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Facing critical disapproval, Alfred Tennyson revised or suppressed many of the pieces in his early volumes Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832). But before he did so, they were full of conspicuously unhyphenated neologisms (“palecold,” “upburning,” “tendriltwine”). These original compounds both symptomatize and oppose the forces of flux and mutability that their author fears are shaping the natural world. On the one hand, a word like “fountainpregnant,” with its prematurely eroded hyphen, reflects a landscape and a wordscape that are molded into unfamiliar shapes. But on the other hand, in exercising individual control over such linguistic alteration, Tennyson resists the influence of inexorable and impersonal forces. To borrow two words, coined by Tennyson’s tutor William Whewell, that apply to both geology and philology: a neologism might represent a moment of defiantly idiosyncratic catastrophism (sudden transformation) in a seemingly uniformitarian world (one shaped by gradual, non-purposive, ongoing transformation). Tennyson’s work may thus point to a teleological model of language change that echoes his troubled but persistent belief in divine providence.

Bio

Veronica Alfano is a Lecturer in the Discipline of Literature at Macquarie University. She specialises in Victorian poetry and poetics, with particular interests in lyric theory, gender and sexuality, memory, and media studies. Her first book is titled The Lyric in Victorian Memory: Poetic Remembering and Forgetting from Tennyson to Housman. With Erik Gray, she is the co-editor of Victorian Poetry: An Anthology, which came out earlier this year with Broadview. She is currently working on a monograph, forthcoming from Ohio University Press, that examines neologisms in the work of Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edward Lear, and others.