fighting talk collections of the period, Tennyson’s first volume of poetry since taking up the
mantleof Poet Laureate,Maud and Other Poems(1855).
TheOED’s earliest example of the term ‘war poem’ is a reference toMaud.The
example comes from a letter by John Addington Symonds in which he recalled
a lecture he attended: ‘[The speaker] chiefly talked about the two Lushingtons &
Maud which he considers a true war poem & praises highly.’^43 ‘True’ hints at a
debate over values, and the volumes of Henry and Franklin Lushington (friends
of Tennyson) offer one side of the argument. In their work, the war poem is an
incitement to decisive action: ‘For a moment, dearly as we love him, let Hamlet
stand aside: he has but too much to say in Germany: we want Fortinbras just now.’^44
Such positions echoed the views of Carlyle, who in his lecture on ‘The Hero as Poet’
(1841) had explained that ‘the Poet who could merely sit on a chair, and compose
stanzas, would never make a stanza worth much. He could not sing the Heroic
warrior, unless he himself were at least a Heroic warrior too.’^45 Tennyson was
frequently drawn to this classical model of the poet-warrior, and to a conception of
poetry as a form of martial action; as he observed in his Epilogue toThe Charge of
the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava, ‘The song that nerves a nation’s heart|Is in itself a
deed.’^46 Likewise, the speaker of his monodrama takes up Fortinbras’s tone when
he feels able;Maudopens with the protagonist calling for ‘loud war by land and
sea’ (i.i.47),^47 echoes language and arguments from poems by the Lushingtons
and other pro-war collections (war as antidote to domestic commercial greed, as
heroic endeavour, as Christian crusade), and ends when he signs up for the army.
Yet Tennyson was not content to ‘let Hamlet stand aside’. He sawMaudas ‘akin
toHamlet’,^48 and although the poem’s speaker talks a good fight, he also expresses
a need to escape the fighting talk: ‘let a passionless peace be my lot,|Far-off from
the clamour of liars belied in the hubbub of lies’ (i. iv. 151–2). The poem does not
merely reiterate the views of the Lushingtons and the pro-war contingent; it frames
them in a dramatic form that asks readers to consider the paucity of the ‘clamour’
alongside the probity of the speaker’s own chatter. Indeed, the speaker’s longing for
a critical distance often leads him towards a pointed critical engagement. When,
gazing down on a nearby village, he mutters to himself that ‘Jack on his ale-house
bench has as many lies as a Czar’ (i. iv. 110), he draws a comparison between a
(^43) John Addington Symonds to Charlotte Symonds,? May 1857, inThe Letters of John Addington
Symonds, i, ed. Herbert M. Schueller and Robert L. Peters (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1967), 105. 44
Henry and Franklin Lushington, ‘Preface’, inLa Nation Boutiqui`ere & Other Poems Chiefly
Political and Points of War(Cambridge: Macmillan, 1855), p. xxv.
(^45) Thomas Carlyle,Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in Literature(London: Dent, 1908), 312.
(^46) Tennyson, ‘Epilogue’, inCharge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava,inThe Poems of Tennyson, iii,
ed. Christopher Ricks, 2nd edn. (London: Longman, 1987), 97.
(^47) Tennyson,Maud,inPoems of Tennyson, ii. 513–84.
(^48) Tennyson, in conversation with James Knowles, quoted in Gordon N. Ray,Tennyson Reads
Maud(Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 1968), 23.