ABSTRACT
Prima facie, it might seem surprising to find 'feminine grace and tenderness' chosen as the best phrase to describe the love lyrics of Maud. The speaker of Tennyson's monodrama, after all, is a violent, misanthropic young man of 25 who is raised to vertiginous heights by his passion for a girl of 16, whose brother he grievously wounds in a duel. In understanding Patmore's point, it is helpful to note that he reformulates the distinction between poets of sensation and poets of reflection made by Arthur Henry Hallam in his essay of 1831 on Tennyson's early poetry. The 'fine organs' of the former kind of poet, Hallam said, 'trembled into emotion at the slightest impulse from external nature'. So vivid was 'the delight attending the simple exertions of eye and ear' for such poets that it became 'mingled more and more with their trains of active thought, and tended to absorb their whole being into the energy of sense' (1943, 186). And, as we have seen, in another place Hallam (1981) spoke of the 'peculiar power' of 'sensuous perception' in his friend's poetry and noted its similarity to 'the fragments of 5appho' (401-2) - that is, to a distinctively feminine grace and tenderness.
