ABSTRACT
THE DIVERSITY OF THE TENNYSONIAN CANON HAS ELICITEDA DIVERSI rly opinion as to Tennyson’s most characteristic themes. Theeditors of the Norton Anthology of English Literature describe Tennyson as “essentially a poet of the countryside” and declare that “the past became his great theme” (Abrams 1056). To Harold Bloom, Tennyson is “one of the three most authentically erotic poets in the language” (“Tennyson: In the Shadow of Keats” 29). “For me,” writes Harold Nicolson, “the essential Tennyson is a morbid and unhappy mystic” (27). “Most characteristic of Tennyson,” states Robert Langbaum, “is a certain life-weariness, a longing for rest through oblivion” (89). George Barker observes that “the Tennysonian characteristic is ambivalence” (v). “The Tennysonian theme is frustration,” Arthur J. Carr remarks (606), while Roger Ebbatson recognizes numerous themes: “longing and frustration; the mask of age; sceptical doubt; the role of the artist in society; the evolutionary principle; the clash between social order and inner disorder” (37).
