The musical aesthetics of the poetry of Tennyson and Browning

This dissertation demonstrates that both Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson were musical poets. Taking its cue from Helen Vendler's definition of aesthetic criticism which, in part, attempts to place a literary work among works of the fine arts, this study is an exercise in aesthetic criticism that attempts to read the poetry with sensitivity to what can be called its musical qualities. The first chapter contextualizes this study by briefly discussing the states of music and musical aesthetics in Victorian England and the musical background of the two poets. Browning and Tennyson are interesting choices for the study of musical qualities in poetry because the one was inordinately knowledgeable, for a poet, about music and the other was relatively ignorant. The second chapter is an attempt to define a system of melopoetics: properties of poetry, such as rhythm, tension, and cadence, that have a direct correlation to an equivalent musical property. The three final chapters are attempts at melopoetic criticism, and study a number of poems by each poet. Chapter 3 studies poems in relation to vocal music, mainly song, but also explores the relationship between the dramatic monologue form and the opera aria. Chapter 4 reads two cycles of poems, The Window and "James Lee's Wife," as song cycles, the first in the German Romantic tradition and the second as an attempt to establish a new, English tradition. A comparison of the melopoetic effects in The Window to Arthur Sullivan's musical setting of the poem reveals Tennyson's self-conscious attempts at musical effects in his poetry. Chapter 5 studies the more difficult relationship between poetry and instrumental music, showing how some poems can be read alongside specific musical forms---"The Two Voices" and the symphonic slow movement, "Audley Court" and the concert overture, "A Toccata of Galuppi's" and the toccata, and "Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha" and the fugue---which the poems at times emulate.