Customer Reviews:
 DIVERS TONES August 10, 2006
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
This is a critical edition with a vengeance. By page-count, the 3000-line poem occupies about 100 pages while the critical essays at the back take up about 150, and there is a preface as well. Whether this preface is from the pen of the editor Erik Gray or is by the previous Norton editor Robert H Ross I'm not fully clear, but I don't suppose it matters. For present purposes I am considering this introduction together with the appended essays.
The great and good of lit crit are out in force here. There is Andrew Bradley, there is T S Eliot, there is Basil Willey and there is Christopher Ricks to mention only four of the twelve essayists excluding Hallam Lord Tennyson, son of the poet himself. I myself have a rather low tolerance of literary criticism, much of which candidly seems to me neither here nor there, indeed at times a bit of a self-perpetuating racket. What I look for in it is genuine illumination, and I flogged through the contributions here dutifully if listlessly in search of that. Failing illumination I will settle for good sense, and the main instances of that here are two remarks of the poet's own, to the effect that this is a poem not a treatise, poetry not philosophy or biography. Poetry, said Housman, is 'a tone of voice, a way of saying things'. Earnest analysis of the religious and agnostic elements in the poet's mind is not literary criticism at all, but biography. It is using the poem to illustrate the poet. When this is extended into the further question, as Eliot once allowed himself to extend it, of the relative merits of firm Christian faith vis-a-vis agnosticism, it is simply extraneous philosophy and nothing to do with Tennyson or with his poem at all.
Roughly speaking, the more recent critics keep this basic point in mind better than the earlier do, although often alluding to one another as they go along. The quality of the various contributions does not of course depend on the extent to which they are literary criticism in the proper sense. I genuinely do find illumination here and there along the way, mainly but not entirely in the pieces that seem most relevant to the poem. I found T S Eliot very helpful in his contribution on the dry and academic-seeming issue of the versification, because to me this is not dry but accounts for the extraordinary effectiveness of this great poem to a major extent. To be able to keep a poem of 3000 short tetrameter lines going in their monotonous rhyme-scheme without fatiguing the ear is a phenomenal achievement, and I'm not sure which other English poet could have matched it. Swinburne's anapaests usually have me exhausted after a page and a half, but I can read In Memoriam from end to end at one sitting and finish up not only fresh but elated at its sheer skill and adroitness. On the other hand, Bradley hacks away at the 'structure' of the poem with a determination that leaves me cold. To me, In Memoriam has shape but not structure, in the way a cloud-mass has that. The poet's musings drift through his successive moods as the random thoughts occur to him: Bradley's pedantry would be better suited to some manual.
Perhaps the best essay, at least in the sense of covering the most ground, is by Ricks. However one that is particularly interesting is by Jeff Nunokawa, exploring possible homoerotic elements in the expression. He is very nimble-footed in his approach, wisely not over-committing himself and of course understanding clearly that some of the more amorous-sounding expressions are largely literary convention with a pedigree going back millennia. Tennyson's poetry, to me, doesn't usually convey much erotic impression of any kind, and I sense something else entirely here. What I sense is mental and emotional liberation - after his ghastly upbringing I suspect that Tennyson found in Hallam a window into a better and more beautiful world, and that eroticism may have had very little to do with it. Another aspect that needs and receives consideration from the essayists is the epilogue to the poem, and here again I wonder whether something has been missed. This epilogue is completely at variance with the rest of the great poem in tone and sentiment, and attempts to link it with the frequent expressions of aspiration to a better world earlier in the work, while fair up to a point, seem to me to miss the main point. Go back to old Chaucer and the epilogue to his own great Troilus and Criseyde. There also the poet goes off at a tangent, and I think for the same reason. There is an abstract aspect to poetry just as there is to music, and the soul of literature itself finally trumps all the mundane considerations of beliefs, passions, theories and personal relationships.
I don't suppose I would dare award this production less than the highest rating, but I wouldn't be right to either. My own reservations are mainly subjective, and what does not convince me often has for others the aspect of great and prevalent truth. As a passionate lover of the great English language and its incomparable literature I shunned like the pestilence academic courses in `English'. That is precisely the market this edition is aimed at, it has everything and everyone it should have basically, and the 100 pages of the book that matter to me are beyond the reach of all of them.
Greatest Narrative Poem since Paradise Lost October 4, 2005
5 out of 8 found this review helpful
Yes, I mean it.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) was definately the greatest poet of the Victorian Age, and in my opinion the greatest English poet of the nineteenth century.
This wonderful Norton Critical Edition presents his masterpiece, the great poetical work which made him poet laureate when it was published in 1850.
In this great work, it is Tennyson analysing his grief over the sudden loss of his friend from Cambridge University, Arthur Hallam, who died of a stroke in 1833. Later that year, Tennyson began his greatest masterpiece.
Definately get this version, if you like it, check out Tennyson's other great masterpiece, The Idylls of the King (1859-1885).
 He Was Too Young To Die. September 21, 2005
3 out of 15 found this review helpful
Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote:
"Forgive my grief for one removed,
Thy creature, whom I found so fair.
I trust he lives in thee, and there
I find him worthier to be loved.
Forgive these wild and wandering cries,
Confusions of a wasted youth;
Forgive them where they fail in truth,
And in thy wisdom make me wise."
Zachary writes, "Life without Tristan is like the dark side of the moon. It's been eighteen weeks since I've seen him -- can't think of the last time I hugged him or told him I loved him or was proud of him. All I know is that I failed him, or he'd still be alife if I'd protected him more. This is not a rational thing, I realize, but it's how I honestly feel. I'm editing some of Tristan's poetry. He was more creative and much smarter than me."
"The lesser griefs that may be said,
That breathe a thousand tender vows,
Are but as servants in a house
Where lies the master newly dead;
Who speak their feeling as it is,
And weep the fulness from the mind:
`It will be hard,' they say, `to find
Another service such as this.'
My lighter moods are like to these,
That out of words a comfort win;
But there are other griefs within,
And tears that at their fountain freeze;
For by the hearth the children sit
Cold in that atmosphere of Death,
And scarce endure to draw the breath,
Or like to noiseless phantoms flit:
But open converse is there none,
So much the vital spirits sink
To see the vacant chair, and think,
`How good! how kind! and he is gone.'
"I still suffer enormously -- it's actually worse now, because the shock and numbness are wearing off." This is a tribute using A. Lord Tennyson's poem in memory of a son by my son.
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