Question: As a poet, Tennyson is greater than Browning but as a thinker, Browning has left Tennyson far behind. Elucidate.
Or, Never have two products of the same age been so widely diverse as Browning and Tennyson. Discuss.
Or, Compare and contrast Tennyson and Browning as Victorian poets.
Or, Compare and contrast Tennyson and Browning as poets.
Answer: Lord Alfred Tennyson is generally regarded as the most complete and comprehensive poet of the Victorian Age (1832-1901). He has highlighted the Victorian spirit in his poems. He is a pictorial artist and a lyric poet. He used words as a painter employs his brush for conveying the impression of a scene in all its vivid glory and color. In this respect, Tennyson is clearly influenced by Turner. As a lyricist, he expresses his subjective ideas and thoughts in his poems. He is a romantic poet. In this respect, he is greater than Robert Browning. He is a poet of rhythmic and lyrical intensity. But art, painting, and philosophy of life are the main features poetry of Browning. His poetry is also blended with psychological thought. He has given a concrete synthesis of life, a creative and constructive line of thinking. He has made a deep philosophy of life rooted in optimism and faith. So as a thinker, he has left Tennyson behind. He has studied human character deeply in his dramatic monologues more than Tennyson.
Browning is a radiant and cheerful optimist. Optimism is at the very core of his teaching and his view of human life. Contrary to the views of some critics, his optimism is not blind. He does not shut his eyes to the suffering and evil that is in life. It is not a cheap optimism. It is founded on the realities of life. According to Compton Rickett, Browning knows that human life is a bewildering mixture of good and evil. It is a mixture of lovely and ugly. It is also a mixture of despair and hopefulness. But Browning derives hope from every incompleteness and imperfection of life. His optimism is founded on the imperfections of man. He derives hope from human deficiency.
Browning is a passionate adherent to the theory of evolution. His optimism is logically justified by this theory. He believes that life is constantly progressing to higher and higher levels from the lowest creatures. It has advanced to the level represented by a man. Browning is a strong believer of success and failure in human life. He believes that evil is our foe and no victory is possible without this foe. In other words, evil is the opportunity offered to us by the Divine to advance spiritually. Actually, Browning is very much hopeful that evil will help a man achieve moral progress.
Browning is a subtle observer of human psychology. This tendency leads him to write dramatic monologues. He is well-known for this technique of writing. He is the master of this form of writing though he did not invent it. He has perfected it. He is mainly interested in the psychological study of his characters in his dramatic monologues. He has painted the characters of Fra Lippo Lippi, Andrea Del Sarto, a Grammarian, and the lover of Porphyria. He enters the depth of them. He analyses them very deeply. He looks into their emotion, feelings, wants, and desires. He probes every vein of their character. His psycho-analysis has made him a great thinker. His belief in art, painting, and life makes him a philosopher-poet. His psycho-analysis and his theory make him an obscure poet too.
Nowhere does Browning display his inherent power more clearly than in his treatment of love. His treatment of love is original. Unlike most love poets, he is a realist. He does not resort to ideal imagery but makes use of the grotesque in order to express sublime emotions. In this connection, Chesterton has observed “The best and most characteristic of his monologues are poems of love, they express almost to perfection the real wonderland of youth, but they do not express it by the ideal imagery of most poets of love." An eminent critic also observes that Browning's love poetry is the finest in the world. Browning does not talk about raptures and ideals and gates of heaven but about window panes and gloves and garden walls. His poetry does not deal with abstractions. It is the truest of all love poetry because it does not speak much about love. Actually, his love is love between man and woman.
Tennyson is a poet through and through. His treatment of the old legends is remarkable in his poetry. But it must be marked that the legendary characters in his poetry are not like those of Homer. His mythological characters are enriched with the Victorian spirit. He has infused his philosophy of life into his legendary characters. But he has drawn various images as his own. He has created pictures in words as a true poet. He is a great pictorial artist. He is gifted with unrivaled powers of picturing a scene, a landscape, and a person in words marked with clarity and vividness. This art of pictorial painting was learned by the poet quite early in his life by keeping Keats's pictorial paintings as models taken by him. His art is essentially picturesque. He has used words like a painter. Leaving aside Shakespeare, Spenser, and Keats, no poet is able to draw such gorgeous pictures of landscapes as Tennyson does.
Imagery in their poems of Tennyson is life-like and pictorial. The poet has drawn wonderfully the picture in words. He evokes the atmosphere of the medieval castle in a great romantic poem, "Morte D' Arthur”. He depicts the following picture of nature with great beauty-
“On the one side lay the Ocean, and on oneLay a great water, and the moon was full."
The poet has described excellently the magical sword of King Arthur, Excalibur. He narrates a story of the Lady of the Lake and the magnificence of the sword romantically.
Tennyson is a romantic poet. His poetry is marked by many striking characteristics of romanticism. He shares much more than Browning in the direct propagation of romanticism. In this sense, he is subjective and a great lyricist. His idea or philosophy has been stained with his subjective thoughts. He is able to create a deep sense of music in his poems. Elegiac touch and a note of pathos give his poems an air of romanticism. Melancholy and sadness stain his poems with individuality. Therefore, Tennyson is able to touch the heart of man easily. He rings out the inevitable music of common humanity in his poems. In this respect, he has left Browning behind.
To sum up, we can say that Tennyson represented the Victorian Period. He highlights the spirit of his time. As a true poet, - he has tried to come close to the Victorian people. He sings the songs that the people of his age require. But Browning turns back his face from the spirit of his age. He lives in the rainbow world of the Italian Renaissance. He is attracted to Italian art, culture, and painting. He has also given us certain and definite convictions about God as well as the soul and the future state. A number of critics regard him merely as a philosophic poet and not an artist. They often charge him only as a logician but not a poet. So as a poet, Tennyson is greater than Browning but as a thinker, Browning has left Tennyson far behind. Never have two products of the same age been so widely diverse as Browning and Tennyson. But we should not forget that Tennyson's poetry also represents the social, political, moral, philosophical, and religious problems of his time.
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