Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

The 19th Century
Presentation 9 of 13

Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)
Idylls of the King. Arthur’s “World” Reappears.
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, January 31, 1984

Transcript:
(00:00:01):
January 31st, 1984. This is the eighth lecture in a series of lectures by Raji where 19th century tonight's lecture is entitled Tasha who lived 1809, 1892 finals Lilly King Arthur's world reappears,
(00:00:22):
Trying to be difficult for you to readjust your house from Los Angeles to the offered Lauren Tennessee. So I'll try and make the bridges easy as possible. There isn't any figure in literature, more distant from us than tennis and single great pony. Boy, that's more alien to a Santana. And the reason is, is that attendance in the first rank Hola could take the temperature of the 20th century and he pronounces dead upon bird. Most of the, again, Callison originated with TSL yet as a pound of your VA, a great voices of the early 20th century in order to be heard at all, had to kill the old King because how a tree and his style was so monumental and indelible part of the Victorian world. He could be discredited. There could not be any new voice. It's difficult for us to appreciate or imagine to ourselves, a poet.
(00:01:48):
So magnificent of his age, that he was poetry and bodied. He was in fact, every edge, the poet Laureate of the British empire didn't watch more surprising is that he was one of the really great poets of the English language. We find it difficult to believe. We think in our minds of tennis as a pure isle, the whose urge to make nice, cute little rhymes was something that he did off the cop in between state dinners. The fact is John, uh, everyone that we've investigated in the 19th century course Tennyson was an extraordinarily complex man, a very great now whose poetry does there, the accolades, then it was C sometimes for more different reasons, more penetrating reasons than we would like to give credit for. I think the way for me to start is to quote a paragraph from the letter by Thomas Carlyle, to Ralph Waldo Emerson. The first time that Thomas Carlyle met Tennyson as a young man, he was only about 30 years of age and Carlyle who was a top old buzzard writing, very openly to his great friend. Ralph Waldo Emerson had this to say about Tennyson as a young man.
(00:03:34):
He man solitary and sad dwelling and an element of gloom carrying a bit of chaos about him, which he is manufacturing into cosmos. One of the finest looking men in the world, a great shock of rough Def gait, dark hair, bright laughing, Hazel eyes, massive Aqualine face, almost Indian looking clothes, cynically loose pre and Dez smokes. Infinite tobacco. His voice is musically loose fit for loud laughter and piercing wail. And all that may lie in between speech and speculation free and plenteous. I do not meet. And these last decades such company over a pipe, this was Tennyson at 30. He was born in 1809. He was born in Lincoln Cher and the family was a strange family, almost, uh, typical of the time. In many ways, there were 12 children all until by the time it was through three of them were supposed to be, uh, insane.
(00:05:06):
Uh, the gloomy Victorian, uh, mode of covering up personality was just endemic with them of the time that Tennyson was 15 years of age, his father began to take to alcohol and lived another seven years in sort of a water, a patriarchal position. One of Tennyson's great friends fell in love with one of his sisters and they, uh, besotted father refused to let the young man even correspond for a year with the girl. Uh, later on, they were, um, uh, pledged, uh, for marriage and have the young man died prematurely. Uh, he would have, uh, married, we'll get to him. Uh, he forms a very important part of Tennyson's life. Tennessee, as a young man had a, uh, normal impoverished literate childhood and he was precocious. He and two of his brothers published a vol volume of poems and Tennyson was just 16 years old.
(00:06:29):
And the older brother went off to Trinity college, Cambridge and within a year or two, the other two Tennyson brothers in line, including Alford went there Kennison while he was there at Cambridge, became somewhat of a spectacle because he was given great talent and capacity for language. Occasionally it happens that a man human being a woman sometimes is able to use language as if it were their own. And Tennyson began composing poetry at comm college at university and Cambridge, and these poems would circulate in manuscript form. So he became quite famous around the, uh, colleges of Cambridge. And in fact, won a golden award from the chancellor of Cambridge, uh, when he was still an adolescent very soon before he was 21 years old, he published a volume of poems on his own and, uh, was quite disheartened when critics in the London papers took him to task for his, uh, uh, sentimentality for his, uh, uh, musical language, which when he was younger, seemed to flow.
(00:08:06):
So glibly that it must be a constant lie. How could anyone write anything truthfully so beautifully by the time that Tennyson realized that he was not going to be able to finish at Cambridge, his father died. He was, uh, beginning to live the Bohemian life. He took to a port and tobacco and large quantities. He began, um, affecting a curious kind of, uh, of a dress is a early portrait, uh, all show him with great shocks of hair and loose clothes. His hero had been Lord Byron. And in fact, when Byron died, uh, Tennyson was still an adolescent and Tennyson in grave. The rock Byron is dead. He began to show the effects of what we would almost call a trans migration of. So it seemed as if Lord Byron's spirit had infused itself in the young Tennessee,
(00:09:20):
He published in 1833, a volume,
(00:09:26):
Uh, of poems, which included a poem, which began to make Tennyson quite famous in England. The poem was called the lady of Shalott. Now, when we read the lines of the lady of Shalott to ourselves today, we missed the ambience. That was important to the Victorian mind. I'll give you a few lines and then I'll talk about them. And, and you can see, and moving through a mirror clear that hangs before her all the year, shadows of the world appear there. She sees the highway near winding down to Camelot. There are the river Edie worlds, and there the Shirley village, Charles girly village, Charles and there, the red cloaks of market girls pass onward from shallot. We are caught up the same way that the Victorian audiences were caught up in the glib rhyming line and the pure flowing imagery. But what we miss, because we have become enough, the ties to that sense is an eerie haunting kind of ambience. What the French call him the you
(00:10:55):
More than almost any
(00:10:57):
Other English poet, what the possible exception of Shakespeare
(00:11:01):
Here, he is able to create an eerie thing
(00:11:06):
Of eminent feeling tone, reality, something verging on sensibility, but not quite able to come through so that there is a ghost slick quality to the imagery of Tennessee. Now I'll give you the followup lines from the lady of Shalott. Remember he's only 21 years old, 22 years old, he'll live for another 60 years. Sometimes the troop of Denzel's glad an Abbott on an ambling pad, sometimes a curly shepherd line or a long haired Paige and Crimson clad goes by to tower Camelot. And sometimes through the mirror blue, the Knights come riding two and two. She has no loyal Knight and true. The lady of Shalott. They constantly a, of a world in which one must reaffirm oneself. Well, I'm looking in the mirror constantly reaffirm daily. They primness in the delicacy because the breath, whole nature of one's psyche does not allow for self continuity, but only for the constant reflectiveness in them.
(00:12:32):
And then the mirror and it's its vastest reflection, the blue of the sky and the landscape winding down to Camelot constantly as a parade of Knights skilling to Arthur's home. And she realizing she has no champion. She is alone in the world with only her mirror and has no champions. This is the image of the Unimog of the psyche of that in here. You're part of the man that he calls his soul, that first rears itself in Tennessee's work. It's the first rumblings it's 1833 England in 1837. England was not green in 1833. There were no blue sky. There were no nights. There was the industrial revolution by 1833, the countryside of England and the Midlands was glowing red at night from the Coke furnaces of the steel works. The client of the railroads being laid across the land, the digging of the great canal, all of this was happening.
(00:13:53):
The appearance of the lady of Shalott wasn't echo of something, loss of an poignant image of a character quality of the soul of learn that had vanished and was reappearing Ghostlight as a watery image and the poetic sensibility of this unruly Bohemian young Tennyson Tennyson is peculiar. And you'll see, as we get deeper into, uh, extraordinarily app to be the port Laureate of the 19th century, he still was a young man. He still was adventurous. He was in his early twenties. He had made a number of friends at Cambridge. In fact, because of his great capacity at writing, there had been a group called the apostles that were formed and the apostles were interested vigorous young college men interested in writing, interested in good conversation among themselves, interested in the politics of the day. So much so that in 1830, when there was yet another revolution in Spain, the apostles, and lifted in a mercenary army and went to Spain to fight.
(00:15:17):
And while they were there, they began, um, touring the continent, looking like young men would look to learn from the vast fields of experience, whatever was offered. One of the apostles was his good friend, Arthur Howell, Arthur Hallam writing, and July, 1832 to Emily, Kenneth Alfred's sister, whom he had fallen in love with whom he had been for bed for bed to write two for a year, writes this, my last letter I think was from Rotterdam, but I better tell you what Alfred and I have been doing. We resumed our Steamboat last Wednesday morning and came on slowly up the ride the banks have, which are more uniformly, ugly, and flat as far as cologne than any country I ever saw of so great extent to talking about, uh, cologne and the cathedral being unfinished. Then he says the part completed is very beautiful. Gothic, Alfred. Wasn't great.
(00:16:31):
Rapture's only complaining. He had so little time to study the place. And then they talk about the paintings of Titian and Raphael and the cathedrals. But the indication here, one of the poignant images that appeal to Tennyson in Europe was the refurbishing of the great Gothic cathedrals cologne. One of the really great Gothic structures in Europe, this immense aspiring unified expression of man's confidence that he could reach up and touch through his sacrament of self sacrifice and belief reach up and touch the very realms of the divine that God's home could be on his earth. The confidence that that could be Tennyson had no such confidence. In fact, the 19th century had no such confidence and 19th century. What have looked at cologne cathedral from an engineering standpoint, could it stand distress? Can it stand the mode and what have itself in studies on the soil samples and the ground compression and so forth and completely have disbelief that there would have been any transcendental purpose. Really one might tell visitors, this one might tell children that, but the phrase would have been come down. Surely you don't believe because the 19th century had begun to suffer from the trunk, lack of confidence. [inaudible]
(00:18:27):
pointed out once the fulcrum on which civilizations falter, he said it is simply a failure of nerve is a failure to allow for self manifestation, the courage to live life, to manifest the confidence that a meaning can be found that a meaning can be made if not found that there is efficacy in man's life to be had. The 19th century is a preaching century where the finger curl slightly at the end and goes completely escaped. Every sermon is an oblique and does not address itself to the real issues of the spirit Tennyson like most of the young men of the day, like his family were being victimized by the industrial revolution, by the grinding up of the individual of the families in society at the time and cell, because of the influence of Bentham, because of the influence of the liberal character of, uh, early 19th century British reform thought a reform bill was passed in this time, 1832.
(00:20:02):
And here's an account by Tennyson's son. My father did not view the political situation. So gloomily as Arthur Hallam. It was the dead waist and middle of the night when the news of the passing of the reform bill for England and Wales had reached summer's beat in Lincolnshire. This from bell as the Lincolnshire people called it had stirred all hearts and my father and some of his brothers and sisters at once salad out into the darkness and began to ring the church. Bells, mad madly, the new person horrified at hearing his bells rung and not merely rung, but furiously clashed without his leave came rushing into the church. And then the pitch blackness laid hold of the first thing I wish he could quiet pan to. And this happened to be this little dog, which
(00:20:54):
Yeah, the pent up frustration, they release
(00:21:01):
At the joy that something was being
(00:21:03):
Done. They crafted
(00:21:05):
Following this, that whatever was being done was not effective. They thinking in of the fact that this occurrence of expectation, disappointment,
(00:21:21):
Despair
(00:21:22):
Began to think into the psyche of not only England, but all of the European mind as the 19th century progressed. And by the 1840s, it began to occur to sensitive person like Alfred Lord Tennyson. It was still a young man, still 30 years of age. That one must take a different tack.
(00:21:51):
He wrote, yeah.
(00:21:53):
This time in 1842, he would have been 33 years of age,
(00:22:01):
A poem called Ulysses few lines.
(00:22:06):
It little profits that an idle King by this still hearts among these barren crags matched with an aged wife, I made and Dole on equal laws upon a Savage
(00:22:20):
That hoard and sleep and feed. And no, not me.
(00:22:26):
I cannot rest from travel. I will drink life to the leaves all times I have enjoyed greatly. Those suffered greatly both with those that loved me and alone on shore. And one through gutting drifts, the rainy high days, vex the Dempsey. I am become a name for always roaming with a hungry heart, much. Have I seen and known cities of men and manners climate council, governments, myself, not least, but honored of them all. And drunk delight of battle with my peers far on the ringing planes of windy. Troy, I am a part of all. I have met yet all experiences in arch where through gleams that untraveled world whose margin
(00:23:26):
Forever and ever. When I move tennis, lose greatness,
(00:23:34):
One index to it is that there were more studies on Tennyson than any other English writer except for Shakespeare in the 19 cents.
(00:23:42):
That's right. He,
(00:23:47):
Um, the lady of Shalott in 1833 to your lyses in 1842 and just nine years, a tremendous growth in capacity. Not only in language, but in sensibility. Okay. It has one of those pioneering angelic spirits, which are the real true barometer of the age. He is going to be a Ulysses. He is going to be an Odysseus. He is going to live life to the leaves, but he already can see deep inside. He intuits. And he sees that his vision is, but an arch through which, as he moves the world, margin fades forever and forever, the more he moves, the more it saves. The subtitle of this course is journey through the permit. Nate dissolving in Inferno, Tennessee will become a great index to the dismantling of the courage of European man in the 19th century so much. So now we haven't time in this course to get to the threshold and the breaking point, the first world war will be an act of fear, wholeness on the part of European man, that he may not even exist.
(00:25:18):
A Tennyson when you list these came out, suffered in credible lime based much of his poetry seemed to offend a large segment of the population. And yet there was a tremendous population of people who found something eerie, haunting and Tennyson. His volumes of poems did not sell so many copies at this time. It was just that he was, uh, talked about a great deal. And in fact, um, they reform movement had become so much a part of his background. Many people suppose that Tennyson was secretly, uh, trying to put one over on us, that he must be an arch, uh, liberal, or that he much must be an arch or a conservative, or that he must be a supporting the crown, or he must be in a rebellion against the crown, all of the criticisms, what laid down on the table come full circle. And one can only suppose that what Tennyson has twice, as he will say in one of his poems, some central cord that is, it moves it's cheerful, melody
(00:26:44):
Down the instrument makes all the sense of music flake. Then this shocking, his great young friend, Arthur Hallam died suddenly tragically of an accident in Europe. He was engaged to his sister. He was his best friend. Tennyson was crying.
(00:27:08):
How, um,
(00:27:09):
Became the name that he gave his son. How, um, Lord Tennyson, who became the second warrant, Tennyson Tennyson stood. He stood for several years. It was an occurrence to him, much like they [inaudible] would be to Alvin KEMU in the 20th century. It became an absurd example of a fine young man, completely intelligent, alive, and alert, just ready to begin life. And he was snuffed out. He was taken away what God permits, this, what order of life has any right to consider itself moral when such an act can occur. These were only the beginning. Thoughts it's sunk into Tennyson. And he began to in fact, uh, find in himself an incredible sense of, uh, miss apprehension. In fact, um, there is a, a dense and Tennyson active time. If I can find it. Um, he wrote a poem called, uh, despair. I don't know if I hear it in four 95.
(00:28:31):
He wrote a poem called despair later on in life, which I think, um, describes for me some of the thoughts in a mature, reflective vein that were going through his mind. This would be printed in 1881. Tennyson would be, um, 53 years old. Is it you that preached in the chapel there, looking over the sand, followed us to that night and dogged us and drew me to land. The poem is about a man and his wife have decided to commit suicide together by walking out into the surf and drowning themselves. And then the flip toss of circumstance, the ways of cast him on shore and the preacher who delivered this sermon the night before, which had been the impetus for them to realize that life was vacuous for them. Indefinitely was the man who had brought him back to life. What did I feel that night? You are curious, how should I tell, does it matter so much? What I felt you rescued me yet? Was it well that you came on wished for on call between me and the deepen, my doom. And then he writes, gives us a beautiful image of the light house
(00:30:06):
There
(00:30:07):
At the end of the spit of rock. And he says the, when the rolling eyes of the lighthouse, an image of madness, you see when the rolling eyes of the lighthouse there on the fatal neck of land, running out into
(00:30:24):
Rock land that
(00:30:26):
Finally Peters out into the sparseness and hardness of rock. They had saved many hundreds from wreck glared on our way towards death. I remember I thought as we pass, does it matter how many they saved?
(00:30:43):
We are
(00:30:45):
All of us wrecked at life. Do you fear? And there came through the roar of the breaker, a whisper in a breath
(00:30:59):
Fear.
(00:31:02):
Am I not with you? I am frightened at life,
(00:31:06):
Not death.
(00:31:08):
And the sons of the limitless universe sparkled and shown in the sky flashed with fires as of God. But we knew that their light was a lie bright as with deathless hope, but however, they sparkled and shown the dark little worlds running round. Them were worlds of wool, just like our, um, no, so, and the heaven above no soul on the earth below a fiery scroll written with lamination.
(00:31:41):
Well, these thoughts
(00:31:47):
Began to sink into Tennyson and as they sank and he began to
(00:31:55):
Conjure up as a
(00:31:58):
Great magician would conjure up out of his element
(00:32:04):
Before.
(00:32:05):
And it began to pile up a section upon section upon section almost as if it were some in credible and got the cathedral. And it became finally and almost 120 sections, a great column called in memoriam, ostensibly about the death of his friend, about the incredible injustice that occurs in this universe that such a happenstance could happen.
(00:32:37):
And yet in his Tennessee
(00:32:41):
Dropped his self, like some sacred needle into the very fabric of existence and began to receive outside of the warp and woof of the regular cultural Fs, a new connective tissue and began recording it painstakingly word by word line by line stanza by stanza section by section until in memoriam was built out. And then he published it at the middle of the 19th century. It was published in 1850 and it was like a watershed of the 19th century. Yep. Struck home, not only in England, although primarily there at first, it began to have its reverberations in the United States. It began to have it through reverberations all over continental Europe. In fact, it drew such a massive attentiveness to Tennyson that it was at this time that queen Victoria made him poet Laureate of the British empire. He would later be raised to the peerage and become war Tennyson in memoriam is a, an uncanny composition.
(00:34:06):
One would like to think this is just Kenneth, just 19th century writing. It's just a large sentimental poem about the death of a friend. But when you go to it, it sinks in bite. A friend of mine once showed me a little sculpture, a Dutch sculpture hands tougher than mine. And she showed me a thing called a nibbler, which it takes little bites of steel, which sculptures used tennis is in memoriam, has these beautiful foot quatrains, which are like a nibbler and they eat away at this steely structure of confidence. That one has that after all. It must be all right, my food tip and then memoriam eats away bite by bite until whatever structure of full of the tea, that one supposed one could conjure up. One could believe in one could hope to expect that everyone knows that this is so, is it not that confidence as leached away until one realizes that in memoriam is not for a man, but for man for mankind for Tennyson was the first great English poet to have read widely and science to experienced widely and politics to have come to terms with the whole age and to have found it lacking, not in any one essential, but in every single quality that men would have hoped to have found matured or present for himself.
(00:35:57):
Not the whole age was not so much rotten, but a fiction or fantasy. It was not even there enough to merit rotting in memoriam, after a brief prologue of about 12 quatrains. And it's interesting that Tennyson uses the wonderful crock train, uh, version of mellifluous, uh, English diction to portray the nibbler destruction of the very frame of confidence in Western civilization, 1850. The first section I hold it truth with him. Who's sayings to one clear harp and diverse tones that men may rise on stepping stones of their dead selves to higher thing, but whose shelf, so forecast the years and find in loss, a gain to match or reach a hand through time to catch the far off interest of tears. Let Love's class grief last, both be drowned, let darkness keep her Raven gloss. Now sweeter to be drunk with loss, to dance, with death, to beat the ground, then that the Victor hours should score. And the long result of love and boast the whole, okay, the man that loved and lost, but all he was is over worn Tennyson. As he builds, comes to the seventh session. And he presents us with an image that suddenly we realized that the mirror of the lady of Shalott is showing awesome blankness. That Tennyson has plumbed into the depths of his angelic messenger, poetic sensibility, and has found that the mirror of vanity does not even show a world anymore. Does not even show when self anymore, but a blankness. This is 70 years before TSL. It would write the wasteland dark house by which once more.
(00:38:36):
I stand here in the long unlovely street doors where my heart used to be so quickly waiting for a hand behind that can be classed no more behold me for, I cannot sleep and like a guilty thing. I creep at earliest morning to the door. He is not here but far away. Yay. The noise of life begins again and ghastly through the drizzling rain on the bald street break. The blank day. He brings us on a long excursion of images and then memoriam trying to find some toehold of confidence. He tries to go a little bit into theology and slips. He looks through history and there's no real traction anywhere. He looks to literature, perhaps in literature and his hands come out empty. And the 70th section of in memoriam, he says, I cannot see the features, right? When on the gloom, I strive to paint the face.
(00:39:57):
I know the Hughes are faint and mixed with hollow masks of night. Cloud tower is by ghostly masons, rot, a Gulf that never shuts and gapes, a hand that points and Pollard shapes and shadows, thoroughfares of thought and crowds that stream from yawning doors and Shoals of puckered faces drive dark bulks, that half tumble, alive and lazy lengths and boundless shores to let once beyond the will. I hear a wizard music roll and through a lattice on the soul, looks a fair face and makes it still the last stability in his psyche in his enema is the ability, at least in memory to conjure up from this lifetime, some meaningful image, a face of a friend. If the ology, if history, if philosophy, if literature, if all the artifice of men are falling or failing is they're not at least the memory which we have as an existential being as a man myself, I have a memory.
(00:41:30):
I may have a clear image of a friend. Is this not somewhere to stand somewhere in confidence then in the 88th section Tennyson trying desperately to believe that memory is a platform from enough for poetry to found itself on suddenly exclaims wild bird whose warble liquid sweet rings Eden through the butted quit. Oh, tell me where the senses mix. Oh, tell me where the passions meet once radiate, fierce extremes employ the ice spirits in the darkening leaf and then the mid most heart of grief by passion clasps, a secret joy die. My harp would prelude wall. I cannot all command the strings. The glory of the sum of things will flash along the chords and go it's untenable. We can, for instance, we can for a flash re occur a sense of reality to ourselves, but it's fleeting. It does not stay. We strive through language, through belief, throwaway society, through an empire to make it stay will not stay, will not stay towards the end. And he's growing weary of searching, but strong poetically. Remember this poem appeared in 1850 and they hundred and 17th section,
(00:43:24):
Uh, 118 section of in memoriam. He writes, contemplate all this work of time, take an overview of time. And incidentally Darwin's, uh, evolutionary writings would not appear for another decade. And when they came out, Tennyson said at live at last some confirmation contemplate all of this work of time. The giant laboring in his youth nor dream of human love in truth is dying nature's earth in line. But trust that those we call the dead are breathers of an ampler day, forever nobler ends. They say the solid earth we're on. We tread in tracks of fluid. Fluent heat began and grew to seeming random forms. The seeming pray of cyclic storms till at last arose, the man who and branched from climb to climb the Herald of a higher race and of himself and higher place. If so, he typed this work of time within himself from more to more or crown attributes of wo like glories move his course and show that life is not as idle or O R E but iron Doug from central gloom.
(00:45:03):
And he did hot with burning spheres and dipped and bows of hissing, tears, and bettered with the shocks of doom to shape and use arise and fly the really fun the sensual seas move upward, working out the beast and let the eight and tiger die. Trying to find something in the grand design, perhaps something which has escaped him, perhaps something which has escaped philosophy or theology or literature, not something in memory, perhaps there's something and grand vision, which has not yet been attainable. And so he carries him or marry him to this Heights of envisioning. He raises up his Aqua line faced laying hair Lin nine hair on his poetic sensibility, tra to try and plum what vast scheme could possibly be sustaining all this. And then the hundred and 22nd sends a, he tries at last to calm himself to assure himself and his Raiders.
(00:46:25):
He's taken an enormous growing tour de force through the sensibility of an age at the watershed of the age, 120 seventh. And here at times, as Centeno who moves about from place to place and whispers to the worlds of space in the deep night, all is well and all is well though. Faith inform be centered in the night to fear and all is well though. And form be sundered in a night of fear. Well, roar is the storm to those that hear a deeper voice moves across the storm. Proclaiming social truth shall spread and justice, even though thrice again, no red fool's theory of the same should pile her barricades with dead, but ill for him that wears the crown and him bill Ozar and his rags. They tremble the sustaining crags. The spires of ice are toppled down and molten up and roar and flood the fortress crashes from on high, the root earth lightens to the sky and the great Ian sinks in blood and encompassed by the fires of hell while thou Jared's spirit happy star overlooks the Tomo from afar and smiling, knowing all is well.
(00:48:09):
He divine light some archaic druidic Sage, that there is nowhere that he may stand. There is no confidence that he may posit. He cannot give us a StoreOnce anywhere, but even through it all through the dissembling rags of the material or all through the falling empire, through the disappearing active men, like some happy star, there's some smiling, spiritual presence, somewhere looking through the storm and Tennyson concludes the Morin, but a great image. But all we can do is to present ourselves in all humility to the universe and hope that we are seen by something inscrutable beyond our Ken and that it's all that we can do. There is nothing more in memoriam made Tennyson the most famous poet in the world. His books of tones began to sell and quantities that were astronomical, and that the volumes came out through the 1850s and through the 1860s and seventies and 1880s Tennyson's fame spread and his position as a spokesman for his age, Fred in the 1850s, a couple of years after in memoriam came out tennis and finally married.
(00:49:48):
He had fallen in love with a woman named, uh, uh, Emily. And he in fact, uh, uh, was hoping to be engaged to her as early as 1840. He was considered a, uh, a Bohemian, uh, loose liver who drank and smoked and had no real assurance of a life. And so for 10 years it was off. And then in 1850 with the publication of, in memoriam Tennyson, suddenly loomed back on the horizon, not only as a potential worthwhile tutor, but there's one of the great men of the age. And almost as if the pattern of life sensing the incredible sacrifice of spirit of energy, of tennis, and having evacuated himself of every conceivable standpoint to try and bring an accurate picture of the whole to his age, almost as if mother nature. In fact, seeing the poets deep hurt in lament gave him his wife, gave him his love to live with too, as Suarez, this deep, deep wound that he had opened in himself.
(00:51:16):
And in the age he was married in the spring of 1850, and the conditions were, uh, exceptional. Eventually the Tennyson's would move to the isle of white and Tennyson. Uh, after he got the poet Laureate ship, uh, he would, uh, move his entire family to the isle of white and Ferring Ford was the name of the, uh, the house that they, um, um, built their 1853 Helen Tennyson writes. My father writes quote, I wrote on Friday to accept the house fairing for it. I also wrote today to mocks into advance 1000 pounds, 400 pounds. He owes me and the odd 600 to be paid if you will. In March, when I get my money's in why I did it because by buying safe Devin, the church in the East Lincoln Sherline for 2,500 pounds with that in 500 a year, I think we ought to get on.
(00:52:27):
So Tennyson was beginning to have some financial security in this life, some renown and felt that he was in a position to further stick his neck out and Tennyson published five years later in 1855, the same year that saw the great American Renaissance, the publications of Emerson's representative men the a year after the publication of Walden publication of the house of seven Gables, um, Melville's PR and the ambiguities, the first edition of leaves of grass. All of this came in 1855 and Tennyson published mod, which he thought his finest poem and mod and other poems put the teeth on edge of the Victorian age because in mod, the poet took off the gloves and came out from behind the vast edifice of in memoriam swinging mod begins. I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood. It slips in the sealed above or dabbled with blood red heat, the red rib legends, drip with a silent horror of blood and deco there.
(00:53:57):
Whatever is asked her answers staff for their, on the gasoline pet long sense. The body was found his who had given me life, Oh, father or God, was it well mangled and flattened and crushed and dented into the ground. There yet lies the rock that saw with him where he fell. Did he find himself down who knows for a vast speculation had failed endeavor. He muttered and Madden and ever one with despair. No doubt. He walked when the wind like a broken whirling. Well, the flying gold is the room. Woodlands drove him through the air. And mod goes on page after page section, after section bringing the mature Tennyson into a confrontation with his age, she had been lionized by a memoriam. He was castigated universally bought for mod mod brings Tennyson's language into a juxtaposition where the surrealistic qualities of the age were becoming transparently, uh, real to him.
(00:55:24):
He tried in his publications after mod to re capture. They deep spirit of the age. He would publish many popular volumes of poems, but already it began to occur to him that there was in fact, some eerie crescendo that had already happened to man and to use a 20th century phrase prematurely that he was living post historically. And that post is dark man. Like prehistoric man was in a world of dinosaurs only where the prehistoric dinosaurs were of natural making the post. His steroid dinosaurs were a man's making. And that Nan's personable size expectation of wholeness was dwarfed by monstrosities of the age whose reverberations of incommensurability with man himself made man obsolete in trying to dig into a deeper memory than the personal Tennyson, then applied himself to going into what he called the memory of the race he did. What Wagner did. He tried to go into the memory of the people, the memory of man, and it's a manifestation in a collective sense.
(00:57:05):
And when he plumbed himself like Wagner plumbing, the dramatic mine finally came up with the Nebia Lunken Tennyson came up with King Arthur and the Arthurian ethics. And so Tennyson like a vast great Sage having beggared himself by having emptied out his entire sensibilities and left himself, vacuous made a Valiant attempt for about 20 years to try and resuscitate the Arthurian legends and build them into a new order. And by resuscitating this collective archetypal, uh, design this pattern, hoping that by some chance, this would spark and reinstate the age. It became all the rage. The first installment of idols of the King came out in 1859. The year that Darwin published his origins of species, how the origins of species and the idols of the King go together. They are two great anguish sensibilities of the age who had brooded a lifetimes over their respective works, who were trying to present some kind of a structural, vast focus for understanding life in total and men in total,
(00:58:39):
He begins the idol.
(00:58:43):
So the King was the coming of Arthur,
(00:58:46):
And he goes through, he did
(00:58:51):
Four sections at a time in late in life. He realized that what he was conjuring up just as Wagner realized what he was to up when he did the ring, was that he was writing the obituary for the collective psyche of the people that by refreshing and re portraying the cycle of the most meaningful mythology of the national spirit in England's case Arthur, in Germany's case, sick free that he was instead of reinfuse it in the age, he was writing it's Coda it's last episode, but by having portrayed all this, he had led himself to the implications that were always implicit, but never reached in the whole mythological cycle that they formed a sacred pattern of sacrifices, man, towards a transcendent center that left the world. And just as Wagner was left with no choice after writing the Nebia London rain, but to write parts of all towards the end of the idols of the King Tennyson had to turn to the Holy grail.
(01:00:24):
And when he turned to the grail, he found good Wagner found in parts of all the Holy grail begins. And this is one of the last episodes of the items of the King from noise for arms and acts of prowess done in tournament or tilt, sir, Percival who Arthur and his knighthood called the pure had passed into the silent life of prayer, praise fast and all arms and leaving for the cowl, the helmet in an Abbey, far away from Camelot there, and not long after died. It's an obituary, not just for his age, but for the whole psyche of the English people as a national type. And the two episodes that come after the Holy grail. One is called Gwen Avir, which he felt equal to mod is some of the finest writing that he had done. And the final episode called the passing of Arthur.
(01:01:44):
And it's a startling realization that the presentation of the theory ethos was always referred to as the death of Arthur Lamar, dark her, it was not the exploits of Arthur so much, but that those exploits signal, the end of an age, the end of a possibility in Gwen affair, it begins with this ghostly image of the grand wife of Arthur, the queen of Camelot. It's not just the lady of Shalott now who sees nothing in her mirror because she can't go to Camelot and have nights for her. Gwen Avir has had nights for her, the greatest of them all Lancelot, the greatest King of them all Arthur. She was the queen of Camelot queen Gwen. There had fled the court and sat there and the Holy house of alms, very weeping, none with her, save a little, made a novice one low light, betwixt them burn blurred by the creeping myth for all abroad beneath the moon unseen, albeit at full the white myth, like a face cloth to the face clung to the dead earth.
(01:03:15):
And the land was still, then he published despair in 1881 and he was taken to task by everyone Gladstone the prime minister, uh, person's state lions like hoped for a Dawn and it came, but the promise had faded away. We had passed from a cheerless night to the glare of a dreary or day. He is only a crowd in the smoke who was once a pillar of fire. The guests have a worm in the dust and the shadow of its desire of a worm is that rise in a world of the weak trodden down by the strong of a dying worm in a world, all mask secure murder, and draw Tennyson lived for another 10 years, but he had become uncomfortable for those in power. He'd become uncomfortable as the poet Laureate. And so the word was leaked out that he was a sentimentalist that he was out of his age.
(01:04:25):
He really wasn't that good. Was he something new, be becoming along? We shouldn't really listen to him. We should, uh, close his books and discredit the man. He isn't really important is he, and there's so many new things coming up. We mustn't really spend much more time with tennis, but when we come to Tennyson's work a hundred years later and we find out exactly what he wrote and the incredible accuracy with which he divined the age and saw our own dilemmas. Very clearly we realized that the only place that we can go to in this course from Tennyson is to go to that vast. So who did not deceive himself about the nature of mans evolving into civilization, the vision of man that dusty ASCII has. So next week we'll have to take a look at him because he's also a part of that negligible 19th century.

END OF RECORDING