Thread: Alfred, Lord Tennyson

I'm very fond of the vigorous poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. I realize that he's not all that popular these days.

I periodically re-read his Idylls of the King. He's also the author of "Charge of the Light Brigade" which I once showed to a friend who claimed not to like or understand poetry and he loved it instantly.

Is there anyone else out here with my kind of old fashioned taste and a love for Tennyson?

I indulge in a little Alfred from time to time. He's one of the few poets I have a book by. The Kraken is my favorite but then I'm a Lovecraftian. Go figure.

Tennyson, Kipling, Lindsay, Byron, Longfellow... the bygone day of the recitable poem.
I always loved this stuff. Most people do, actually, it's just been "declassed" by the constipated academy-based cabal that has taken over poetry, ripped it out of the hands of the common man, and declared it some esoteric property only the over-educated can understand.

I could, at one time, recite the "Light Brigade" (and Kipling's "The Last of the Light Brigade").
Kipling, by the way, was totally degraded by academia, not only for writing rhymic, metric poems, but for being an "imperialist"--if you can image a Brit in love with the Raj falling into the trap of describing his own milieu--but there is currently a resurgence and reinstatement. If you don't like Kipling, it's probably because you never kipled.

Rolling iambic pentameter is good for people. These guys were the rock stars of their day. They would do tours where thousands of people came to hear them, had groupies, stirred the love life and political outrage of millions.

In fact, one of the reasons this kind of poetry lost ground (apart from the academic/industrial complex grab) was the rise of the rock lyric as the poetic gesture of the time, and even the whole popular impact of recorded music and the common man started having a phonograph in his house, instead of a few treasured tomes of verse. Just as painting recoiled into abstraction and pointlessness becasue photography could handle the mimesis cheaper and easier, lyric poetry retreated from the unbiquitous lyrics into it's current obscurity and preciousness.

The thing is, reading words like "she walks in beauty like the night" or "the splendor falls on castle walls" or "you may talk of gin and beer when you're quartered safe out here" still have the power of conquest. They've just convince people they don't.

I have always favored poetry that rolled off the tongue. It begs to be read aloud. I think that academia's quest for obscurity is responsible for much of the reaction I get when I mention poetry to a lot of people: "I just don't get poetry."

I like Kipling also. His fiction as well as his poetry. I am currently re-reading "Kim"

Exactly. They've convinced the general public that poetry is some sort of exotic thing you need years of education to understand.
Just like the commercial art biz has convinced them that you need to be educated to appreciate painting and therefore it's your fault if you don't see why anybody would want a lucite box full of used tampons covering their living room wall.

It gets really disgusting when you get around the academic world and watch them beat this into freshman poets and painters.

I fully agree. I have seen a lot of good work over the years by genre poets, but even there you begin to see 'poetry' that is just prose with fancy formats. I think that academia has ruined a lot of things for the general public.

I hate to say it, but what has really replaced this sort of poem in the niche of human need is hiphop.
What you have there (stripped of the ugliness and posing) is basically stories being told in a rolling meter.

It's ironic that you mention it. I keep telling people that it is not singing, but chanting and they get freaked with me. The rolling meter is intense in hiphop. I don't like it, I don't listen to it. But it is definitely meter. I listen to classical, new age, and sound tracks mostly. That makes me a raving lunatic fuddy-duddy. I really think that meter needs to make a comeback in poetry. People are so unused to using it now that they usually end up with something that is very strained.

One thing somebody might say about this is something along the lines of , "If high culture abandons ballad poetry, it just seeps up out of the gutter"

I like that. I would like to think that ballad poetry will never really die. I love it.

Another odd survival I ran into was in prison, where big tough biker white racist gang guys just love poetry.
Well, ballads kind of in the gesture of Robert W. Service. "At night I ride my white horse" kind of stuff. I remember a really long one based on the "Beverly Hillbillies" theme.
"And all his witnesses turned up late
(Dead that is)
(And good riddance)"

They'd like pay cigarettes for this stuff, send it to their old lady. In envelopes decorated with all this clock/calendar/wire/warrior/maiden artwork. I used to say prison is one of the few places traditional artists and poets can make a living anymore.

Unpopular? How could Tennyson ever be unpopular. If he's unpopular it's because the world has been made dumb with too fat tongues that do not roll but lisp.

You've got to be yanking my chain, Lin. That is just so very outre to think of. And, Player, it does seem like we're in a cycle where the powers that be are very much skewed toward poetry that fails to be true to the heart of what I think poetry is. Like Tennyson. The old fashioned gets tossed out like the baby with the bath water. I've been told that there are two schools of thought in poetry in academic circles. One that favors the older styles (meter and rhyme) and one that goes toward the total free verse end. It's probably cyclic (most things are) and right now the latter group seems to hold the upper hand. Keats, Yates, and Wordsworth are far more highly regarded than the ballad poetry of Tennyson, mostly because of the philosophy of what they wrote, despite the styles they were written in. But I love balladry in poetry. Give me a story in highly charged verse, meter and rhyme.

I find Tennyson very appealing, regardless of the age. He did say "It is better to have love and lost, than never to have loved at all."

My favorite poem is a free verse poem, from Langston Hughes. The Dream Keeper. "Give me your dreams you dreamers, that I may wrap them in a blue cloud cloth away from the too rough fingers of the world.." It's brief and it's free verse, but I think that there is room in this world for Hughes and Tennyson and Gray who I all hold in high esteem. To me, poetry is not rarefied air it's the revelations of the air we breath and take for granted. Commenting on a thing doesn't make it any more remarkable than it already was. But realizing how remarkable the world is can make you a great poet. I don't think it matters if your writing in free verse on in iambic pentameter as long as your revealing something enduring with your words and the simple fact is that Tennyson endures.