ABSTRACT
In common with other poets of his generation, Tennyson used a variety of poetic masks as larger versions of metaphors, dramatic monologue being one example. In fact, though, Tennyson was not good at concealing himself, as he admits in In Memoriam.
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within. (Canto V, 11. 3–4)
His deeper anxieties and difficult relationships with his era and society can be complicated and hidden by being enclosed in dialect; indeed, many readers miss the deeper revelations in attempting to understand the words. The mask of Lincolnshire dialect seems to provide something concrete in Tennyson’s unstable poetics, whereby he can name presences clearly without the slippage lurking in sophisticated, classically constructed speech. These rural dramas contain the disjunctions of his early life expressed in an enclosed linguistic landscape, removed from the infinite horizon of his major works. In the claustrophobic world of the Northern farmers, cobblers, and village wives Tennyson interrogates both what he has escaped and what he wishes to retain.
