Tennyson and Geology

Poetry and Poetics

Michelle Geric

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9783319661094
• eBook ISBN: 9783319661100
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book offers new interpretations of Tennyson's major poems along-side contemporary geology, and specifically Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830-3). Employing various approaches – from close readings of both the poetic and geological texts, historical contextualisation and the application of Bakhtin's concept of dialogism – the bookdemonstrates not only the significance of geology for Tennyson's poetry, but the vital import of Tennyson's poetics in explicating the implications of geology for the nineteenth century and beyond. Gender ideologies in The Princess (1847) are read via High Miller's geology, while the writings of Lyell and other contemporary geologist, comparative anatomists and language theorists are examined along-side In Memoriam (1851) and Maud (1855). The book argues that Tennyson's experimentation with Lyell's geology produced a remarkable 'uniformitarian' poetics that is best understood via Bakhtinian theory; a poetics that reveals the seminal role methodologies in geology played in the development ofdivisions between science and culture, and that also, quite profoundly, anticipates the crisis in language later associated with the linguistic turn of the twentieth century.

© The Author(s) 2017

M. GericTennyson and GeologyPalgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicinehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66110-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Michelle Geric¹

(1)

University of Westminster, London, UK

Michelle Geric

Email: [email protected]

no other object in the universe dominates human perception to the extent of the Earth. This dominion is all the more powerful because it is unperceived; the Earth provides the fabric on which all experience is located.

Robert Muir Wood, The Dark Side of the Earth (1985), 7.

End Abstract

Tennyson had an enduring interest in geology, which has long been known by students and scholars of literary studies. As part of a broad introduction to nineteenth-century literature, students routinely study In Memoriam’s ‘geological stanzas’ as evidence of both Tennyson’s engagement with geology and its significance for Victorian religious belief; those “dreadful hammers” of which Ruskin complained.¹ The role played by geology in Tennyson’s poetic imagination—taking In Memoriam as the usual example—has had much attention. Excavated dinosaur fossils recovered from “scarped cliff and quarried stone” reveal how ‘Nature’ “care[s] for nothing”, while the “hills” that are “shadows” and that “flow / From form to form” demonstrate Tennyson’s knowledge of contemporary ideas of geomorphology and specifically the uniformitarianism expounded by Charles Lyell in his Principles of Geology (1830–1833). Tennyson’s knowledge of Lyell’s Principles and its significance for his poetic thinking has been documented by literary critics for at least the past sixty years.² However, Lyell’s geology, and geology generally, has nearly always been read in conjunction with In Memoriam (1851), and in consequence, the extent to which it figures in other poems has not yet been fully appreciated. This study examines Tennyson’s treatment of geology over an extended period across his three major mid-century poems, The Princess (1847), In Memoriam and Maud (1855). It argues that Tennyson’s poetics specifically and consistently engaged with geological patterns of thinking, theories and ideas in and around geological time and the reading of fossil remains . When Tennyson’s three poems are read together, this book claims, they can be seen to cohere in striking ways. One reason why the extent of the geology has not been fully appreciated is that it operates not only at the level of idea, image and metaphor but also at structural levels, and as deep structure it works powerfully but largely imperceptibly. Just as the earth itself “provides the fabric on which all experience is located”, geological structures and patterns of change order the internal logic of the poems, shaping the poetic expression and dictating the ways in which the drama of each poem unfolds.

Alongside Tennyson’s poems, this book also pays close attention to Lyell’s Principles of Geology as an understanding of Lyell’s text is crucial to an appreciation of the poetics of In Memoriam and Maud . However, debates in and around the works of other writers, geologists, polymaths and comparative anatomists, such as William Whewell, Hugh Miller , William Buckland , Adam Sedgwick , Gideon Mantell , Robert Chambers, Richard Owen and Richard Chenevix Trench also figure in readings of the poems, and an awareness of Tennyson’s understanding of the ideas of these writers and theorists modifies and enhances the perception of how and why Lyellian geology was so important to Tennyson’s poetic thinking.³ Chapter 2, for example, argues that Hugh Miller’s much-neglected (in terms of Tennyson’s writing) The Old Red Sandstone (1841) was seminal for Tennyson’s geological thinking and that it figures significantly in The Princess’s validation of contemporary gender ideologies. The less certain ideological territory of In Memoriam and Maud indicates the move away from the firmly theological epistemological grounds of Miller’s geology to the shifting landscape of Lyell’s Principles and its ‘uniformitarian’ vision of change. Thus, The Princess , In Memoriam and Maud can be seen to plot an increasingly radical movement from the geological and ideological confidence of The Princess, to In Memoriam’s Lyellian expression of doubt and division, and on to the geologically initiated crisis in language and meaning that characterises Maud.

Tennyson’s engagement with geology demonstrates the significance of geological language and ideas for the period, while it also illuminates the importance of poetic language in explicating the meanings and implications of geological discoveries for mid-nineteenth century thinking in philosophy, theology, and specifically for this study, for theories of the origin and nature of language. Thus, close attention to the poems and contemporary geological discourses not only enriches the understanding of Tennyson’s work but also adds to the understanding of the significance of early geological science for the nineteenth century and beyond. Crucially, a close examination of Tennyson and geology also offers a remarkable insight into the origins of the bifurcation of literature and science and the emergence of science writing as a distinctly separate form, as the poems chart a crisis in the assumption of the seamlessness of literary and scientific ways of knowing. In this, the poems are important not solely as aesthetic productions or as texts read within their contexts but as sites of experimentation and creativity where new geological thinking finds its wider significance and where new forms of knowing and experiencing are forged. While the focus of this study is mainly on the poetry, the geological texts are, of course, equally important in understanding this bifurcation. Reading the poetry and the geology together, the study argues, shows how they map a vital cultural shift in the history of the development of modern epistemologies.

There has been much exciting academic activity in the field of nineteenth-century literature and science in the last decade. In the area of poetry and science, there have been a number of seminal studies (Holmes 2009; Tate 2012; Brown 2013) and also in nineteenth-century literature and geology (O’Connor 2007; Buckland 2013).⁴ Most scholarship, however, has taken an historicist approach, while Noah Heringman’s nuanced study of Romantic poetry and geology, Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology (2004), stands out as offering a theoretically inflected approach that addresses the origins of Romantic ways of knowing and persuasively argues that Romanticism and geology both “spring from a common source, landscape aesthetics”.⁵ The approach to Tennyson’s poems and geology in this book makes use of a range of literary critical practices, combining historical contextualisation with close readings, but also drawing on modern literary theory and specifically Mikhail Bakhtin’s model of dialogism . Theory, however, is not merely projected back onto the nineteenth-century texts as a way of understanding them via new paradigms. Rather, it is there to demonstrate the part that these poetic and geologic texts played in originating modern theory itself. Thus, one of the broadest arguments of this book is that a close examination of these texts adds to the understanding of the formation of modern critical thinking and specifically early twentieth-century language theory, as will be discussed.

This introductory first chapter begins by discussing some of the issues concerning reading literature and science together. It looks briefly at the ‘two cultures’ debate and at how the texts here studied—poetic and geological—are seminal themselves in the development of what we now think of as ‘two cultures’. As the connections between geology and contemporary language theory are important for the book’s larger argument, the introduction outlines the crucial concepts and debates around language that the texts were part of. Following this, it sets in place some of the ideas involved in reading ‘remains’—geological or otherwise—in Tennyson’s poems. Finally, as a preamble to Chap. 2’s analysis of The Princess , Hugh Miller’s The Old Red Sandstone (1841) is examined as Miller’s popular theologically orientated geology figures prominently in The Princess , and an understanding of how it operates in the poem helps to bring into relief the heterodoxy of Lyell’s geology.

Tennyson, Literature and Science

Studying literature and science at a time when these categories are being founded raises many issues concerning their relationship. As Gillian Beer demonstrated (1983, 1996) the flow of ideas between literature and science is not a “one-way traffic”; literature does not “act as a mediator for a topic (science) that precedes it and that remains intact after its re-presentation”. Rather, “Scientific and literary discourses overlap” albeit “unstably”. Beer draws attention to the way ideas shape and re-shape themselves as they move through discourses, and in turn, shape and re-shape human thought, suggesting, much “is to be gained from analysing the transformations that occur when ideas change creative context and encounter fresh readers”.⁶ Beer’s ground-breaking work is still producing fresh insights and how nineteenth-century literature and science relate to each other is still a critical issue in itself.

Ralph O’Connor’s extensive examination of geology, poetry and the scientific imagination, The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802–1856 (2007), makes a number of critical points about how literature and science might be read together. One of his aims is to address what he sees as a bias in literary criticism towards the literary text as the central form worthy of analysis. What he calls “the ‘poet x and science y’ framework”, in which “Literature represents the centre and science one of several possible peripheries, supplying the raw material for poetic production”. O’Connor offers the title of Dennis R. Dean’s meticulous study of Tennyson’s geological sources, Tennyson and Geology, as one example of what the x y framework tends to look like.⁷ The present work, of course, is exactly that too—Tennyson and Geology—and the focus of this book is, mainly, the poetic texts. However, this study moves beyond the formula O’Connor discusses. The geologic texts are not seen as peripheral, nor as merely the source of poetic embellishment. Rather, one of the aims of this study is to apply to all texts, poetic and geologic, the same level of literary critical awareness. Thus, Chap. 3 scrutinises Lyell’s Principles with the same attention to literary and rhetorical device as given to Tennyson’s poems. But the study also aims to examine the ways in which the poetry interrogates the use of literary device in Lyell’s geological text. Tennyson’s reading of geology produced poems that were not merely passive receptacles of geological ideas, just as geological discourses were not merely sources for new metaphors. The poems test out the fitness of geological concepts, processes and patterns of change by probing the logic and intelligence of the metaphoric structuring used by those writing about geology, and in doing so they extend and develop the meaning of geology. They do not merely record particular intellectual shifts occurring in the period or document the cultural assimilation of things happening in geology. The poetry played a role in giving geology cultural meaning while it also helped explain geology to itself.

O’Connor also usefully questions the assumption that the “period between 1780 and 1820” saw a “watershed” in the relationship between literature and science “culminating in a divorce”. Rather, O’Connor argues for the “glacial slowness of this metamorphosis”, which, by 1820 “had hardly begun”. For this reason, he argues, “we need to stop thinking in terms of ‘given’ dichotomies such as ‘science and literary writings’”, as “for at least the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, this distinction cannot be assumed”.⁸ Thus, as the specific set of value systems that created our pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Between a Rock and a Hard Place
• 2. Ida’s Footprint in the Sand: The Princess, Geology and the Extinction of Feminism
• 3. “Uniformitarian Arguments Are Negative Only”: Lyell and Whewell
• 4. In Memoriam’s Uniformitarian Poetics
• 5. Reading Maud’s Remains: Geological Processes and Palaeontological Reconstructions
• 6. Maud and the Unmeaning of Names: Geology, Language Theory and Dialogism
• Back Matter