McGann 1988

Jerome McGann. "Tennyson and the Histories of Criticism." The Beauty of Inflections. Oxford: UP, 1988. Web.

• Alfred Tennyson, "Charge of the Light Brigade"
• 183 An authentic criticism must vigorously oppose these spurious [idealist] forms which criticism itself sometimes assumes. The case of Tennyson is merely symptomatic - and an opportunity. The study of T's poetry must begin and conclude in a field of historical particulars. To do so requires, of course, that we be able to elucidate the specific socio-historical contexts of the originary works themselves. However, because these works are at all points mediated in time by a series of readers and audiences, we cannot make contact with the originary works except through the social mediations and mediators which have handed them over to us.
• 190 The fact that he [Leo Spitzer] does not deal with the poem in terms of its immediate social context means that his analysis does not attempt a self-conscious explanation of the meaning of this poem in and for mid-Victorian England. The refusal to develop such an explanation - to set forth a comprehensive social and ideological analysis of the poems in terms of its originary context -- is significant because only that sort of analysis can provide a later reader - a reader in late C20 America, for example - with a critical context for his (later) reading. We cannot have it on any terms, least of all on our own terms, unless we understand the terms that are and are not possible. We may have it on our own terms - we may read the poem in terms of our own (implicit or explicit) ideologies - only when we are clear about the differences that separate us from the poem, and hence that permit us to sympathize with it.