Monodrama and Madness: Maud and the Shrieking of the Wainscot Mouse

This chapter examines Tennyson’s Maud, published in 1855. The poem was met with sustained criticism, not least because of its ‘innovatory’ form, a ‘drama in lyrics’ as Tennyson himself terms it. Maud displays a variety of influences, including, most conspicuously, Hamlet, and a variety of metrical forms, in its attempt to render the speaker’s successive phases of passion; the latter include ballad, heroic couplet, alexandrines, and epithalamion. It has also been claimed that Maud, Tennyson’s first non-occasional poem as Laureate, is the result of an Oedipal rivalry with Wordsworth, largely as a result of his inheritance of the Laureateship in 1850. However, Wordsworth’s presence in Maud is more complex than Harold Bloom’s somewhat monolithic model would allow, creating a multiplicity of effects: some borrowings allow Tennyson to remodulate Wordsworth, allowing him to define himself in relation to his predecessor; others define him in turn, underlining the trajectory of the poem and questioning its narrative form; others allow Tennyson to address issues which the poem ostensibly avoids; yet others allow Tennyson to question his role as public poet and as poet of ‘sensation’.