Forming desire: On the eponymous in memoriam stanza

Nineteenth-Century Literature

Volumn 53, Issue 4, 1999, Pages 480-504

  Gigante, Denise ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 21544441502     PISSN: 08919356     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2903028     Document Type: Article

References (33)

1. Timothy Peltason, for example, remarks that "the poem is, in fact, very oddly made: each of its 700-odd stanzas the product of daunting and obvious formal constraint; all of its stanzas collected together into a large and uncertain form the rules of which nobody can quite discern" (Reading "In Memoriam" [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985], P. 3)
2. Among recent responses to the problematic "question of form" in In Memoriam, see Isobel Armstrong, Language as Living Form in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1982), pp. 172-205
3. Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 166-203
4. and Alastair W.Thomson, The Poetry of Tennyson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), pp. 106-40
5. Christopher Craft, however, writes that "the issue that matters ... is the function of represented sexual desire within the verbal economy we call In Memoriam and within the larger tradition of representation from which the poem arises" (see "'Descend, and Touch, and Enter': Tennyson's Strange Manner of Address," in his Another Kind of Love: Male Homosexual Desire in English Discourse, 1850-1920 [Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1994], p. 50)
6. Other key accounts of this important "question of desire" in In Memoriam include Alan Sinfield, "The Importance of Arthur Being," in his Alfred Tennyson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 113-53
7. Richard Dellamora, "Tennyson, the Apostles, and In Memoriam," in his Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1990), pp. 16-41
8. and Jeff Nunokawa, "In Memoriam and the Extinction of the Homosexual," ELH, 58 (1991), 427-38. Some overlap is of course implicit in this dichotomy of "form" and "desire."
9. For a survey of In Memoriam scholarship up to this point, see Joseph Sendry, "In Memoriam: Twentieth-Century Criticism," Victorian Poetry, 18 (1980), 105-18
10. In Memoriam, in The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks, 3 vols., 2d ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1987), 11,449; sec. CXXIX, 1. I. All further references are by section and line numbers and appear in the text
11. Tennyson, quoted in Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1905), I, 305-6
12. hereafter cited parenthetically within the text as Memoir. To be precise, Sir Philip Sidney did not use the In Memoriam stanza. He did, however, use the abba rhyme-scheme with seven-syllable lines, as did Shakespeare, Carew, and Marvell. In this essay I will focus on the In Memoriam stanza in particular, but Edward Payson Morton gives an account of its variants in "Poems in the Stanza of In Memoriam," Modern Language Notes, 24 (1909), 67-70
13. A. C. Bradley, A Commentary on Tennyson's "In Memoriam," 3d ed. (London: Macmillan, 1915), p. 68. Bradley adds: "The extent of his 'borrowings' is in favour of this view: why otherwise would his language happen to coincide with that of other poets so much more often than does the language, say, of Shelley or Keats?" (pp. 72-73)
14. Rhyme's Reason: A Guide to English Verse (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1981), p. 16
15. Susan J. Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1997), p. 193
16. Propertius, Elegies, ed. and trans. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990), p. 43
17. Steffano Guazzo, Dialoghi Piaceuoli (1587 ed.), quoted in Drummond, p. 7n
18. Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, revised ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), p. 116
19. Antony Easthope, Poetry as Discourse (London: Methuen, 1983), pp. 55, 54-55
20. Derek Attridge, in The Rhythms of English Poetry (New York: Longman, 1982), anticipates Easthope in arguing against the "naturalness" of the English pentameter
21. See The Rhythms of English Poetry, pp. 124ff
22. The Examiner is quoted in Edgar Finley Shannon, Jr., Tennyson and the Reviewers: A Study of His Literary Reputation and of the Influence of the Critics upon His Poetry, 1827-1851 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1952), p. 142
23. Kingsley's review is quoted in Tennyson: The Critical Heritage, ed. John D.Jump (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967), p. 185
24. The Times is quoted in Shannon, p. 156
25. Quoted in Poems, II, 313
26. For helpful accounts of "Hellenism" during this period, see Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994)
27. and Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980)
28. Poetic Form and British Romanticism (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), p. 30
29. The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 6, 5; emphasis in original
30. Even critics who have analyzed the poem in more traditional terms have remarked on the connection between the "God of Love" and the elegiac god of Love. John D. Rosenberg, for example, writes that "to overlook Tennyson's passionate quest for Hallam's 'ghost' is to fail to see that In Memoriam is one of the great love poems in English" ("The Two Kingdoms of In Memoriam," Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 58 [1959], 232)
31. Metre, Rhythm, and Verse Form (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 133
32. "My Sister's Sleep," in The Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. William Rossetti, 2 vols. (London: Ellis and Scrutton, 1886), I, 230; 1. 48
33. Oscar Wilde, "Impression du Matin" in Complete Poetry, ed. Isobel Murray (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), p. 129