Poet tasting #1: Tennyson

”Dark house, by which once more I stand

                           Here in the long unlovely street,

                           Doors, where my heart was used to beat

                  So quickly, waiting for a hand…”

We hope that this Salon on Tennyson will be the first of many, where Tim Swinglehurst invites salonistas to a tasting of a specific poet writing sometime between the English Renaissance and the outbreak of the First World War. His aim is that after two weeks you will be left wanting more!

In 1946 W.H. Auden articulated the polarised reception – Victorian idolisation versus Modernist rejection – of his venerable poetical predecessor, Alfred Lord Tennyson, writing “He had the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet; he was also undoubtedly the stupidest; there was little about melancholia he didn’t know; there was little else that he did”. Tennyson’s mastery of form and exceptional ear for rhythm and lyrical phrasing (“the finest ear of any English poet since Milton” said T.S. Eliot) were praised; his preference for hypnotic, sensual musicality at the expense of intellectual rigour and moral seriousness condemned (according to F.R. Leavis he was guilty of an unhealthy, “dream world” escapism, while Eliot – again – described “a further stage in the disintegration of the intellect, the further separation of sound, image and thought”).

More generously, Professor Christopher Ricks has written, “That, among so much else, he knew – and could effect – consolation as no one else has in our tongue, knowing consolation in its substantiality as well as its limits; that he understood madness, bereavement, fear, shivering, erotic loveliness, undying friendship, loss, exquisite courtesy, as it has been given to very few to understand them.” Extraordinary that anyone should have such comprehensive understanding of melancholia as Auden claims for Tennyson, mind-boggling that his understanding may encompass so much more.

During this two-week Salon we will read short poems and selected passages from longer poems to taste Tennyson for ourselves and see how we respond to his verse. We will, among other poems, read from The Lotos-Eaters and Ulysses, listening to Tennyson in dialogue with Homer’s Odyssey; explore a fraction of Tennyson’s grief and the mind-altering challenges of geology and cosmology to his faith expressed in In Memoriam; and journey into the deeply disturbed and deteriorating psyche of the narrator of the monodrama Maud. We will, most importantly, take time to read some of Tennyson’s verse aloud together, experiencing with our ears and voices the Tennyson ‘sound’.

“Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,

                  And slips into the bosom of the lake.

So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip

Into my bosom and be lost in me.”

JOINING DETAILS:

• Two-meeting study led by Tim Swinglehurst live on Zoom
• Tuesday 3 & 10 November, 6.00-8.00 pm (UK time)
• £80 for two meetings

REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. We can’t promise to help, but please email us at litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a study.