5. The Ending of the Poem

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this module, we turn to the second and third parts of the poem, which sees the speaker’s flight to France (Part II) and ultimately his enlistment in the British Army (Part III). To what extent, however, has the speaker changed from when we first met him?

Course

In this course, Professor Seamus Perry (University of Oxford) explores Tennyson’s ‘Maud’ (1855), a narrative poem about man’s relationship with a sixteen-year old girl called Maud. As we move through the course, we think about the concepts of ‘monodrama’ and ‘speculation’ in the poem, the characterisation of Maud herself, the use of repetition in the poem, the ending of the poem, and the poems that were published alongside ‘Maud’ in the original 1855 collection, ‘Maud and Other Poems’.

Lecturer

Seamus' interests are principally in the field of English Romantic poetry and thought, especially Coleridge and Wordsworth, and in post-Romantic English poetry, especially Tennyson, Eliot, Auden, Larkin, and their circles. He also has an interest in the modern history of criticism, reflected in articles on A.C. Bradley, William Empson, F.W. Bateson, and M.H. Abrams. He is co-editor, with Christopher Ricks, of the journal Essays in Criticism: A Quarterly Journal of Literary Criticism (OUP), and the general editor of the new series, 21st-Century Oxford Authors (OUP). He often reviews for the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, and the Literary Review. He is also Fellow Librarian of Balliol.