
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Because Tennyson (like the Lady of Shalott) is an artist and not (like Trench) a knight or burgher, his work comes to its Baudelairean positions by agreeing to defend the untruths of his corporeal friend Trench.
XX. So Tennyson is just another late Romantic.
NN. Not at allanymore than Baudelaire is a late Romantic. Of course Tennyson and Baudelaire don't abandon the inheritance of Romanticism: one traces many connections to their immediate forebears, as one does in Browning, or Arnold. Tennyson is Victorian because the dominant context for his work is social and institutional. In the Romantics the context is subjective and interpersonal.
Even when Tennyson writes a poem of self-exploration and expression
In Memoriam
, for examplethe work is organized to move beyond the personal: the poem is, after all, framed on one end by an address to Queen Victoria and on the other by a celebration of the marriage of Tennyson's sister. Byron's
Don Juan
is every bit as socially conscious as
In Memoriam
, but its egotistical sublimity is overwhelming. The contrast with Tennyson couldn't be sharper.
AA. Yes, and the development of that paradigm Victorian formthe dramatic monologuehelps to define the differences. Putting a frame around its subjects, the monologue drops the appearance of a mediating consciousness. Byron's "dramatic monologues"poems like
The Lament of Tasso
and
The Prophecy of Dante
are clear vehicles of self-expression. "Ulysses" (1832) and
Pauline
(1833) are not, partly because they could not be: unlike Tennyson and Browning, Byron's "dramatic monologues" come from an author already famous as a poetic ventriloquist.
"dramatic monologue": Although formal equivalents of this mode can be found throughout the Romantic period, the sub-genre is distinctly Victorian. Paradoxically, its Romantic foreshadowing appears not so much in poems like
The Lament of Tasso
as in "The Solitary Reaper" or
Childe Harold
or any other highly subjective Romantic work. In Romantic writing, the "monologue" is a "dramatic" presentation of the poet
in propria persona
.
XX. Perhaps Tennyson and Browning are just more guarded and circumspect in their dramatic monologuesas if the formulas of Romanticism, and especially late Romanticism, bore too much reality for Byron's shocking public displays. That, at any rate, appears to be what Clare believed, as his late acts of Byronic imitation show. That they are "madhouse" poemspoems of an incarcerated self

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