Tennyson (Guide to the Year's Work) (Critical Essay‪)‬

The work on Tennyson published in 2010, including two books and numerous essays, addresses issues of genre, biography, literary history, cultural memory, and visuality. In "Form Things: Looking at Genre through Victorian Diamonds" (Victorian Studies 52, no. 4: 591-619), Stephanie Markovits integrates thing theory and neoformalism, noting that genre can function both as thing and abstract form. Diamonds, which bespeak narratives (of imperial capture, slow natural processes, commercial exchange) yet also signify the immaterialities of beauty or love, usefully focus generic impasses in Idylls of the King. The Idylls' aspiration toward epic form runs athwart episodes linked not by causal relationships but by lyric similitude. Yet the poem does not sustain lyric intensity, apart from such moments when Guinevere casts diamonds into the stream just as the dead Elaine, an authentic figure of diamond-like truth and fidelity, passes by--all of which suggests the impossibility of Tennyson's own inventive but unstable generic project. Whether Markovits' model applies equally to works that feature no diamonds but likewise incorporate lyric and narrative, as with "Tears, Idle Tears," is left unclear (see Helsinger below for an alternative approach). But Markovits' essay, like her subject, intrigues with its many facets. Though Tennyson played a slight role in the special issue of VP on the sonnet (ed. Marianne van Remoortel and Marysa Demoor), Valentine Cunningham contributes a fine essay on the sonnets of Tennyson's brother: "Charles (Tennyson) Turner and the Power of the Small Poetic Thing" (VP 48, no. 4: 509-521). Turner's sonnets self-consciously announce their investment in small things not only in form but also subject--small animals, little girls, little England. But Cunningham reverses customary critical connections between modest scale and Turner's self-effacement relative to his laureate brother to probe the sonnets' ambition, which often depict the power of a small thing to envelop and even overwhelm vast reaches of time and space, whether a pocket watch capturing, then redirecting rays of the setting sun onto the landscape or little England subduing large tracts of the globe. Two essays probing the status of Shakespeare's sonnets in the nineteenth century are useful for the light these cast on In Memoriam. Rhian Williams ("'Pyramids of Egypt': Shakespeare's Sonnets and A Victorian Turn to Obscurity" [VP 48, no. 4: 489-508]) notes the impasse posed by Shakespeare for predominant expressive models of poetry, since his sonnets implied either deviant sexuality or a flawed icon of national identity. Robert Matz's fascinating "The Scandals of Shakespeare's Sonnets" (ELH 77, no. 2: 477-508) assembles compelling evidence that Shakespeare's "scandal" for nineteenth-century readers was less same-sex than adulterous desire (in contrast to post-Freudian, twentieth-century audiences that saw in robust heterosexual randiness expressions of health). Matz backs up his assertion that male romantic friendship remained an honorific operative ideal for Victorians with evidence from Wordsworth and Arnold, whose schoolboy commentary at Rugby lauded Shakespeare's sonnets on these very grounds. Henry Hallam's oft-quoted wish that Shakespeare had never written the sonnets, Matz suggests, may derive less from the speaker's expression of affection for a young man than the prospect of a middle-class poet abasing himself before a noble patron.