I already knew pretty well the origin of the
Tennysonian line in English poetry; Wordsworth, and Keats, and Shelley; and I did not come to Tennyson's worship a sudden convert, but my devotion to him was none the less complete and exclusive.
She had never been tormented by womanhood, and she had lived in a dreamland of
Tennysonian poesy, dense even to the full significance of that delicate master's delicate allusions to the grossnesses that intrude upon the relations of queens and knights.
But
Tennysonians who may be members of the Plain English Society are advised to ignore these two sections and go directly to chapters 1 to 5, where an editorial Atropos has intervened with her scissors to achieve some clarity.
My reading follows this tradition, but ultimately depends on my own analysis of the poem's gendered imagery;
Tennysonians may want to note that I ignore the final Christmas when I divide the poem into three, rather than four phases.
While the next two pieces were not part of Beetz's plan,
Tennysonians may wish to know or be reminded of Helen A.
It was almost a fever, as Dixon [Morris' good friend at Oxford] recalled it: 'All reading men were Tennysonians; all sets of reading men talked poetry.
This rhyme scheme is common enough in Victorian poetry, as it most notably appears in In Memoriam; however, Morris rhymes all other quatrains in The Defence with an abab scheme, setting "Golden Wings" apart with its particularly Tennysonian style.
In fact, Billone opens by provocatively suggesting that "if they had only met earlier, Elizabeth Barrett might well have married Alfred Tennyson," documenting "Barrett's longstanding passion for Tennyson as a man and as a poet" despite her sharp reaction to critical "accusations" about supposed "
Tennysonians" in her poems (pp.
The two eminent
Tennysonians I consulted, Herbert Tucker and Christopher Ricks, both doubted whether Tennyson would have said such a thing and thought the quotation might be spurious; but the quotation rings true to me, and this essay will suggest that the statement, whether or not Tennyson ever made it, expresses something essential about him.
see In Memoriam CXXI-of long established
Tennysonians (Peltason, Shaw).
Probably only
Tennysonians know a group of his poems that may loosely be called verse epistles, and as less than a
Tennysonian I discovered them myself fairly recently.
Supporters of his poetry were dubbed "
Tennysonians," (10) his appointment as Victoria's laureate meant that his name carried the impressive weight of the Establishment at large, and the poetry to which he gave his name was guaranteed a degree of commercial success.