Tennyson on the overdone Love of Letters

I should hopefully be able to get back to longer posts on literary ideals this weekend. I'll be busy arranging a presentation on scholastic psychology for a young adult group next week, as well as working on poetry, but I should have time to write another post. In the meantime, I want to share this clever little poem by Tennyson titled 'Poets and their Bibliographies':

Old poets fostered under friendlier skies,
Old Virgil who would write ten lines, they say,
At dawn, and lavish all the golden day
To make them wealthier in his reader's eyes;
And you, old popular Horace, you the wise
Adviser of the nine-years-ponder'd lay,
And you, that wear a wreath of sweeter bay,
Catullus, whose dead songster never dies;
If, glancing downward on the kindly sphere
That once had roll'd you round and round the sun,
You see your Art still shrined in human shelves,
You should be jubilant that you flourished here
Before the Love of Letters, overdone,
Had swampt the sacred poets with themselves.

If I have a problem with this poem, it is only that it turns poetry into something of a religion. In the essay "Christianity and Literature" printed in The Seeing Eye C.S. Lewis points out that there is a common tendency in our history to make a religion out of poetry in absence of true religion. The other side of this is that true religion on the one hand exalts poetry by declaring the Beautiful to be a true object of love ultimately suggesting Divine Beauty, and on the other hand lowers poetry to the level of a human craft by putting the burden of revealing truth and mystery elsewhere. That is to say, it puts poetry in its proper perspective.

Beyond that, I find this to be a delightful little meditation. The body of it is a somewhat run-of-the-mill restatement of the old (and still useful) norm of reverence for ancient authors, but what makes it very interesting to me is the sudden criticism of "Love of Letters, overdone," in the last two lines. I occasionally hear poetry defined in terms of a love of language, a concentration on the sound of words. This is true enough, but becomes very problematic once the love of the sound of language is put in opposition to the content of language. Certainly the form and content together form the meaning, and to love both is a true love of language. I do not know exactly what Tennyson means by "Love of Letters, overdone," but interpreting it as a self-absorbed estheticism certainly explains how it could "swampt the sacred poets with themselves." Another possibility would be that he's referring to excessive criticism at the expense of creative activity, by which process an exaggerated love of letters buries poetry in writings about poetry (I will address this problem in a later post asking whether or not poets ought to be educated). I will not claim to know exactly what Tennyson is getting at, but self-indulgent estheticism was certainly a concern of his. He makes this point brilliantly in the narrative poem 'The Palace of Art,' in which the palace crumbles after separating Beauty from Truth. On the other hand, the reference to "bibliographies" in the title suggests that he may be thinking of excessive learning about poetry by poets who should be sticking to the classics. All of these possibilities can certainly be claimed to be matters of concern for Tennyson, regardless of the exact intention of this poem.

Lastly, I think the description of Virgil is quite a lovely account of the importance of reverence for nature in forming one's talents (I would extend this to all talents, though only poetic gifts are referenced in the poem). Compare Virgil writing just ten lines in the morning to the frantic typing of Kerouac or other peddlers of unedited garbage.