(DOWNLOAD) "Delirious Bulldogs and Nasty Crockery: Tennyson As Nonsense Poet (Alfred Tennyson) (Critical Essay)" by Victorian Poetry # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Delirious Bulldogs and Nasty Crockery: Tennyson As Nonsense Poet (Alfred Tennyson) (Critical Essay)
- Author : Victorian Poetry
- Release Date : January 22, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 228 KB
Description
In concluding his 1833 essay "The Two Kinds of Poetry," John Stuart Mill turns to the role of the critic and suggests that, just as a person must be possessed of a certain amount of feeling and philosophy to be poet, so a critic must be possessed of those same qualities to be able to recognize poetry: Mill's remark about how an ill-equipped critic is likely to respond to poetry is a return to his essay "What is Poetry?," published earlier that year, in which he agrees with Wordsworth's "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads that the opposite of poetry is "not prose, but matter of fact or science." (2) In both instances, Mill's explicit exclusion of prose from his discussion of poetry bespeaks his conviction that poetry is not a form or a genre, but a mode of knowledge. By replacing prose with science as poetry's opposite Mill admits the sameness of poetry and science as well as their difference: they are polar extremes of a common spectrum. In the same way, by suggesting that poetry is most likely to be mistaken for exaggeration, mysticism, or nonsense, Mill implies, perhaps unwittingly, the common life of poetry and nonsense. To say that nonsense is poetry that has not been recognized, or that poetry is nonsense with a sympathetic readership, would be wilfully to misread Mill. However, Mill's belief that, on first encountering a piece of writing, a reader might recognize its poetry before being fully confident of its meaning does suggest that poetry stands at a certain remove from sense, that a poem might make nonsense before it makes sense. This article seeks to explore the relationship suggested by Mill between poetry and nonsense through a discussion of Edward Lear's reading of Tennyson. When Lear, after reading the poem that Tennyson dedicated to him, wrote a parody of it that pronounced "This is nonsense," he was accurately identifying in Tennyson the want of sense that makes room for poetry.