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Marion Shaw's ground-breaking feminist exploration of representations of love and marriage in Tennyson's poetry includes a brilliant reading of The Princess in which Shaw observes that for the majority of the poem, Ida, the poem's princess, is "in many respects [...] the very spirit ofVictorian liberal enlightenment'; but that she is forced to abandon her progressive outlook at the end of the poem when she is "reclaimed into an unredeemed, unaltered marriage relationship' (Shaw, 1988, 47). Shaw argues that this reclamation is "signalled in the question of who controls language; from being a speaker, Ida becomes a listener, from being a poet she becomes the reader of other (men's) poetry' (47). Shaw's acute observation that in assuming the role of wife, Ida also assumes the role of audience, and Shaw's sense that both these roles - of audience, of wife - involve a similar kind of subordination, is the germ of this article. I take it as the starting point for a discussion of Tennyson and attention: the attention that audiences pay, or fail to pay, to Tennyson's poetry and the ways his poetry holds or slips our attention. As Shaw insists, any exploration of attention is also an exploration of power: the power that a poem seeks to exert over its attentive audience and, perhaps, the power that an audience has to grant or withhold its attention. To observe the dynamics of poetic attention I draw on the letters and diary accounts of women who heard Tennyson perform his poetry and consider how they experience and articulate the role that Ida adopts in a way that rethinks attention as a practice of care. These accounts then frame a re-examination of female attention in The Princess, a poem that fashions its own attentive female audience within its framing narrative, modelling a kind of careful, embodied attention for its own readership.
In the popular and critical imagination, it is Tennyson's performance of his poetry, more than his audiences, that has held our attention. How could it not? His physical presence, his voice, his words loom large and sound loud in these scenes of reading. Eric Griffiths and Angela Leighton have dwelt with sensitivity and insight on the way Tennyson's voice sounds through the printed text of...