Respect Without Love
[ HAD a feeling when listening to the Tennyson Book of Verse programme from 2YA the other evening that the compiler of the talk was not a Tennysonian. He was careful to pay homage to Tennyson the Craftsman, thus by implication denying his right to a place among the truly great, to apply to him his own tribute to Virgil-"landscape-lover and lord of language"-while stripping verisimilitude from his contemporaries’ vision of him as the Lucretius of the age. Kenneth Muir, in his essay Heirs of Shelley says of Tennyson that he "acquired unequalled popularity by advocating progress in the abstract and reaction in the concrete.’’ The writer of this talk does not go as far as this, but you detect in him a definite puzzlement at Tennyson’s lack of social consciousness. I liked his theory of the conflicting forces in Tennyson’s poetry, the war
of Public Voice with Private Voice, the war of Garden with Wild. But I feel that no true admirer of Tennyson would have allowed so much of the programme to be devoted to the Lotus-Eaters, nor have collaborated with a reader who intoned rather than spoke his lines. The general impression given by the programme was that we had come to bury Tennyson, not to praise him.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19460920.2.27.3
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 378, 20 September 1946, Page 14
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213Respect Without Love New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 378, 20 September 1946, Page 14
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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