An Application For Lariatship

Dear Mrs. Queen Victory

     Your honored Ladies boat;

Excuse my seemin’ boldness

     In sendin’ you this note;

But lately in the papers

     They’ve be’n a-tellin’ that

You’re troubled some in gittin’

     A poet lariat’.

To me that soun’s some cu’rus,

     They mus’ be poets there;

But then, you know your business,

     An’ want one purty fair;

An’ so I’ve be’n a-thinkin’

     How would it do to bring

One frum acrost the water

     Them royal songs to sing.

Please unnerstan’ your upness,

     This is a mere suggest;

I wouldn’ try to infloontz

     Do what you think is best.

I’ve put this note in rhymin’,

     My genius to expose;

An’ if you send fur someone,

     It might be me, who knows?

Aug. 1, ‘94

Pub. in B. Courier,

Aug. 12, ‘94

There was a major controversy in the British literary world as to who should succeed Alfred, Lord Tennyson as Poet Lauriate. It began upon his death on Oct. 6, 1892, and lasted into 1896:

Even before Tennyson died in October 1892, speculation had begun about the next poet laureate and the future of the office.  As early as May 1890 the Fortnightly Review published an anonymous assessment, “Tennyson: And After?” which praised the high achievement of the nineteenth-century laureates, Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, and Alfred Tennyson, and wondered whether any modern poet had comparable merit.  The Fortnightly named the obvious candidates, as well as many less likely: Algernon Swinburne and William Morris, the most worthy poetically; George Meredith, Lord Lytton (“Owen Meredith”), Coventry Patmore, Edwin Arnold, Andrew Lang, and Austin Dobson, capable but less distinguished; Augusta Webster, Christina Rossetti, and F. Mary Robinson, chief among the women poets; and Lewis Morris and Alfred Austin, acknowledged contenders but dismissed by the Fortnightly as imaginatively and technically inferior. In this assessment, repeated in the Review of Reviews and debated for the next five years in the periodical press, Swinburne emerges as the first choice. As the Fortnightly concludes, “scarcely another English poet can be named who has written so few faulty or unmelodious lines, and surely none who has more enriched and enlarged our resources of lyrical metre, or more nobly maintained the dignity of our dramatic blank verse”.

Poets and periodical writers recognized, however, that a laureate was chosen not simply for high literary merit.  The office represented an intersection of poetry and politics; it was a royal appointment as “Poet Laureate to Her Majesty” and had traditionally required odes celebrating the monarch and English nation. Earlier in Victoria’s reign, Prince Albert had recommended Alfred Tennyson to his wife based primarily on the quality of In Memoriam, with Lord John Russell, then Prime Minister, acquiescing; now it was assumed that the prime minister would exercise greater control in recommending a candidate to his sovereign. But on what basis? If politics dominated, then the recommendation might be troublesome in the unstable parliamentary conditions of the 1890’s: an aging William Gladstone (Liberal) had returned as prime minister in August 1892, just before Tennyson’s death, but was soon displaced by Lord Rosebery (Liberal) in March 1894 and then by Lord Salisbury (Conservative) in July 1895. Indeed, for both Liberals and Conservatives, the best poets might be disqualified: William Morris as a “Radical of the Radicals” and “a preacher of Socialist homilies” or Algernon Swinburne as the controversial poet of Poems and Ballads, Republican glorifier of risorgimento in Songs before Sunrise, and sympathizer with “violent forms of revolt”.

Recognizing the difficulty of aligning good poetry with royal politics, several writers in the periodical press urged a shift in the conception of the office to “poet laureate of the nation.” In The Bookman, which commissioned four poets to comment on the laureateship and its future, William Butler Yeats observed: “All the public officers, from the Prime Minister downwards, were once Court officials, but now they are responsible to the nation and to the nation alone.  Surely it is time to transform the Laureateship also”. Another Bookman commentator, Robert Bridges, noted that Tennyson had held the office of poet laureate particularly well because his “whole method of thought was in harmony with existing institutions”; he represented “the best and most liberal side of English Conservatism”.  But this situation no longer pertained: “No younger English poet could honestly see life from the same standpoint”. So various alternatives were suggested: (1) detach the laureateship from the Court; (2) eliminate the title “the laureate” but grant the honorific laureates to distinguished poets; (3) abolish the position; or (4) retain the office but expect a diminishment in quality. Rejecting the third and accepting the last, the Saturday Review put it this way: “Lovers of poetry would prefer to see a great poet succeeded by a poet; but if this is not to be, we need not feel broken-hearted.  There have been infinitely worse laureates than any one who is like to be chosen”.

Prime Minister Gladstone’s negotiations with potential laureates remain shrouded in mystery.  General lore has it that Queen Victoria suggested Swinburne for the office: “I am told that Mr. Swinburne is the best poet in my dominions,” she is reported as saying, but Gladstone vetoed him “as too archly republican for the post”. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography cryptically notes: “In 1892 Gladstone considered Swinburne as a possible candidate for poet laureateship on Tennyson’s death but after correspondence with Lord Acton took his candidacy no further”.  Negotiations with William Morris may have proceeded further.  According to Fiona MacCarthy in the ODNB, in 1892 Morris “was sounded out discreetly as to whether, if offered the poet laureateship (left vacant by Tennyson’s death), he was likely to accept it.”  This honor, like the Oxford Professorship of Poetry for which he had been nominated in 1877, was “rejected scornfully”.  After the aborted negotiations with Swinburne and Morris, not much more happened during Gladstone’s ministry. Some insiders hinted that, out of respect for Tennyson’s memory, Gladstone delayed the search for a replacement. Others claimed that he “wandered about hopelessly . . . imploring aid in making up his mind”.

Unofficially, the competition for the laureateship heated up. By August 1893, Andrew Lang was commenting in his Longman’s Magazine column, “At the Sign of the Ship,” that “it would be well if Mr. Gladstone could make up his mind speedily” because “in this long interregnum, the manhood of the country is being sapped by everlasting Odes”.  Every royal “burial, birth, or bridal” produces a spate of “Dirges, Natal Odes, Epithalmia,” and only when a laureate is appointed will these “authors of odes cease firing”.  Lang humorously registers a sense that poets were now competing for the laureateship by showing their competence in the required form and that the British public was getting in on the act by judging their performances. American admirers of Jean Ingelow sent Queen Victoria a petition supporting the appointment of a first female laureate. T. P.’s Weekly, a workingman’s paper, held a voting contest for the laureateship in which Rudyard Kipling came in first and Alice Meynell second. In January 1894 the periodical Fun aired a letter from “An Unemployed Poet” who proposed that “the vacant office of Poet Laureate should be in the gift of the London County Council” and that the poet chosen should “publish an affidavit . . . that he always paid his typewriter the trade union rate of wages”. The lack of a poet laureate was becoming a matter for jest.

Three years after Tennyson’s death, the laureateship remained unfilled. In June 1895, however, soon after the Conservative electoral victory, Lord Salisbury as prime minister moved to fill the vacancy. Clement Scott in The Idlertook up the pro-Swinburne cause: “I care not if he be a persona grata or not at Court; it does not matter to me one fig if he has underwritten his fierce democratic and republican elegies with baby drivels and sonnets to pettitoes.  This has nothing to do with it. . . . I should vote for the poet greatest in England after Tennyson and Browning”.  But Lord Salisbury let it be known that he was considering the appointment of a journalist—as a compliment to that modern literary profession. Some poets were outraged, but Coventry Patmore used the rumor to nominate a woman writer who had excelled as both journalist and poet, Alice Meynell:

 "A rumour is being circulated, through the Press and otherwise, that Lord Salisbury has expressed his intention of “complimenting journalism” by selecting the Laureate from its ranks. I wonder whether it has occurred to Lord Salisbury that it would be possible, at the same time, to pay a compliment to poetry. . . . It seems to me there is one writer only in whose person the double compliment could be united."

Obviously, Lord Salisbury thought otherwise because, in November 1895, the Bookman opened its “News Notes” column with this tidbit: “We are informed, on what appears to be reliable authority, that Mr. Alfred Austin has been appointed Poet Laureate, and that the formal announcement may be expected about the middle of this month”

http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=linda-peterson-on-the-appointment-of-the-poet-laureate-to-her-majesty-1892-1896