eBook details
- Title: William Morris' "Golden Wings" As a Poetic Response to the "Delicate Sentiment" of Tennyson's "Mariana" (Alfred Tennyson) (Critical Essay)
- Author : Victorian Poetry
- Release Date : January 22, 2011
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 233 KB
Description
In a letter dated October 24, 1872 to his affectionate friend Aglaia Coronio, William Morris writes: "I suppose you see that Tennyson is publishing another little lot of Arthurian legend. We all know pretty well what it will be; and I confess I don't look forward to it." (1) Fourteen years earlier, Morris had published The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems. (2) In these poems, he reinvents medieval romance legends and does so far more beautifully, some say, than Tennyson had done in the "pale and anaemic" (3) Idylls of the King, the first installment of which was published only a year after The Defence. (4) Yet, because Tennyson's Idylls earned a far kinder response from the critics than did Morris' Defence, (5) Morris' confession to Coronio may have been nothing more than a moment of bitterness remaining from Tennyson's previous success. In an earlier letter written on August 12, 1869 to Edward Williams Byron Nicholson who, as an undergraduate at Oxford, sought Morris' advice for the creation of a magazine, Morris expresses his specific love for a few of Tennyson's poems: Don't think it ungracious if I take you to task for falling upon Tennyson, who after all is a great poet ... it is always unfair to judge a man by any but his best works ... I say this is much more like to be the case with a lyrical poet than any other; I allow as a matter of course that Tennyson has little or no dramatic capacity, not enough for him to write even narrative poetry with success But if you think of the finish of In Memoriam, the pathos and feeling of the May Queen the delicate sentiment of Mariana, you must surely allow that he is a great poet. (Collected Letters, l:86)