The Columbia History of British Poetry (104 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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Page 414

Declaring Tennyson "decidedly the first of our living poets," Wordsworth confessed himself pleased, despite serious misgivings, to have won Tennyson's praise: "To this I am far from indifferent, though persuaded he is not much in sympathy with what I should most value in my attempts, viz. the spirituality with which I have endeavoured to invest the material universe, and the moral relation under which I have wished to exhibit its most ordinary appearances." Tennyson's suspected reservations, however, were more stylistic than metaphysical. Wordsworth, he admitted privately, was often too prosaic and barren, "too diffuse and didactic for me,'' and to Wordsworth's simple language he preferred the richer diction of Keats, which exemplified the verbal concentration and intensity he chose to emulate. But his complaints were minor in comparison with his high estimate of Wordsworth's essential power.

Near the end of his own long career Tennyson assured the anthologist Francis Palgrave that he regarded Wordsworth as "the greatest of our poets in this century." And to another friend he explained that when he had his great heroic Lancelot in
Idylls of the King
claim the far surer "greatness" of his liege lord Arthur, "I was thinking of Wordsworth and myself." It was oddly characteristic that in writing of medieval knights, he should have been thinking at all of the relative status of nineteenth-century poets.

Apart from a few verbal echoes, Wordsworth's direct influence on Tennyson is seldom apparent. The Solitary's illusion of "a mighty city" among the mountaintops in
The Excursion
seems to anticipate the vision from the heights in Tennyson's Cambridge-prize poem "Timbuctoo," for in both we have an imagery of "glory," gold and diamonds, "boundless" space, domes, starry battlements, and dazzling canopiesWordsworth's "wilderness of building" against Tennyson's "wilderness of spires." The un-Wordsworthian debate "The Two Voices" reaches a quite Wordsworthian conclusion:


And forth into the fields I went, And Nature's living motion lent The pulse of hope to discontent. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I wonder'd, while I paced along; The woods were fill'd so full with song, There seem'd no room for sense of wrong;

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And all so variously wrought, I marvell'd how the mind was brought To anchor by one gloomy thought.

Here the "living motion" recalls the "motion" in "Tintern Abbey" that impels all living things, and the conquest of "discontent'' repeats the pattern of "Resolution and Independence," where also "the birds are singing in the distant woods." On the other hand, Tennyson's "Tears, Idle Tears" (actually written at Tintern Abbey) may have been prompted by his admiration of Wordsworth's "Lines . . . ," but it expresses its own sense of the past to quite different effectwith a sad regret rather than a forward-looking satisfaction. Tennyson said he often wished to take up the theme of "Intimations of Immortality" in a poem of his own; but his version, had it ever been attempted, would scarcely have striven for Wordsworth's rhetoric of assertion. At any rate, his "Tithonus," which repudiates the appeal of immortality, has been read as a conscious inversion of the "Ode."

The large differences between the two poets are, of course, more conspicuous than the few parallels. The representative figure in Wordsworth is the solitary (not usually as embittered as that character in
The Excursion
) placed against a bleak wild nature, and the chief value is stoic self-reliance. In Tennyson, conversely, the ideal is human fellowship, whether with the Somersby family circle in early lyrics or within the "reverend walls" of Cambridge in
In Memoriam
or among the Round Table knights of the
Idylls
. Few occasional verses in English can match the Horatian grace of Tennyson's urbane epistles to his many friends. No elegy expresses the dread of aloneness with greater poignancy than
In Memoriam
, and none aspires to a resolution so boldly social:


I will not shut me from my kind, And, lest I stiffen into stone, I will not eat my heart alone, Nor feed with sighs a passing wind

a resolve which should prepare us for the unexpected coda that celebrates the shared ritual of marriage.

Unlike Wordsworth's rugged moors and craggy hills, Tennyson's preferred landscape is a cultivated terrain, "not wholly," as "The Gardener's Daughter" puts it, "in the busy world, nor quite beyond it,"

Page 416

within easy reach of good companionship. And the nearby city is not necessarily an intrinsic evil, as it is in "Michael"though some of Tennyson's late pieces deplore urban squalor and the dismal "warrens of the poor." In the
Idylls
the city represents the brief triumph of Arthur's civilized order, Camelot, "the city . . . built to music"as opposed to the encompassing wilderness, which is inhuman, brutish, and menacing. More realistically, in
In Memoriam
the city presents both the dark ''unlovely street" of the dead Hallam and the same street quickened to new life at early dawn. Elsewhere, most genially, it becomes the setting of the Cock, the chophouse where Will Waterproof shapes his rhymes:


High over roaring Temple-bar, And set in heaven's third story, I look at all things as they are, But thro' a kind of glory.

Tennyson's engagement with society extended to the intellectual life of the city and the universities. His personal acquaintancesometimes close friendshipwith Victorian statesmen, liberal theologians, and eminent men of science encouraged wide general reading and a concern with current ideas and the challenges of new knowledge. Tennyson discussed social and political issues on long walks with Carlyle and, in later years, on summer travels with Prime Minister Gladstone. He welcomed the leading Broadchurchmen, Frederick Denison Maurice and Benjamin Jowett, to his home at Farringford. Sir John Herschel stimulated his lifelong interest in astronomy, and Norman Lockyer had him proofread a treatise on cosmology. John Tyndall, the physicist, argued with him the case for materialism. Charles Darwin sent him an advance copy of
The Origin of Species
, and "Darwin's Bulldog," T. H. Huxley, praised him as "having quite the mind of a man of science."

Wordsworth in his 1800 "Preface" had predicted that "if the time should ever come"the tense and mood were scarcely sanguine"when what is now called science" should make its theories and abstractions familiar, concrete, and relevant, then the Poet might "lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration." But for Tennyson that time was already here; scientific Discovery (personified as early as "Timbuctoo"), both exhilarating and alarming, haunted his imagination all his life.

On its broadest public level
In Memoriam
is a dialogue between science and faith. Nature has now none of the solidity and permanence

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