Top 6 - Alfred Tennyson

Andrew Motion on Tennyson, Royal Marines Museum, Portsmouth, June 23.

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Andrew Motion presented his personal appreciation of one of his laureate predecessors in the fine surroundings of the Royal Marines Museum with views of the Solent across to Tennyson's Isle of Wight just out of the windows, over there.

He began by noting the surprising proximity of the dates of birth of Tennyson and Keats, given our perceptions of them now as representing very different ages. It was Hallam who switched Tennyson on to Keats, who only sold 200 books in his brief lifetime, and although they have a fascination with similar themes and exist in the same tradition, they are different in sensibility, Keats liking poems to press towards a conclusion while Tennyson's occur at a moment before something dramatic is about to happen.

He noted the ghost of Shakespeare in Ulysses and echoes of Homer throughout, but also a tendency in earlier Tennyson towards generalization, a consensus, that might sound glib to modern ears that has been overcome by the time of maturer poems like Audley Court.

Motion's best piece of literary critisim came in his finding in this, his favourite Tennyson poem, a pleasant feeling of being within a current moment yet of vulnerability to geological scales of time.

In In Memoriam he finds a tenderness in poems about his friend Hallam that is not apparent in poems about women although he was at pains not to suggest that this was homo-erotic in any way we might understand it now.

So, by choosing six Tennyson poems to read, joined together by these biographical and literary notes, Sir Andrew did me a great favour by unwittingly nominating a Top 6 of Lord Alfred, which were The Kraken, Ulysses, Audley Court, In Memoriam, The Princess and Crossing the Bar. But Andrew didn't choose these as a Top 6 and so I mustn't pass it off as such. In fact, perhaps the most moving poem of the evening was when Andrew was prevailed upon to give us one of his own and he chose his tribute to his friend and Tennyson scholar, Mick Imlah.

His manner is modest and careful and increasingly becoming like Prince Charles in a thoughtful mood. A genuine and humane man, he is English in that traditional, understated way that hopefully isn't completely out of fashion yet. He could have said more but he preferred to present more of a poetry reading rather than give a lecture and you don't get to see poets reading other poet's work so often these days. Or I don't, anyway.

So, using Andrew's sound choices to start with, I'll have to insert my personal favourites from the classic Tennyson and select the Top 6 as Mariana, The Lady of Shallott, The Lotos Eaters, Audley Court, In Memoriam, and Tithonus. In fact, I find myself changing most of it with the proviso that Andrew Motion knows much more about Tennyson than I do and, furthermore, my favourite Victorian poet is probably Matthew Arnold and have also always suspected that the corresponding period in French poetry has more to offer.

But none of that takes anything away from a generous and intimate evening, well supported for such an event in Portsmouth and my thanks to Andrew for returning here once more to give us the benefit of his view of this massive figure in English poetry. It's difficult to imagine a poet now being as big a public figure as Tennyson was in his day, not only of genuinely laureate status at the Queen's court but with a wide general readership, not operating as a marginal cultural figure on a university campus known to few beyond the province of specialist magazines and increasingly inward-looking shoe-gazers. If that's a problem for anyone, it would be up to them to wonder why it is so.