‘The American Tennyson’ and ‘The English Longfellow’: Inverted Audiences and Popular Poetry

Abstract

Moving farther into the century, Estes continues the volume’s recovery of transatlantic reception history and its role in the construction of English literature with a comparison of Tennyson and Longfellow as objects of readers’ devotion. Her chapter tracks the development of an inverted audience pattern in which each author’s international circulation outstripped domestic numbers of copies printed and sold. Readers of Longfellow and Tennyson at times envisioned themselves as an immense transatlantic group and at other times as devoted readers whose insights renationalized their beloved writers, rendering Longfellow an ‘English poet’ and Tennyson a highly democratic voice of the American people. The curiosity of a monument to Longfellow in Westminster Abbey (‘This bust was placed amongst the memorials of the poets of England by the English admirers of an American poet …’) captures many of this volume’s core concerns and highlights the importance of literary exchange and commemoration for Anglo-American relations.