Tennyson’s Weeper Revisited – «Tears, Idle Tears» in Context

Abstract

The article responds to one of the key books of new critical interpretation and theory, Cleanth Brooks’ The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry where the whole chapter «The Motivation of Tennyson’s Weeper» is devoted to Tennyson’s short lyric «Tears, Idle Tears». Brooks treated the poem with the conception of the Romantic lyric in mind as a short poem expressing the poet’s own thoughts and feelings, a product of sincerity and spontaneity. The article seeks to consider the lyric in its original context, that is as a part of a longer verse narrative The Princess from which it was extracted. When analysed in context, «Tears, Idle Tears” can be discussed as a retreat from the Romantic self-expressive poetics and may be an apt example of an earlier conception of the lyric as a dramatic performance and a communal activity.