Riassunto per l'esame di Letteratura inglese 3, prof Saglia, libro consigliato The gardener's daughter, Tennyson

ALFRED LORD TENNYSON

- The poet of Englishness and Britishness in the Victorian Age.

- He wrote about the past, the Middle Ages, the legends of King Arthur and the round table,

the tradition of chivalry (as a set of values such as generosity, self-abnegation, courage that

can also be improved in the present). He also wrote about the present: the principles of

contemporary England and Britain. So he was not only nostalgic, but he also celebrated the

institutions of England and their missions (defending Christianity, expanding the Empire

and bringing civilization to primitive people).

- The poem “To the Queen” is dedicated to Queen Victoria, published in 1851 to celebrate the

Queen, who is glorified. The Queen is the kingdom, the nation, the mother of the English.

He also uses the figure of the Queen as a symbol of condensation of the values of Britain.

He speaks about the concept of LOYALTY: the Queen is loyal to her own royalty but also

to the land: crown + nation. Also the nation is loyal to the Queen. Then this concept is

projected outside on an imperial scale. He’s presenting Imperialism as a possible

development for the nation and the rest of the world. NB: “our” vast Orient – idea of

possession. By this time Tennyson was the poet laureate in succession to W. Wordsworth.

He was the official poet in the British Empire.

- Very often in his poetry he acted like a sage = wise interpreter of the meaning of life. This is

visible in “In Memoriam (1850): it’s a long elegy in rimes. It was dedicated to his friend

Hallam, died young. Tennyson was devastated and began to write poems mourning this

death and celebrating his life. This book became a kind of vademecum (how to live life and

how to face death). This was true for Queen Victoria too because her husband died young

and she found consolation in Tennyson’s book. “it’s better to have blood and loss than never

to have loved at all”.

LIFE (Norton) ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON (1809-1892)

 In his own lifetime Tennyson was the most popular of poets. Such popularity inevitably

provoked a reaction in the decades following his death. The Edwardians and Georgians

established the fashion of making fun of Tennyson's achievements.

 Tennyson's stature as one of the major poets of the English language seems uncontroversial

today. Like his poetry, Tennyson's life and character have been reassessed in recent times.

To many of his contemporaries he seemed a man whose life had been sheltered, marred only

by the loss of his best friend in youth. During much of his career Tennyson may have been

isolated, but his was not a sheltered life in the real sense of the word.

 Tennyson was the fourth son in a family of 12 children. One of his brothers had to be

confined to an insane asylum for life; another was long addicted to opium; another had

violent quarrels with his father, the Reverend Dr. George Tennyson.

 This father, a man of considerable learning, had been born the eldest son of a wealthy

landowner and had, therefore, expected to be heir to his family's estates. Instead he was

disinherited in favor of his younger brother and had to make his own livelihood by joining

the clergy, a profession that he disliked. After George Tennyson had settled in a small

rectory in Somersby, he was often drunk and violent; he was nevertheless able to act as his

sons' tutor in classical and modern languages to prepare them for entering the university.

 Before leaving this strange household for Cambridge, Tennyson had already demonstrated a

flair for writing verse—precocious exercises in the manner of John Milton or Byron or the

Elizabethan dramatists. He had even published a volume in 1827, in collaboration with his

brother Charles, Poems by Two Brothers. This feat drew him to the attention of a group of

gifted undergraduates at Cambridge, "the Apostles," who encouraged him to devote his life

to poetry.

 He was painfully shy, and the friendships he found at Cambridge as well as the intellectual

and political discussions in which he participated gave him confidence and widened his

horizons as a poet. The most important of these friendships was with Arthur Hallam, a

leader of the Apostles, who later became engaged to Tennyson's sister Emily. Hallam's

sudden death, in 1833, seemed an overwhelming calamity to his friend.

 Not only the long elegy In Memoriam (1850) but many of Tennyson's other poems are

tributes to this early friendship. Tennyson's career at Cambridge was interrupted and finally

broken off in 1831 by family dissensions and financial need, and he returned home to study

and practice the craft of poetry.

 His early volumes (1830 and 1832) were attacked as "obscure" or "affected" by some of the

reviewers. Tennyson suffered acutely under hostile criticism, but he also profited from it.

His 1842 volume demonstrated a remarkable leap forward, and in 1850 he at last attained

fame and full critical recognition with In Memoriam. In the same year he became poet

laureate in succession to William Wordsworth.

 His life thereafter was a comfortable one and he managed to marry Emily Sellwood, whom

he had loved since long time but could not marry, because of poverty. He was as popular as

Byron had been, and the earnings from his poetry enabled him to purchase a house in the

country.

 His notoriety was enhanced by his colorful appearance. Huge and shaggy in cloak and

broad-brimmed hat, gruff in manner, he impressed everyone as what is called a "character"

Tennyson had a booming voice that electrified listeners when he read his poetry. Moreover,

for many Victorian readers, he a wise man whose occasional pronouncements on politics or

world affairs represented the national voice itself.

 In 1884 he accepted a peerage. In 1892 he died and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

 One of the difficulties of his dignified blank verse was, as he said himself, that it is hard to

describe commonplace objects and "at the same time to retain poetical elevation." This

difficulty is evident, for example, in Enoch Arden (1864), a long blank verse narrative of

everyday life in a fishing village.

 In his later poems dealing with national affairs, there is also an increased shrillness of tone

—a mannerism accentuated by Tennyson's realizing that he, like Charles Dickens, had a vast

public behind him to back up his pronouncements.

 In 1855 he published his experimental monologue Maud, in which he presents an alienated

hero who feels great bitterness toward society.

 In 1859 appeared four books of his Idylls of the King, a large-scale epic that occupied most

of his energies in the second half of his career. The Idylls uses the body of Arthurian legend

to construct a vision of civilization's rise and fall. In this civilization women both inspire

men's highest efforts and sow the seeds of those efforts' destruction. The Idylls provides

Tennyson's most extensive social vision: concerns with medieval ideals of social

community, heroism, and courtly love and despairing sense of the cycles of historical

change.

 He worked hard at his craftsmanship. Tennyson studied his predecessors assiduously to

perfect his technique.

 The state of feeling to which Tennyson was most intensely drawn was a melancholy

isolation, often portrayed through the consciousness of an abandoned woman, as in

"Mariana." (1830) Tennyson's absorption with such emotions in his early poetry evoked

considerable criticism.

 The death of Hallam and the religious uncertainties that he had himself experienced,

together with his own extensive study of writings by geologists, astronomers, and biologists,

led him to confront many of the religious issues that bewildered his and later generations.

The result was In Memoriam, a long elegy written over a period of seventeen years,

embodying the poet's reflections on the relation of human beings to God and to nature.

Tennyson's mind was slow, ponderous, brooding; for the composition of In Memoriam such

qualities of mind were assets.

 Very different are the poems Tennyson writes of events of the moment over which his

thoughts and feelings have had no time to brood. Several of these are what he himself called

"newspaper verse." They are letters to the editor. "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1854),

inspired by a report in the London Times of a cavalry charge at Balaclava during the

Crimean War, is one of the most fascinating of his productions in this category. Tennyson's

poems of contemporary events were inevitably popular in his own day. So too were those

poems in which, as in "Locksley Hall" (1842), he dipped into the future. The technological

changes wrought by Victorian inventors and engineers fascinated him, sometimes giving

him an exultant assurance of human progress. At other times the horrors of industrialism's

by-products in the slums, the persistence of barbarity and bloodshed, and the greed of the

newly rich destroyed his hopes that human was evolving upward.

 His final book of Idylls of the King was published in 1869: Tennyson was similarly haunted

by the possibility of retrogression. For despite Tennyson's fascination with technological

developments, he was essentially a poet of the countryside, a man whose whole being was

conditioned by the recurring rhythms of rural rather than urban life. He had the country

dweller's awareness of traditional roots and sense of the past. It is appropriate that so many

of his poems are about the past, not about the present or future. The past became his great

theme, whether it be his own past (such as the times he shared with Hallam), his country's

past (as in Idylls of the King), or the past of the world.

THE GARDENER’S DAUGHTER

- Poem about the present.

- No references to the Empire, Asia, India, chivalry.

- It was first published in 1842 in “Poems. It belongs to a group of texts which Tennyson

called “The English Idylls”. They are about nature, the countryside and the celebration of

values of England, Englishness. Nature is a container of Englishness. It is manmade:

modified by civilisation.

- There is a celebration of Englishness in everyday life.

- If Tennyson concentrates on England from inside, Robert browning concentrates on England

from outside England. “Home Thoughts, from abroad” is about England which is

symbolized by its nature and nostalgia for the past. (always Victorian period).

- An Englishman describes the English countryside and the woman he falls in love with.

- It’s a narrative poem because it tells a story, but it’s also a Victorian type of poem, a

st

dramatic monologue which is spoken in 1 person by a character who is not the poet and

who speaks to an audience and reveals his feelings, memories.

- It’s a love story. The protagonist is a painter who falls in love with the gardener’s daughter

who lives in a house in the co