Tennyson (Critical Essay‪)‬

Preoccupations with empire and gender somewhat abated in Tennyson studies in 2002, with the slack taken up by attention to influence, a term near to hand because Robert Douglas-Fairhurst treats the subject in such resonant terms in Victorian Afterlives: The Shaping of Influence in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Oxford University Press). One of his aims is to complicate theories of influence advanced by Harold Bloom and Jerome McGann. Douglas-Fairhurst contends that neither of their models encompasses, for example, the influence of a poet's own prior texts or compositional history on later productions. Yet he offers no opposing theoretical model, for Douglas-Fairhurst's recursive yet expansive book is less a product of method than a process, a supple, extraordinarily sensitive study of influence or afterlife in poetry and its individual, psychological, poetic, moral, social, national, and even theological implications. Tennyson is crucial to his exploration. In the introduction Douglas-Fairhurst notes that the registering of a vanished voice in the sea's crashing waves in "Break, break, break" ("the sound of a voice that is still") finds a kind of afterlife in "Ulysses," another response to Hallam's death ("the deep / Moans round with many voices") and again in Section 35 of In Memoriam ("The moanings of the homeless sea"). But if influence can be traced backwards through successive layers of personal and literary experience, influence is for poets also deeply proleptic, a question of whether they may continue to exert influence after their own deaths through the ongoing life of texts. Having noted Tennyson's penchant for echoing Arthur Hallam's earlier poems in his own, Douglas-Fairhurst continues, "Taking on someone else's words can allow the poet to question how far a literary afterlife is as socially dependent as the human life from which it emerges, and so whether it can be prepared for in advance by writing in such a way that a poem's appeal will live up to the sheer persistence of its printed form. Alternatively, an argument for personal immortality might be expressed with an intellectual and stylistic coherence which supported its claims for the integrity of the person writing" (p. 83).