‘Why should it look like Maud?': playing with Tennyson in twentieth-century women's poetry

Abstract

Tribute, parody, and travesty are often close companions in early 20th-century reworkings of Tennyson by female poets. The Idylls of the King are rejected in favour of fiddle-playing in Dorothy Parker’s epigram (1928), while the drooping peacocks of The Princess are just ‘pulling the same old line / Over again’ in her ‘Monody’. ‘The Dying Swan’ becomes Stevie Smith’s ‘The Bereaved Swan’ (1937), hopeless, comic, and without grace, while ‘The Lady of Shallot’ finds a pale reflection in Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘The Gentleman of Shallot’ (1936), with his enfeebled sign-off of ‘half is enough’. This cluster of lampoons or wry rewritings suggests the tendency to make Tennyson into a figure of fun in the 1930s.
However, these are also examples of poets at the beginning of their careers, and in this article I will argue that Parker, Smith, and Bishop’s parodies were early dismissals that belie a deep engagement not just with Tennyson’s work, but his poetic career, and its undulating critical reception. In markedly different ways, all three will return to Tennyson to navigate their expectations or understanding of poetry both as a vocation, and a profession. Tennyson’s own work was retrospective from its outset – as Dinah Birch notes, his ‘reflections on the past begin so early that in his maturity they become one of the things he has to remember’. For these poets, reflecting on and parodying Tennyson at the start of their careers offered a means of asking their readers to forget him, while making sure they kept him close.

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