Poe and Tennyson
Author(s): Gerhard J. Joseph
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Source: PMLA, Vol. 88, No. 3 (May, 1973), pp. 418-428
Published by: Modern Language Association
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GERHARD J. JOSEPH
Poe and Tennyson
the persistent French homage to
Edgar Allan Poe has made it impossible
for a twentieth-centuryaudience to underestimate his importance for the evolution of the
Symbolistes,the extent to which he was completely
a writer of his time, a characteristicvessel of earlynineteenth-century literary attitudes, has been a
comparatively recent emphasis among his readers.
As late as 1926 Edmund Wilson found it necessary
to argue that far from being an interesting "freak"
who had little in common with his contemporaries,
Poe was a "thorough Romantic" who might most
readily be understood as belonging to the mainstream of the Western movement. In Wilson's
summary catalog Poe's "nightmarish vein of
fantasy is very much like that of Coleridge; his
poetry in its earlierphase derives from Shelley and
Keats; his 'dream fugues' resemble De Quincey's
and his 'prose poems,' Maurice de Guerin's. His
themes-which, as Baudelaire says, are concerned
with 'the exception in the moral order'-are in the
tradition of Chateaubriandand Byron, and of the
romantic movement generally.''1 While Poe's
debts to the European tradition, especially to his
critical mentor Coleridge, have of late been explored in some detail,2no study has as yet, except
in passing, juxtaposed Poe with his single favorite
contemporary (both poets were born in 1809),
with, indeed, the writer he once called "the greatest
[poet] that ever lived"3-Alfred Tennyson.
That the work of the two has never been thoroughly compared seems doubly strange when one
considers Tennyson's reciprocal, if less extravagant, admiration of Poe. "Edgar Poe," Tennyson
felt, "is (taking his poetry and his prose together)
the most original American genius."4 Although
throughout his life Tennyson held a severe distaste for America and all its works, he is reputed
to have said later on that the only thing he ever
wanted to see in this country was Poe's grave.5In
response to the request that he compose a oneline epitaph for Poe's monument in Westminster
Churchyard in Baltimore, Tennyson answered,
WHILE
"How can so strange and so fine a genius, and so
sad a life, be exprest and comprest in one line?"
(Memoir, II, 293). The tribute he finally did send
was generous enough:
Fate that once deniedhim,
And envy that once decriedhim,
And malicethat beliedhim,
Now cenotaphhis fame.6
When the two are linked at all it is usually in
Poe studies and with respect to the parochial
question of whether Poe did or did not plagiarize
from the poetry of Tennyson. At this late date the
plagiarism charges-the most notorious of which
was advanced in an anonymous London Foreign
Quarterly Review article in 1844, bandied about
in the course of Poe's savagejournalistic duels with
Lewis Gaylord Clark, and firmly rejected by Poe
in letters to James Russell Lowell7 seem a minor
enough affair in a life filled with literary skirmishes of the most acrimonious sort. More recently, several articles on Tennyson, while trying
to assess his role in the development of literary
modernism, have briefly mentioned Poe's and
Tennyson's correlative impact (though the former's is more traditionally received) upon the
Symbolistes.8It is indeed only the French themselves-Verlaine, Baudelaire, and Mallarmewho have sensed with any degree of adequacy the
spiritual kinship of Tennyson and Poe. Mallarme,
for instance, interrupted his translations of Poe
with a "prose poem" version of "Mariana," and
rounded out his funeral elegy for Tennyson
("Tennyson vu d'ici") with a translation of Poe's
ringing endorsement in "The Poetic Principle" of
Tennyson as "the noblest poet that ever lived"
("l'ame poetique la plus noble, qui jamais vecut").
Baudelaire, noting the "quasi-fraternal admiration" of the two, contrasted the genius of Poe,
"dream-like in its depth and sheen, crystal-like in
its mystery and its perfection," with "the smooth,
harmonious, distinguished melancholy of Tennyson."9 But an elaboration upon the French pairing
of the writers would constitute a rather oblique
418
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GerhardJ. Joseph
approach to their similarities;it is Poe's own acute
appreciation of Tennyson that provides the clearest indication of a tonal and thematic convergence
that only the French were capable of perceiving.
419
music: compared to the mastery of a Tennyson
who prided himself upon being able to discriminate subtly among the sound qualities of every
English word except "scissors," Poe's mellifluous
regularity is a thing of the metronome. What
Poe is often cited as the first American author
transcends such differences is the insistence in
to welcome Tennyson. While this is not in fact
Poe's work, and in his interpretationof Tennyson's
the case, no American reception matched Poe's in
("he seems to see with his ear," xvI, 30), upon the
its enthusiasm or staying power (Eidson, pp.
subservience of thought to music. By coming at
et
Whenever
Poe
alludes
to
the early Tennyson through Poe's relentlessly
3-56,
passim).
is
with
a
it
that
"musical" reading of him, we realize more clearly
panegyrical energy
Tennyson
reaches for superlatives: Tennyson is "the most
than we otherwise might the extent to which
ever
of
that
"the
lived,
greatest poets";
pure" poet
Tennyson prepared for esthetic developments
the critical neglect in America of Tennyson's
later in the century-for the determined melepoeiasis of Swinburne, the dreamlike airiness of the
"magnificent genius" is "one of the worst sins
for which the country has to answer."'10
And so on,
Pre-Raphaelites, the Pateresque doctrine that all
with scarcely interrupted proselytizing, until the
art constantly aspires to the condition of music.
end of Poe's life. Granted that Poe's critical
We understand why a Mallarme, who in striving
veer
to
somewhat
thruststended
for a poesie pure drew more upon the music of
recklesslybetween
and
words and their vague associations than upon
slashing attack
disproportionate praise, the
which
he
with
celebrated Tennyson's
their conventional meanings, would have admired
frequency
work in absolute terms suggests that Tennyson
Tennyson as well as Poe.
For Poe and the early Tennyson, the cultivation
was for him a poet of special relevance and usefulof
ness.
exquisite tonalities is not an end in itself but
a strategy to facilitate the ascent toward
rather
most
The quality that initially and
obviously
to
link
their
is
an
extratempts the reader
poetry
heavenly Beauty. Though neither adapts the
of Plato into his work as thoroughly as
esthetics
If
ordinary delight in sound for its own sake. each
does
a
is, in Tennyson's early description of himself,
Shelley, a fervent philosophical idealism lies
the surface of both. Poe thus considbelow
"lord of the five senses" (Memoir,I, 501), the sense
just
ered
of sound is the one most handsomely, even
Tennyson among the greatest poets that ever
because of his unique "etherisity,"his unsurlived
exaggeratedly, developed in both poets. The
versatile aural patterns in Tennyson's early
passed "purity of spirit."'2Diaphanous loveliness
of the finest texture, freed from any cloying pasfeminine portraits, the riding trochees of "Lockssion or gross materiality-that is the quality in
ley Hall," the plangent cadences of "The LotosEaters" and "Oenone"-it is such rhythms that
Tennyson's best work which Poe singled out and
one hears, despite Poe's denials, echoing through
attempted to emulate. "Oenone," he felt, "exalts
the soul not into passion, but into a conception of
his poetry and through that of his friend, Thomas
Holley Chivers. Poe's "Lenore" and "Annabel
pure beauty, which in its elevation-its calm and
intense rapture-has in it a foreshadowing of the
Lee," as well as the "Isadore" of Chivers, unfuture and spiritual life, and as far transcends
doubtedly owe even more than a kinship of name
to Tennyson's "moonshine maidens" (in John
earthly passion as the holy radiance of the sun
does the glimmering and feeble phosphorescence
Wilson Croker's denigrating phrase), the illusive
of the glow-worm." One must, that is, distinguish
and airy Eleanores, Orianas, and Lilians of Tennybetween a poetry like that of Byron which stimuson's early keepsake portraits; the insistent
lates the passions and that finer sort whose cultitrochees of, say, "The Raven" probably contain
vation of the "sentiment of the beautiful" achieves
resonances of "Locksley Hall." On his side,
an "ideality" that is not of this earth (xi, 255-56).
Tennyson thought Poe "not unworthy to stand
beside Catullus, the most melodious of the Latins,
Poe, of course, found the quest for a sublime
and Heine, the most tuneful of the Germans.""1 Beauty exemplifiedby poets other than Tennyson;
his assertion in "The Poetic Principle" that the
There is of course a differencein the aural sophistication with which the two poets patterned their
"pleasurableelevation, or excitement, of the soul"
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Poe and Tennyson
420
rather than a search for Truth constitutes true
poetic sentiment (xiv, 275) has various Romantic
sources and parallels. My point is that on the evidence of Poe's recurring hyperbolic praise of
Tennyson, it would appear that he found the
locus classicus of a Romantic "fellowship with
essence" in the work of Tennyson rather than
within the earlier Romantics themselves.
Poe evolved his esthetic principles in the course
of his journeyman critical writing and summarized
them rather completely in "The Philosophy of
Composition" and "The Poetic Principle." What
he especially prized in the finest poetry was an
"indefinitiveness" that is the evidence of "true
music" (xiv, 29). The most exalted species of
composition, what Poe calls "The Rhythmical
Creation of Beauty" (xiv, 275), has as its primary
feature a relative vagueness of incident with which
the poem's emotion is associated. Because absolute Beauty is by definition unattainable, an aura
of musical indeterminacynecessarily surrounds it:
"Music is the perfection of the soul, or idea, of
poetry. The vagueness of exaltation aroused by a
sweet air (which should be strictly indefinite and
never too strongly suggestive) is precisely what we
should aim at in poetry." Furthermore, the higher
reaches of true Beauty are inevitably bathed in an
atmosphere of melancholy; in Beauty of the
rarest sort the "tone is one of sadness. Beauty of
whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears. Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all poetical
tones" (xiv, 198).
From the contemplation of such abstract ideals,
we can understand why Poe admired the practice
of the early Tennyson, the most Virgilian of the
English poets, and extrapolate a sense of what he
might have liked in the poetry of the later (for Poe
died in 1849, even before the publication of In
Memoriam). Above everything, Poe valued an
elegiac subject shrouded within a dreamlike
haze-the death of a beautiful lady was for him
"unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the
world" (xiv, 201). It is therefore no surprise to
discover Poe reserving special praise for Tennyson's poems about dying maidens, singling out
such pieces as "The Lady of Shalott" and "Mariana" which work toward a "suggestive indefinitiveness of meaning, with the view of bringing
about a definitiveness of vague and therefore of
spiritual effect" (xvi, 28). Tennyson's amorphous-
ness arises, in the first place, from a compression
and even the downright ellipsis of narrativedetail.
"Mariana" supplies but the barest of hints, and
then only to those readers who remember their
Measure for Measure, as to the occasion of the
dejected maiden's isolation; we are given no clue
at all as to the origin of the "curse" that will
descend upon the Lady of Shalott. And in "Tears,
Idle Tears," the poem that Poe reprints in "The
Poetic Principle"to show that Tennyson was "the
most ethereal- in other words, the most elevating
and the most pure" poet that the world has known
(xiv, 289), the knowledge that the tears arise from
no readily assignable cause, that they are rather
cosmic and all-pervasive lacrimae rerum, is precisely the moving discovery of the lyric's narrator.
That Poe put the highest premium upon a
melancholy diaphaneity can, of course, be
gathered not only from his celebration of that
quality in Tennyson but also from the consciously
evoked evanescence of one of his own styles.
Indeed, Poe's characterization of Tennyson's
method-the cultivation of a suggestive "indefinitiveness" in order to create a sense of vague
"definitiveness"-may well serve to describe the
technique of Poe's verse and the style of his nonratiocinative tales. In the works of both writers
physical objects are suffused with a mingled aura
of ineffable beauty and suffocating gloom; houses
and palaces and cities are built to a shadowy
music and take upon themselves deathlike associations that are articulated with lesser or greater
exactitude as they approach the condition of
allegory.
To begin with Tennyson, the technique of an
early allegorical experiment, "The Deserted
House," sets a pattern which he will follow with
finer subtlety in the "parabolic drift" (Tennyson's
description of his mode in the Idylls of the KingMemoir, II, 127) of his mature work. Four
stanzas are devoted to the "nakedness and
vacancy" of a "dark deserted house" in which
"Life and Thought" no longer dwell. The final
stanza, with its description of a "city glorious / A great and distant city" containing a "mansion
incorruptible," makes explicit the poem's conceit
of the corpse as a deserted house from which the
soul has escaped. (This figure is developed more
successfully because less allegorically in the
"Dark House" section of In Memoriam,vII, where
the empty Hallam house in London comes to
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GerhardJ. Joseph
stand in the narrator's mind for the dead Arthur.)
Tennyson was extraordinarily receptive to remote
and abandoned places that reflected the psychic
strangeness of their inhabitants-to mountain
heights and ocean floors, sheltered groves and
deserted islands lush with vegetation, dark houses
and lonely towers. The abysmal sea in which the
ancient Kraken sleeps, the Lady of Shalott's silent
isle with its gray towers and walls picturesquely
set off within a field of flowers, the blasted vale
of Ida in which Oenone mourns her loss of Paris,
the four luxuriant and ultimately prisonlike
courts that comprise the Palace of Art, the mountains whose "silent pinnacles of aged snow"
shimmerin the middle distance of Lotos-land one
might extend the list. In such Tennysonian retreats
the deliquescent mood of a speaker emerges
obliquely through the details of a dimly ominous
landscape or architecture, "a height, a broken
grange, a grove, a flower" as "The Ancient Sage"
would have it, exotically distant in time and location from the comfortable bustle of Victorian life.
Indeed, in many of his best pieces Tennyson
either concentrates solely upon the elucidation of a
spatial mood, or, if character exists, it is the expressionistic projection of a topography that the
poet has imagined or experienced.At its worst this
habit can give rise to such embarrassingbanalities
as "0 Darling Room"; at its most felicitous it
accounts for some of his finest and most characteristic lyrics. Struck, for example, by the phrase
"moated grange" in Shakespeare's Measure for
Measure, Tennyson created the epigraph "Mariana
in the moated grange," out of which arose the
poem "Mariana." "The moatedgrangewas no particular grange," he asserted, "but one which rose
to the music of Shakespeare's words.13The isolated spatial phrase gradually fills itself out in
Tennyson's mind to become the fully realized
atmosphere of Mariana's scarcely motivated distraction, a place of rusted nails and broken sheds.
The threatening landscape, the shadow of a spectral poplar tree aslant Mariana's bed at night as
the wind rustles the curtains, becomes the apt
measure of her solitude and muted hysteria. With
mice shrieking in the wall and imagined footsteps
on the upper floor, her dwelling is a much more
circumstantially rendered one than its equivalent
in "The Deserted House." In a sequel "Mariana
in the South," there is, as Arthur Hallam has described, an even "greaterlingering on the outward
421
circumstance, and a less palpable transition of the
poet into Mariana's feelings, than was the case"
in "Mariana" (from a Hallam letter, quoted in
Memoir, I, 501).
The sheer accumulation of such outward circumstance, the clutter of ominous detail upon
detail, becomes the outward sign of a psychic
weariness; or the relentlessly sensuous character
of that detail provides a hallucinatory intimation
of a writhing, indifferentlyfecund universe. In the
early fragment "Memory (Ay me!)," "The Hesperides," and "The Kraken," for instance, a
sensuous landscape continually verges upon
passing into a destructively prolix, humanly sensual one. The botanical multitudinousness, the
spawning in "The Kraken" of "unnumberedand
enormous polypi" in the "sickly light" of the
ocean floor betrays an all but overwhelming
nausea. As Tennyson told his son, "The lavish
profusion ... in the natural world appals me,
from the growths of the tropical forest to the
capacity of men to multiply, the torrent of babies.
I can almost understand some of the Gnostic
heresies" (Memoir, I, 314). Tennyson's affinitiesto
the world of pure spirit frequently assume this
shrinking form, a terror at the ease with which
vegetative and inorganic life weeds, insects, and
houses-take on a morally ambiguous animation
and a menacing sentience. The ethereal loveliness
and gossamer vagueness of his best work is the
positive expression of this quasi-gnosticstrain that
Poe understood so well because he was driven by
a similar impulse.
Poe's "The Haunted Palace," first published in
N. C. Brooks's American Museum of Literature
and the Arts for April 1839, has such structural
and metaphorical resemblances to Tennyson's
"The Deserted House" of 1830 that the work was
isolated by Poe's enemies as an outstanding example of his plagiarism of Tennyson (Eidson, p. 23).
Tennyson develops the figure of a deserted house
as a dead body; Poe allegorizes his dwelling, in
only a slightly more veiled way, into an insane
mind. While the metaphorical strategies of the two
poems are certainly similar, the trope of the body
as a house within which the soul dwells for a short
time is so ancient that there is no reason to believe
it could not have occurred to the two poets independently. (And surely Poe's work even if he
was following Tennyson-is a superior, less
merely conventional achievement.) Far more
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422
Poe andTennyson
interesting for my purposes than the plagiarism
issue is the evidence that the congruence between
the poems gives of a profound thematic similarity
in the two writers-the manner in which their
parallel treatment of deserted houses points to
divided feelings toward the human body and the
material world. On the other hand, Tennyson and
Poe are thoroughgoing devotees of the exotically
beautiful; as lords of the five senses they contemplate with a sensuous delight the dark houses
of this murky world as emblems of universal
mystery, even if their absorption be leavened in the
case of the former with an elegiac melancholy and
of the latter with nightmarishterror. On the other
hand, both writers seem repelled by the corrupt
materiality of this world, its hypertrophied
houses and shadowy cities being the appropriate
enclosures for its paralyzed inhabitants.
The pattern laid out by "The Haunted Palace"
and the paradigmatic "Fall of the House of Usher"
into which the lyric was eventually set confirms
such a psychospiritual connection between
Tennyson and Poe. The first four stanzas of the
poem describe the healthy body as a "stately
palace" in the "monarch Thought's dominion."
Through "two luminous windows" (the eyes)
spirits can be seen "moving musically, / To a
lute's well tuned law." In stanzas 5 and 6 the
occupation of Thought's mansion by "evil
things, in robes of sorrow" has blasted the lute's
harmony with a "discordant melody" that the
story itself shows to be madness, whether of
Roderick Usher or of the narrator (if they are not
the same kind of "doubles" that Poe brings
together in "William Wilson"). The poem, that
is, offers a compressed version of the fate of
Usher, in whose degeneration the collapse of
person, family, and house are one. The barely
perceptible fissure, which descends from the roof
of the building through its wall until it is lost in
the black tarn at its foot, is the division in Usher's
own neurasthenic, inbred character. And when
the ultimate destruction of Usher occurs, brought
on presumably by his incestuous love of Madeline,
it is schematically appropriate that the house
itself, which both poem and story have equated
with Usher's body, split along the fissure before
being swallowed up in the waters of the tarn. Poe
is thus even more insistent than Tennyson upon
the emblematic aptness of his settings, upon the
precise psychospiritual significance of his material
architecture. To provide one further example, in
"William Wilson" the schizophrenia of the dissolute narrator and his alter ego of a conscience
is symbolically represented by the schoolhouse in
which the characters first meet. Its description
conveys how fully the story parabolizes the workings of a single tortuously divided mind (a subject
Tennyson handled even more allegorically in
"The Two Voices"):
But the house! how quaintan old buildingwas this!to me how veritablya palace of enchantment!There
was really no end to its windings-to its incomprehensible subdivisions.It was difficult,at any given
time, to say with certaintyupon which of its two
storiesone happenedto be. From each room to every
other therewere sure to be found three or four steps
eitherin ascent or descent.Then the lateralbranches
were innumerable-inconceivable-and so returning
in upon themselves,that our most exact ideas in regardto the whole mansionwerenot veryfar different
from those with whichwe ponderedupon infinity.
(iII, 303)
Poe's architectural structures-one could add
to the houses already described the palace in "The
Assignation," Prospero's imperial suite in "The
Masque of Red Death," the bridal chamber in
"Ligeia," or the madhouse in "The System of Dr.
Tarr and Professor Fether"-seem suffocatingly
oppressive; they often refer, with more and less
allegorical precision and absoluteness of identification, to the soul's being buried alive within the
body or, as Allen Tate would have it, to "the
survival of the soul in a dead body."14And the
desolation at such emotional enchantment and
psychic abandonment is precisely one of Tennyson's recurring subjects as well. The dead body
containing the living soul of M. Valdemar, the
entombed Fortunato in "The Cask of Amontillado," the walled-up cat (the conscience of the
murderer) in "The Black Cat," Madeline Usher
sealed alive within the brilliantly lit underground
room whose picture hangs on Roderick's wallthese entombments have their equivalents in the
twi-light entrapments of Tennyson's characteristic figures. To be sure, as Mariana moated within
her grange, the mariners of Ulysses drugged into
the quiescence of Lotos-land, the Lady of Shalott
and Sleeping Beauty isolated within their respective enchantments, Merlin immured within a tree
by Vivien, and Tithonus caught forever at the
Eastern edge of the world suggest, Tennyson's
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GerhardJ. Joseph
symbolic claustral states enclose a muted, exquisitely patterned melancholia that is peculiarly
his. Only rarely, as when the raving narrator of
"Maud" believes himself buried alive beneath a
street as horses' hoofs and a stream of passing
feet pound a yard above his head, do such states in
Tennyson's work encompass some of the more
sensational, luridly gothic effects of Poe.
But despite such tonal differences Poe and
Tennyson share equivocal feelings about the psychic isolation they portray. The entombment of
soul within the world's deserted houses is at once
morally suspect and esthetically appealing. Poe's
constant theme may indeed be what Baudelaire
has declared it to be-the monstrous "exception
in the moral order"; but as Richard Wilbur has
shown, the entrance into the winding and circular
"houses" (as well as the undertaking of "seavoyages") in his stories representthe imagination's
movement through the various stages of dream, in
which artistic creation becomes possible; Poe's
heroes, soul images of the poet, actually woo a
deathlike isolation as they move from wakefulness
into reverie, from reverie into the hypnagogic
state, and from the hypnagogic state into deep
dream.15While he is rarely didactic about the matter, his tales thus describe the moral pricehallucination, psychic abandonment, nightmarish
division of personality-to be paid for the artist's
entrance into his houses and sea voyages of dream.
Tennyson shares with Poe the legacy of a Keatsian Romanticism in their mutual fascination with
the varieties of dream. Tennyson speaks of "a kind
of waking trance" that he periodically knew, a
mystical state in which "as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the
individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade
away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the
surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest,
utterly beyond words" (Memoir, I, 320). From the
early "The Mystic" and "Timbuctoo" through the
trance-visionin which Arthur Hallam climactically
appears to the speaker of In Memoriam (xcv) to
the late "Merlin and the Gleam" his poetry returns
to instances of such loss of personality within
transcendent states of wonder. As for more conventional dream journeys, Tennyson's earliest
work suggests the appeal for him of their languorous toils. In an essay on Tennyson (xII, 181),
Poe singled out for special praise the description
423
from "A Dream of Fair Women" of the descent
into the vortex of sleep:
All those sharp fancies, by down-lapsingthought
Streamed onward, lost their edges, and did
creep
Rolled on each other, rounded, smoothed, and
brought
Into the gulfs of sleep.(11.49-52)
Like Poe, Tennyson accepts the dream state,
or alternatively the operation of "memory" (see
the early "Memory [Memory! dear enchanter],"
"Ode to Memory," and "Memory [Ay me!]!"),
as practically identical with the workings of the
creative imagination. In the Prologue to "The
Day Dream," for instance, the poetic act is directly
equated with dream, a luxuriant "brooding warm"
that stimulates the memory of Sleeping Beauty, a
"reflex of a legend past" that settles loosely into
its esthetic form within the narrator's mind as he
enters into reverie. In much of Tennyson's early
work, movements into "thickets" of a dreamlike
past and "groves" of memory-the "deep shades"
of "Sense and Conscience," the seahall in "The
Merman" and "The Mermaid," the "gardenbowers and grots" the dreamerenters at the end of
his sea journey in "Recollections of the Arabian
Nights"-are symbolic enclosures for creative
play, both erotic and esthetic, space surrounded
(as in Poe) by natural barriers against a hostile
worldliness and rationalism. The allegorical grove
of "The Poet's Mind," hedged about by laurel
shrubs (the poet's creative powers), is "holy
ground" that must be protected against the invasion of the "Dark-browed sophist" who would
foul it with sin; the golden apple tree standing
upon a shielded slope in "The Hesperides," the
veiled symbol of the poetic imagination, must be
guarded warily lest Heracles, the intruder from
the East, plunder the sacred fruit. The quiescence
of a Western dreamworld cut off from quotidian
Victorian responsibilities always appealed to one
side of Tennyson's mind: even though the "fated
fairy prince" must shatter the "perfect form in
perfect rest" of Sleeping Beauty, that awakening
in "The Day-Dream" is surely a mixed blessing,
a return to "Care and Pleasure, Hope and Pain."
And "The Lotos-Eaters" depicts most famously of
all the attractiveness for Tennyson of a drugged
lassitude within an enisled oblivion.
But while some of Tennyson's artist figures are
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424
Poe and Tennyson
content within and indeed seek out their imaginative redoubts, others attempt to break out of their
dream houses, attractive as they may be, into the
daylight of Victorian social reality. As meaningful
as he found the mystical trance, Tennyson could
also appreciate its disastrous effects: the "weird
seizures" of the hypersensitive Prince in The
Princess visit him in times of crisis with the feeling
that everything he sees is but the "shadow of a
dream"; his is the curse of an enfeebled sensibility
in a world requiring strenuous action. Such Poelike confusion of shadow and substance can be
deadly, as the Lady of Shalott had illustrated even
earlier in Tennyson's work as, "half sick of shadows," she had tried to burst her circumscribed
dream tower to enter into a human love.
But perhaps the "dream-house" most reminiscent of Poe in all of Tennyson is the Palace of Art,
the splendid pleasure palace that the poet's soul,
a "Lord of the senses five," has had built for itself.
Eventually, the soul's haughty insistence upon
solitude transforms the allegorical dwelling into a
garish "haunted house," much like those within
which the neurasthenic egoists of "The Fall of
the House of Usher," "Berenice," and "Ligeia"
suffer their hallucinatory terrors:
But in darkcornersof her palacestood
Uncertainshapes;and unawares
On white-eyedphantasmsweepingtears of blood,
And horriblenightmares,
And hollow shadesenclosingheartsof flame,
And, with dim frettedforeheadsall,
On corpsesthree-monthsold at noon she came,
That stood againstthe wall.
A spot of dull stagnation,withoutlight
Or powerof movement,seemedmy soul,
'Mid onward-slopingmotionsinfinite
Makingfor one sure goal.
Back on herselfher serpentpridehad curled.
'No voice,'she shriekedin that lone hall,
'No voice breaksthroughthe stillnessof this world:
One deep, deep silenceall!'
*''''
Shut up as in a crumblingtomb, girt round
With blacknessas a solid wall,
Far off she seemedto hearthe dully sound
of humanfootstepsfall.
(11.237-76)
The stentorian abhorrence with wrhich in the
poem's closing lines the soul deserts the "crumbling tomb" of art for the spacious Victorian
valley and its "human footsteps" suggests a basic
difference between Tennyson and Poe. Whereas
Poe describes the dream voyages of such protagonists as Arthur Gordon Pym with relative moral
detachment, indulging in what he called the
"heresy of The Didactic" (xiv, 271) only obliquely,
Tennyson becomes increasingly cautionary as he
grows to distrust the circumscribeddream groves
of his youth and the esthetic impulses that flourish
therein. "The Palace of Art" is a notorious
enough watershed in the Tennysonian embrace of
the didactic, even if the overabundanceof sensuous
detail the speaker lavishes upon the palace tends
to undermine the poem's morally energetic conclusion. Certainly, the vestigial self-assertion of
the disinterestedly esthetic and sensuous in the
later Tennyson has often been underestimated.
But even if Tennyson rejects, however ambiguously, the self-entombment of a Poe-like hyperesthetic soul in "The Palace of Art," he hardly
turns away from the essential impulse of that soul,
a passionate eros toward what Poe called "etherisity," the condition of Poe's angel Israfel. Tennyson's later poetry treats with varying degrees of
sympathy questers who attempt in either a classical or Christian context the earthly transcendence
first allegorized in "The Deserted House"-the
flight from the limitations of fleshly mortality
toward a spiritual, esthetic, or intellectual purity.
A pilgrim toward the Spiritual City such as Sir
Galahad would
muse on joy that will not cease,
Pure spacesclothedin living beams,
Purelilies of eternalpeace,
Whose odourshauntmy dreams;
And, strickenby an angel'shand,
This mortalarmourthat I wear,
This weightand size, this heartand eyes,
Are touched,are turnedto finestair.
("SirGalahad,"11.65-72)
The female counterpart of Sir Galahad is the nun
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"The Holy Grail" where as "brother" and
"sister" they cooperate in Galahad's translation
into the Spiritual City.) Despising her corrupt
fleshly state she longs for a "spirit pure and clear"
with which to meet her God as quickly as possible.
While "The Holy Grail" demonstrates for once
the fulfillment of such sublime yearnings, Tenny-
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GerhardJ. Joseph
son-again like Poe-usually concentrates upon
the terrible human price to be paid for them. The
dramatic monologues on classical subjects, especially, illustrate how a mortal's ascent toward the
divine invites either the death of the hero or, more
typically, the hypertrophied Death in Life (first
"named" at the conclusion of "Tears, Idle Tears")
that Poe explored as well:16Tithonus, having been
granted immortality by the goddess Eos, is cursed
as a concomitant of that gift to wither eternally in
the "ever silent spaces" of the East. Tiresias'
intellectual surge toward godhead brings down
upon him the blinding vengeance of Pallas Athene.
Immured within their attempted self-apotheosis,
such characters are frozen at the very boundary
of their mortality, victims of what Alien Tate in
his essays on Poe has called "angelism,"the paralysis of feeling, will, and intellect resulting from the
thrust of these faculties beyond the scale of
human action. In the Death in Life of a Tithonus
or Tiresias, Tennyson provides a classical frame
for the hypertrophy that Tate sees as the characteristic disease of the Poe hero-"the exhaustion
offorce as a consequenceof his intellectual liberationfrom the sensible world."17Though the overall
tone of the work is quite foreign to the spirit of
Poe, perhaps the angelism of intellect most reminiscent of him is depicted in "Lucretius," where
the Roman philosopher-poet ranges in Israfel-like
splendor far beyond earthly bounds, questing for
the serenity of pure reason. In his preference for
an abstract "Passionless bride, divine Tranquillity" he both moves beyond his merely human
wife, Lucilla, and denies the existence of an erotic
Venus. Like Poe's Platonizing overreachers,those
of Tennyson attempt to possess utterly a purity
of intellect or spirit and to liberate themselves
totally from the sensuous and sensual vessels in
which these abstractions must necessarily present
themselves to the human imagination. When this
happens the natural world, which the hero presumes to overleap in his pursuit of divine essence,
pulls him back through the force of a destructive
woman; or the supernatural, guarding its prerogative of immortality, takes its revenge in the
guise of a vindictive goddess. In "Lucretius" a
mortal wife and an outraged goddess actually
combine to punish the audacity of the questing
hero. The magic philter his wife gives Lucretius
to "lead an errant passion home" releases the
cloyingly erotic nightmares in which the Venus he
425
has slighted destroys his sanity.
If the fate of Lucretius most sensationally illustrates the ravages of an intellectual angelism, the
Lancelot of the Idylls of the King embodies in his
epic sufferings the comparable destructive powers
of an angelism of the spirit. Lancelot had devoted
himself to Guinevere precisely because, as the wife
of a liege lord to whom he had sworn a "deathless
vow" of loyalty, her physical inaccessibility would
make possible the absolute spiritual purity that
he sought through her as an analogue to God.18
Intoxicated by visions of heavenly flight, he had
worshiptno unmarriedgirl
But the greatQueenherself,fought in her name,
Swareby her-vows like theirs,that high in heaven
Love most, but neithermarry,nor are given
In marriage,angels of our Lord'sreport.
("Merlinand Vivien,"11.12-16)
And Lancelot is not alone, for other knights,
wishing to follow him, their model in all things,
imitate his deification of an untouchable woman
(11. 21-27). The adultery with Guinevere that
follows and the moral poison that it spreads
through all of Camelot are the revenge of the
senses-again taking the form of a woman-upon
those who crave a supersensible essence. (Andre
Malraux makes the point well in Man's Fate: "he
who seeks the absolute with . . . uncompromising
zeal can find it only in sensation.") In Guinevere's
refusal of apotheosis, she makes Lancelot as well
sit down to the sensual feast of this life; in her
insistence upon remaining a flesh-and-blood
woman, a "garden rose," rather than becoming
the "spiritual lily" into which Lancelot tries to
crystallize her ("Balin and Balan," 11.235-75), we
see the most fully elaborated emergence of the
Tennysonian "fatal woman," the carnal subverter
of man's flight heavenward.
Tate's generalization about characters in Poe
who self-destructively etherealize their womenRoderick Usher, the husband of Ligeia, the lover
of Berenice, the mourner for the dead ladies in
the poetry-thus applies to Lancelot and other
Tennysonian figures as well: "if a writer ambiguously exalts the 'spirit' over the 'body,' and the
spirit must live wholly upon another spirit, some
version of the vampire legend is likely to issue as
the symbolic situation" ("Our Cousin, Mr. Poe,"
p. 88). Berenice, Ligeia, Madeline Usher, and
Morella tend to be more supernaturallyvampiric,
Poe's obsessive instances of the prevalent nine-
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426
Poe and Tennyson
teenth-century Belle Dame sans Merci, than
Tennyson's disguised equivalents. Perhaps only
the serpentine Vivien whose venom saps the intellectual integrity of Tennyson's Merlin approaches
the Grand Guignol luridness of Poe's devouring
ladies. But in the Amoret of The Devil and the
Lady; in Eleanore, the Lady Clara Vere de Vere,
Ettarre, and Guinevere; in such ruthless avengers
as the Pallas Athene of "Tiresias" and the Venus
of "Lucretius," we have only slightly less garish
and scarcely less deadly instances of the type. In
Poe such vampirism is the heroine's response to
a male egoism which attempts to extinguish her
will, to move beyond the beloved's body and
possess her as pure spirit; but some of Poe's
women-Ligeia and Morella, at any rate-are as
much monsters of the will and intellect as the men
they come back from the grave to possess. In
Tennyson the destructive female principle always
asserts itself in retaliation either from "below" as
fatal woman or from "above" as fatal goddess
for a male intellectual or spiritual thrust beyond
legitimate human aspiration.
It might be wise, in conclusion, to allow for some
exaggeration in the foregoing comparison. It is
perhaps unnecessary to describe all the ways in
which Tennyson and Poe are unlike each other,
but an admission of one or two major divergencies may supply a reasonable perspective from
which to judge their similarities.
In their relationship to their respective audiences
the two writerscould not have been more different.
Where Poe spent the better part of his difficult life
as a pariah of American letters, Tennyson occupied, certainly after the publication of In Memoriam, the exact literary center of mid-Victorian
England. "No age of poetry," George Saintsbury
has rightfully observed, "can be called the age of
one man as the later Nineteenth Century is, with
us, the Age of Tennyson."19 Their professional
careers are, furthermore, difficult to compare
because of Poe's death in 1849 his praise that I
have cited was confined to the relatively disinterested lyricism of Tennyson, the youthful melancholiac. The increasingly insistent moralism of the
Victorian Laureate-precisely in such cautionary
works as "Lucretius" and the Idylls of the Kingmight well have been totally uncongenial to a Poe
who continually inveighed against the search for
Truth rather than Beauty. And certainly Tenny-
son's attempt after 1842, at the behest of his
critics, to write long narrative poems when his
gift was essentially a lyrical one might also have
gone against the esthetic grain of Poe, who in
"The Poetic Principle" insisted that "unity of effect" was possible only in a short poem, that a long
poem was "simply a flat contradiction in terms"
(xiv, 266). John Eidson may indeed be right when
he remarks that Poe, had he lived, might never
have liked anything of Tennyson's as well as he
had the Poems of 1842 or the songs from The
Princess (Eidson, p. 88).
Nevertheless, the thematic affinities of the two
writers are so striking that, it seems to me, Poe
would have maintained an essential sympathy
even for the later Tennyson. The "vagueness"and
"strangeness" that Poe admired in the early
Tennyson and that he cultivated in his own work
are precisely the lyric atmospherics that become
translated into the narrative themes of intellectual
and spiritual angelism in Tennyson's later poetry.
As Tennyson reached for the sustained effects and
wider range of poetic narrative, he objectified into
the motives of characters like Lucretius, Galahad,
and Lancelot the free-floating mood of his earlier
lyrics. Some such connection exists as well between
Poe's verse and certain of his stories-though he
may be more programmatic in his cultivation of
vagueness, especially of motive, in his narrative
than is Tennyson. (The question, say, of what
precisely drives Roderick Usher, of why he buries
Madeline alive, of whether it was a deliberate act,
has perplexed many a reader.) But even Poe-to
confine ourselves to the Idylls-might have applauded the multiple, conflicting accounts of
Arthur's mysterious birth in "The Coming of
Arthur"; the magical Lady of the Lake whose
arm "clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful"
draws Excalibur into the mere once again at Arthur's death with three beautifully talismanic
flourishes; or the ubiquitous presence of the unexplained three queens who shadow Arthur
through life and accompany him upon the deathbarge to Avilion. Surely the creator of "The City
in the Sea" would have admired the conception of
Camelot itself, the misty and flickering "city
.. .
built / To music, therefore never built at all, / And
therefore built for ever," the "city of shadowy
palaces / And stately, rich in emblem and the
work / Of ancient kings who did their days in
stone" ("Gareth and Lynette," 11.272-98).
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GerhardJ. Joseph
The etherisity-to return to Poe's distinctive
word-of both writerswas in some measure a conscious literary adaptation of a Romantic quest for
infinitude. At the same time it reflected a personal,
highly idiosyncratic convergence of idealizing
temperaments that recognized the exploration of
the elegiac mode and of the vaguely beautiful as
the surest and most personal way to esthetic perfection. The angelism and the concomitant evolution of the fatal woman in Poe's stories and in
427
Tennyson's poetry grew quite naturally out of a
comparable ideality-a loose and undogmatically
held belief in the absolute primacy of the spirit and
of a beauty that was the spirit's clearest, and at the
same time most ineffable, human expression.
Herbert H. Lehman College of the City University
of New York
Bronx, New York
Notes
1 "Poe at Home and Abroad," The Shores of Light (New
York: Farrar,1952),p. 183.
2 See esp. Henry M. Belden, "Observationsand Imagination in Coleridge and Poe: A Contrast," Papers. . . in
Honor of...
Charles Frederick Johnson (Hartford: n.p.,
1928), pp. 131-75; Floyd Stovall, "Poe's Debt to Coleridge," University of Texas Studies in English, 10 (1930),
70-127; and ClarkGriffith,"Poe's 'Ligeia'and the English
Romantics," University of Toronto Quarterly, 24 (1954),
8-25.
3 Quoted by John Eidson, Tennyson in America: His
Reputation and Influencefrom 1827-1858 (Athens: Univ. of
Georgia Press, 1943), p. 43, from an unsigned review in
the BroadwayJournal,2 (29 Nov. 1845), 322, confidently
attributedby his biographersto Poe, the "sole editor and
proprietor"of the Journal.
4 Quoted in Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A
Memoir by His Son (London: Macmillan, 1897), II, 292-93;
hereaftercited in the text as Memoir.
6 May E. Phillips, Edgar Allan Poe: The Man (Phila-
delphia:Winston,1926),II, 1517.
6 Quoted in Phillips, II, 1517. These lines may, however,
be spurious. Phillipscites no source, and I have been unable to discover a citation of this tribute outside of her
work. The following letter from Poe's mother-in-lawto
Tennysonmakes for an interestingpostscriptto an account
of the poets' faint biographicalconnections:
AlexandriaVa. 7 Feb. / 60
If you reply to this please direct to me AlexandriaVa.
and I will receiveit safely. Respectfully,
MariaClemm
This letteris pinnedto a pagein the earliestof severalbound
copies of Hallam Tennyson's Materials for a Life of A. T.
(v, "1860 Etc." p. 16), now at the Tennyson Research
Centre in Lincoln (the director of which has kindly permitted publication).Appearingin the first printedversion
of Materials (II, 257-58), the letter is crossed out in pencil
(Hallam'shabitualpracticewhen editingmaterialout) and
does not appear in the Memoir which grew out of the
Materials.(The date on the letter is crossed out in pencil
and was therefore not printed in Materials.) George O.
Marshall, Jr., who generously called the letter to my
attention, has looked through Tennyson's check stubs at
the Research Centre (which, to be sure, are mostly for
household accounts) and has found no evidence that
Tennysonsent Mrs. Clemmany money.
7 For a full account see Sidney P. Moss, Poe's Literary
Battles (Durham,N. C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1963),pp. 108,
n., 157-59, 205. Poe's lettersto Lowellappearin TheLetters
of EdgarAllanPoe, ed. John Ostrom(Cambridge,Mass.:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1948), i, 246-47, 253-54. Poe attributedthe anonymousarticle to Dickens, Lowell (probably more correctly,accordingto Moss) to John Forster.
8 See H. M. McLuhan, "Tennyson and Picturesque
Poetry," and "Tennyson and the Romantic Epic," in
Critical Essays on the Poetry of Tennyson, ed. John Killham
Dear Sir
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), pp. 67-85,
I have often heard of your speakingwith appreciation
of my belovedson E A Poe. And I thinkyou will sympasize with me when I tell you I have sufferedmuch privation since his death, and am now without a home. I have
friends in Louisianawho have offeredme a permanent
one, but I cannot avail myself of their kindnessfor want
of meansto take me to them. Will you contributea small
portion of the requisitesum to enable me to accomplish
it. It may appear strange that my literaryfriends here
cannot assist me. I have made the appeal to them, but,
without success except in two instances. I feel a great
delicacyin makingmy situationknown to you. But when
I think a Poets motheris writingto a Poet, I feel it less.
9 Stephane Mallarme, CEucres completes, Pleiade ed.
(Paris: Gallimard, 1945), pp. 527-31, 703-04, 1590,
1621-23. Baudelaire'scomparisonappears in his GEucres
completes(Paris:Levy, 1870),vi, 22, as quoted in translation
by MarjorieBowden,Tennysonin France(Manchester,Eng.:
ManchesterUniv. Press, 1930), p. 101.
86-95.
10The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 17 vols., ed.
James A. Harrison (1902; rpt. New York: AMS Press,
1965), xiv, 289; xvi, 28; and xII, 180 respectively. All
furtherreferencesto this edition appearin the text.
" Quoted in Phillips,II, 833.
12 According to Thomas Holley Chivers' account of a
conversationwith Poe in the summer of 1845, quoted in
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428
Poe and Tennyson
George E. Woodberry,"The Poe-ChiversPapers,"Century
Magazine,65 (Jan. 1903),447.
13 Quoted in ChristopherRicks, The Poems of Tennyson
(London: Longmans, Green, 1969), p. 187. Quotations
from Tennyson'spoetry follow this text.
'4 "OurCousin, Mr. Poe," The ForlornDemon: Didactic
and CriticalEssays(Chicago:Regnery, 1953),p. 85.
16"The House of Poe," Libraryof CongressAnniversary
Lecture,4 May 1959;rpt. in TheRecognitionof EdgarAllan
Poe, ed. Eric W. Carison (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan
Press,1966),pp. 255-77.
16 For comparabletreatmentsof the conceptin Tennyson
and Poe, see GerhardJoseph, "Tennyson'sDeath in Life
in Lyric and Myth: 'Tears, Idle Tears' and 'Demeter and
Persephone,'" VictorianNewsletter,34 (1968), 13-18; and
Darrell Abel, "Coleridge's 'Life-in-Death' and Poe's
'Death-in-Life,'" Notes and Queries,NS 2 (1955), 218-20.
17 "The Angelic Imagination:Poe as God," pp. 56-78;
and "Our Cousin, Mr. Poe," pp. 79-95, in The Forlorn
Demon. The quotation appears on p. 77 of the former
essay. Tate acknowledges Pascal as his classical and
JacquesMaritain(in The Dreamof Descartes)as his modern sources for the doctrineof angelism.
18 I have arguedin Tennysonian
Love:TheStrangeDiagonal (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1969) that
Tennyson examined such a conception of woman in the
Idyllsand may have derivedit in part from two of Arthur
Hallam's essays-"The Influenceof Italian upon English
Literature"and "Remarks on Professor Rossetti's 'Disquisizioni Sullo Spirito Antipapale.'"
19 Quoted in G. M. Young, "The Age of Tennyson,"
Proceedingsof the British Academy,35 (London: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1939), 127.
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