ABSTRACT
One of the most perplexing facts about Tennyson's life as a literary and public man is that he never wrote anything more than a few sentences in prose about his lifelong passion and occupation: the making and molding of poetry. When Ruskin, Carlyle, the Brownings, Swinburne, and Arnold were not only willing but eager to record (in discursive, Victorian paragraphs) their musings about poetics, why did Tennyson never put together so much as an essay, hardly even a letter, about theory? The answer to this question may be that Tennyson simply lacked the necessary intellectual, critical, or philosophical credentials, that he was, in Auden's phrase, "the stupidest of English poets.»~ It could be that he simply abhorred the writing of prose and "would as soon kill a pig as write a letter" (Martin 85). But perhaps Tennyson chose not to construct his poetics in prose because the ultimate subject of his poems was hardly anything other than poetry: he wrote no essays precisely because he loaded every crevice of his long life's work with speculations about the capacities and efficacy of verse. The very titles of his poems herald this preoccupation with aesthetics: "The Palace of Art," "The Poet," "The Poet's Mind." A listing of Tennyson's major characters reads like a Who's Who of fictional Victorian artists, whose fates cannot be unbound from their fashionings: the Lady of Shalott, Elaine, and Princess Ida. Everywhere he wrote, he wrote of art. None the less, there remains no theory, no explicit engagement of ideas in systematic fashion. To understand Tennysonian poetics, then, we cannot go to the letters, as with Keats, or find, as with Robert Browning, a convenient (if somewhat ambiguous) piece such as his essay on Shelley. Instead, we have only lyrics, idylls, elegies, dramatic monologues, songs, plus the few statements recorded in the Memoir and the notes for the Eversley edition. But these statements, far from producing anything resembling a coherent theory, ring with vatic indecipherability; they, too, become something like poems. The oracle chosen by Hallam Tennyson to stand at the head of the Eversley edition's Notes-"Poetry is like shot-silk with many glancing colours, and every reader must find
his own interpretation according to his ability and according to his sympathy with the poet"-invites us to ambiguity, not clear resolution.2
