Tennyson's “Ballads and Other Poems”: Organization by genre and theme
Abstract
The purpose of the present study was to examine generic and thematic relationships between the 1880 poems. Its first aim was to discover why Tennyson foregrounded “ballads,” a popular poetic form, in his title. The second was to find whether reading the poems in the volume instead of in isolation (as in a magazine or anthology) leads to apprehension of an overarching theme or themes that point toward values the poet believed fundamental to personal integrity and national strength when Victorian England was undergoing rapid political, social, and intellectual changes—matters of grave concern to the poet in his later years. My approach to the poems, which follows Tennyson's ordering, embraces and rejects some principles of both formalist (especially new critical) and new historical criticism. It considers how genre, mode, and prosody work within and across the poems, and also acknowledges biography, history, politics, and religion as constituents of their meanings. Examination of the collection's great range of subjects, speakers, times, and poetic types reveals Tennyson made the two ballads its generic and thematic “anchor-points.” They expressed his belief that individual and national welfare required preservation of basic values he associated with the nuclear family, an ordered society that fortifies individual integrity, and military defense against peoples and ideologies that contravene those values. The writer hopes this study of relationships between poems in the one volume will encourage scholars to apply its methods to other volumes early and late.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Deering, Purdue University.
Subject Area
British and Irish literature
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