Volume 27, Number 20 · December 18, 1980
The All-Star Victorian
By John Bayley
Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart
by Robert Bernard Martin
Oxford University Press, 643 pp., $29.95
The Tennyson Album: A Biography in Original Photographs
by Andrew Wheatcroft
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 160 pp., $25.00
When Tennyson was a young man the French poet Gérard de Nerval used to walk about with a lobster on a lead, observing that 'it doesn't bark and it knows the secrets of the sea.' Such behavior, or variations on it, is wholly familiar and comprehensible where poets are concerned, in any post-romantic age. Eccentricity seeks familiarity, and in obtaining it yields up any claim to be inveterately peculiar. Baudelaire and Dylan Thomas would have understood each other very well, and both of them are on easy terms with the modern spirit in poetry, easy terms with Berryman, with O'Hara, with Lowell, with Pound and Eliot. Eliot was, figuratively speaking, leading his lobster about when he wrote his notes on The Waste Land.
Review, 6562 words
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