Tennyson’s Tears, Brooks’s Motivations

To Cleanth Brooks’s signature argument in The Well Wrought Urn (1947) that “The language of paradox is the language of poetry” and that “paradox” is the expression of a dramatic tension in thinking, experience, and feeling, Tennyson’s Tears, Idle Tears posed a limit case: “Tennyson is perhaps the last English poet one would think of associating with the subtleties of paradox and ambiguity.” A chapter for this Studies in the Structures of Poetry (The Well Wrought Urn’s subtitle), “The Motivation of Tennyson’s Weeper,” looms as critical dramatic monologue about Brooks’s attachment to a lyric of unaccountably arresting power. At once provoking and resisting his professional management, the chapter’s deep humanity stirs in the fissures of the well wrought urn.