Tennyson's Method of Composition
There stands the list, ordered according to the repositories in which
the documents now lie. Such an organization in itself indicates the next
problem to be faced. How do these various scraps of paper, small blue
note-books, tattered proof sheets covered with printer's scrawls, how do
they all fit together into the final completed poem which we now know as
the Idylls of the King? The question is one of chronology,
and
will be answered with a short history of the poem itself, into which each
document can be fitted. The authority for the chronology is purely textual.
Every manuscript, proof sheet and edition has been collated with the final
version and compared with its fellows, following the theory that as an
individual text
diverges from the final version more and more, it can be considered to
come earlier and earlier in the history of the poem.
But before we begin we must consider how Tennyson set about
writing poetry. Once we know something about his methods of composition,
we will be able to readily understand the relationships among these
scattered and confused sources.
Tennyson was a man who did much of his work in his
head—he
was not addicted to scratch pads and doodling. He would begin a new work
with a period of brooding which, for his longer works, could last for
months. In his later years he described this habit to a friend. "I can always
write," he said, 'when I see my subject, though sometimes I spend three
quarters of a year without putting pen to paper."[7] Such a practice rules out the
possibility
that we will discover in the manuscripts a large number of false-starts and
half-formed conceptions.
Only when he had roughed out the entire pattern of the poem, when
he could "see" it, would Tennyson begin the work of versification. This too
began mentally, either during certain hours which he formally set aside for
composition, or during his long rambles about the downs of the Isle of
Wight. He would begin, his son tells us, with a "single phrase" which he
would "roll about" in his head, over and over, elaborating it into poetry
(Mem., I, 268). As he worked he muttered the lines aloud,
testing their sound and feel; his was always a "verbal" poetry
(Ibid., p. 378). At this stage the poem was in a remarkably
fluid state. As a friend of his tells us, "he might say aloud and almost as it
were to himself, some passage he had just made, but seldom twice in the
same words, and unless written down at once, the first and original form
of it was lost or 'improved'" (Knowles, p. 168). It is at this point in his
creative process that Tennyson would begin jotting down his
lines. The overall plan was established and he was creating poetry to fit that
plan. As it came to him he would write it down, even if, as was often the
case, he had only two or three lines ready. It seems evident from the
confusion of his notebooks that he did not work through his poems from the
first line to the last, creating them in sequence. Rather, he would work on
whatever passage or scene seemed "ready" for composition. The end result
of this method is the jumbled state of the earliest drafts which have
survived. These are usually scattered across the pages without order or
pattern and frequently appear in a scrawl which clearly mirrors its writer's
hurry.
As he continued to work Tennyson would commence molding these
random scraps together into a continuous narrative, altering phrases, lines,
sometimes entire blocks of lines. Though the overall patterns persist, minor
characters and incidental scenes appear and dissolve as the final poem
begins to emerge. Sir Lamorack falls into shadow; elsewhere, Sir Bors
appears. The final text is, in fact, the product of relentless and persistent
craft. Though Tennyson may have labored hours shaping a line, he is
merciless with his creations, and again and again he will chip and patch,
write and rewrite, cut or expand. For some poems we have draft after draft,
each filled with new revisions, some of which seem to us as perhaps
inordinately picayune, but which to Tennyson were, in fact, of equal
importance to the cancellation of an entire passage. When Tennyson began
working on his second set of four
Idylls he turned to a new
compositional procedure. The process of slowly molding scraps of poetry
in his head was evidently enormously taxing, and consequently he began to
write out prose drafts of his poems before the actual versification.
Most of the manuscripts, both prose and verse, which have survived,
are on a variety of pale blue paper of which Tennyson was fond. He
purchased this paper unbound and worked on it in quires, often ripping out
pages if he was dissatisfied. As the work progressed from fragmentary
scraps to continuous narrative, he would begin writing on only the right
hand page, reserving the left for the inevitable alterations and additions. In
this manner he was sometimes able (e.g. in the Trinity "Enid" [CT-30]) to
assemble pages from various drafts into a fair copy. When the poem was
finished his wife would frequently sew the pages into small "notebooks"
and hand cover them with marbled boards and orange-red spines.
Following the final manuscript draft would come the spate of proof
sheets, over which Tennyson worked with great care. While he was writing
out his poetry in manuscript Tennyson never concerned himself with
punctuation. Many times he would write on for lines without a single
punctuation mark, frequently even neglecting to capitalize the first word of
a sentence. He was a wealthy and successful poet by the time he actually
began the Idylls, and his publishers were evidently happy to
cater to what must have been his expensive preference. The slightly
punctuated manuscripts would be sent to the typesetter whose proof sheets
became the ground on which Tennyson worked out his punctuation. Because
he was such a perfectionist this could often be an extended process in itself.
The most extreme example is "Merlin and Vivien" which went through five
different versions of proof before it was finally set up and sent to the
printer. Years later, when preparing "Gareth and Lynette,"
Tennyson reduced the number of proof states he needed, but heavily
corrected two different copies of the same proof state, evidently trying to
get the punctuation "right" on the first try. Even then he required two more
proof states before the actual first edition was set up.
This scrupulosity, this endless nagging concern for his poems drove
Tennyson to tinker at them even after they were finally placed under the
public gaze. In virtually every new edition of his Idylls
Tennyson would make alterations, generally in punctuation, but sometimes
in word choice as well. For this reason, no copy of the poem printed during
his life matches the final version, published only after his death. His epic
was in
fact in a state of endless alteration, until finally death itself came to halt the
tinkering.
