Tennyson Among the Poets: Bicentenary Essays

by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Seamus Perry

Overview

Published to mark the bicentenary of Alfred Tennyson's birth, these essays offer an important revaluation of his achievement and its lasting importance. After several years in which the temper of criticism has been largely political (and often hostile towards Tennyson in particular) a number of influential recent accounts of Victorian poetry have rediscovered the virtues of a closer style of reading and the benefits and pleasures of an approach that, without at all ignoring social and cultural contexts, approaches them through a primary alertness to textual detail and literary history. This volume, including entirely commissioned work by a wide range of critics and scholars from across the profession in both Britain and North America, seeks to bring such forms of attention to bear on the immense variety of Tennyson's career by exploring the complex and multiple connections between Tennyson and other writers - his predecessors, his contemporaries, and his successors. Collectively,
the essays describe an intricate network of affiliation and indebtedness, resistance and reconciliation. They provide a unique assessment of Tennyson's origins, work, and imaginative legacy as he enters upon his third century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199557134
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	12/13/2009
Pages:	452
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.70(d)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Notes on Contributors
A Note on the Texts and Abbreviations
Prefatory Note, Christopher Ricks
1. Tennyson's Dying Fall, Peter McDonald
2. Tennyson's Retrospective View, Dinah Birch
3. Tennyson's Limitations, Christopher Decker
4. Tennyson's Grotesque, Aidan Day
5. Tennyson, Browning, Virgil, Daniel Karlin
6. Tennyson and the Voices of Ovid's Heroines, A. A. Markley
7. On lines and grooves from Shakespeare to Tennyson, Eric Griffiths
8. Epic Sensibilities: 'Old Man' Milton and the Making of Tennyson's Idylls of the King, N. K. Sugimura
9. The Wheels of Being: Tennyson and Shelley, Michael O'Neill
10. 'Brother-poets': Tennyson and Browning, Donald S. Hair
11. Friendship, Poetry, and Insurrection: The Kemble Letters, Marion Shaw
12. Tennyson's Humour, Matthew Bevis
13. Edward Lear and Tennyson's Nonsense, Richard Cronin
14. 'Men, my borther, men the workers': Tennyson and the Victorian Working-CLass Poet, Kirstie Blair
15. 'Frater, ave'? Tennyson and Swinburne, Linda K. Hughes
16. After Tennyson: the Presence of the Poet, 1892-1918, Samantha Matthews
17. Tennyson, by Ear, Angela Leighton
18. Hardy's Tennyson, Helen Small
19. T. S. Eliot and Tennyson, John Morton
20. Tennyson and Auden, John Fuller
21. Betjemen's Tennyson, Seamus Perry
Index

Editorial Reviews

"The essays are uniformly strong and collectively add to the understanding of an important poet who has, at times, been undervalued in recent years." —Choice

From the Publisher