Alfred Lord Tennyson\'s the Palace

Alfred Lord Tennyson's The Palace Of Art

A good and well-proven way to examine and understand an important piece of literature is read what scholars have written about that piece of literature. This is not to say that just because a professor of English has been teaching and writing about a given artist or poem for years he or she has the best understanding of it. But by comparing the various critic's interpretation of the Palace of Art the reader can in a meaningful way grasp the essence and substance of what the poem is intended to convey.

Indeed, some scholarly critics have been in praise of Tennyson's poem the Palace of Art -- and others have found many reasons to attack it as well. Are there flaws in this work by a literary giant? If there are gaps or if there is any vagueness about it, what are those issues? The problem with critiquing a great piece of literature like a Tennyson poem -- especially for a student or a lay person -- is that it was written many years ago and it is very different from contemporary poetry. But whether the scholars praise or find fault with the Palace of Art, its place in English Literature is secure, Tennyson is an icon in his genre, and this paper will review the poem and utilize scholarly critiques of the poem to provide further analysis.

Boston University Professor of Humanities Christopher Ricks -- a noted scholar and critic of British literature -- asserts that the Palace of Art is characterized by "wordy pretence," "clumsiness," "rhyming wastefulness" and "preciosity," according to an article in Oxford Journals by Richard Cronin (Cronin, 1993, p. 195). Cronin's piece on Tennyson further quotes Ricks saying that the Palace of Art is full of "thoughtless vapidity and impotence" -- and Ricks adds that the poem is "a shallow charade" that Ricks terms in, what Cronin calls "a crushingly brilliant phrase 'the hollow resonance of strenuous affirmation'."

In his book, Tennyson, professor Ricks asserts that Tennyson, despite insisting that the Palace of Art was about a soul that did "love beauty only" -- and a soul that did not see the interrelationship of Beauty, Good, and Knowledge -- did not "explore the interrelationship" between beauty, good, and knowledge in the poem. If a poet says out in front that his work is about a soul that failed to see the relationship between beauty, good and knowledge -- but fails himself to explore those relationships, then the poet has not completed his thematic effort.

Moreover, Ricks' book attacks Tennyson for merely offering that a soul that loves beauty only, and builds for itself a Palace of Art, will fall into "disrepair and self-loathing." The lines in question follow:

I build my soul a lordly pleasure-house,

Wherein at ease for aye to dwell.

On page 87 Ricks states that that use of "lordly pleasure-house" in the opening line is "gimcrack" when compared with the "stately pleasure-dome" of Kubla Khan, a line from the poem Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In other words, Ricks accuses Tennyson with plagiarism, or something close to a rip-off of another poet's work. Using the phrase (with some minor adjustment, e.g., using "lordly" instead of "stately") of another poet is "narrative pomposity," Ricks accuses (Ricks, p. 87). Incidentally, Coleridge's line is from "A Vision in a Dream" -- reportedly written by Coleridge during an opium experience:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

Obviously the Coleridge poem is a far different poem, but meanwhile it was fair game for Ricks to use as backup for his attack on Tennyson. Ricks also takes issue with Tennyson's tenth's stanza: "And high on every peak a statue seemed / to hang on tiptoe, tossing up / a cloud of incense of all odour steamed / From out a golden cup." It is "wordy pretense" Ricks asserts to overlap "high" with "peak" (peaks are high); and it is "clumsy" to write "To hang on tiptoe" and "wasteful" to explain in the poem that the incense went "up" (Ricks says "incense cannot but rise").

Later in the poem when Tennyson references literary giants Shakespeare, John Milton, and Dante, Ricks insists that the lines are not "percipient portraiture" but rather a "shallow charade" (Ricks, p. 87).

Meanwhile, after reviewing what Ricks feels about the Palace of Art, Cronin, Professor of Romantic and Victorian Poetry at the University of Glasgow quotes Herbert Tucker's critique of the Palace of Art. Tucker "…hurries past its 'rather awful' introductory lines to find a poem in which the suitable case for treatment is not the sinful soul but 'the aesthetically torn bourgeois poet who created her'" (Cronin, p. 195). Tucker, who is Professor of English at the University of Virginia, and other scholars have picked away at Tennyson's poem in contemporary times but Cronin says that at the time Tennyson published this work, he received "winning enthusiasm" from his friends at Cambridge University.

On page 201 Cronin describes the "narcissism" in the Palace of Art as "childlike and endearing." And Cronin goes on to say that while the Palace of Art begins and it ends as a "narrative poem," most of the lines throughout the poem have "no narrative connection" linking one stanza to another. Rather, Cronin continues, the stanzas are like pictures in a gallery -- they are all in the same building but very different in tone and imagery. It is well-known that the poem was edited significantly over the years subsequent to its original text, in 1832.

For example, Cronin points out that in the original poem, there was a stanza that described "the maid-mother" (the Virgin with child) -- and the stanza immediately after that one referenced Venus. However, according to Cronin, "Tennyson seems quickly to have decided that so striking a juxtaposition was vulgar" so he changed it (p. 201). Tennyson was a man with an "extraordinary talent as a reviser of his own work" (Cronin, p. 202).

James R. Kincaid is Professor of English at the University of Southern California; he explains that the Palace of Art is "poised between comedy and irony" and though it deals with "a dilemma" that dilemma is "a comic" one. And while life inside the palace is "both wonderful and impossible" it cannot possibly be maintained, Kincaid explains. The soul in the Palace of Art is trying to achieve a "comic satisfaction of self-indulgence," Kincaid continues; but in the process the demands of the social side of the soul are not being met.

There is an initial irony to the poem, Kincaid writes (www.victorianweb.org), as the reader is immediately struck by the "apparent perfection and convincing richness of the palace and the vision it embodies." And while Kincaid sees the opening of the poem as offering an image of "near anarchy, a life of ease, sensuality, and lawlessness," later in the poem the "disorder" is brought under control, Kincaid believes, by the use of the key words, "all is well" (1. 4).

Writing in the Review of English Studies, John Woolford, Professor of English at the University of Sheffield, states that the Palace of Art reflects the fact that Tennyson had wanted to overcome the "social and metaphysical" isolation that comes with the territory when you are a "Post-Romantic poet" (Woolford, 2006). Indeed Woolford believes that the Palace of Art represents a "cultural crisis for the idea of poetry" in that the poem "systematically disrupts linear representation by confusing temporal and perspectival coherence…"

Among the passages that are challenging to relate to -- and there are a number of those in this work -- is the passage in which the narrator (a woman) believes the soul is a mirror of what she sees without ceasing to be who she really is. "All these, from room to room did pass / and all things that she saw, she multiplied / a manyfaced glass / and being both the sower and the seed / Remaining in herself became / All that she saw." Woolford wonders (with justification) -- is each thing she perceives "multiplied by one, at one moment, or many times, in one or many moments?" And is the narrator a "manyfaced glass" simply because she has become the home of all the images she imagines? Moreover, since the sower of seeds has no relation at all to the seeds she sows, how can she be both and still be inside herself? Woolford is not the only critic confused by some of the conflicting images, but the measure of a great poem isn't necessarily whether or not highly intelligent people comprehend the meaning or irony of every line.