Well… it’s been a while. My last blog post went live in late January of 2020 – exactly four years ago today – and we all know what happened about six weeks later. I was lucky in just about every way during the pandemic, not least because my workplace took it seriously and had us working at home from a very early date. And remarkably, I even managed to keep doing some research.
I didn’t start baking sourdough or tackle any projects to clean or renovate my home, but I did have a lot of time to spend in front of my computer after the work day was done. That gave me the chance to expand on something I’d noticed during my doctoral research: Tennyson’s rhyming made use of historical precedent. And as it turns out, so did William Morris’s. In fact, as I’ve shared here before, nineteenth-century poets and critics had, shall we say, an ongoing conversation about how appropriate it was to rhyme words that chimed nicely for Chaucer but not for the modern ear. Tennyson and Morris were both fond of the history of English, in ways that overlapped but also served quite different political stances. (The past, after all, serves many masters.) That article (after some very late nights) appeared midpandemic in the Tennyson Research Bulletin.
And speaking of expanding previous work, I also revisited some research that I first dipped into as part of interviewing for a postdoc that I ultimately didn’t get. But what I learned as part of that exploration is that Edward Lear – famous nonsense poet and sometime bird artist – used to set Tennyson’s songs to music by improvising at the piano. And then he actually published a few of them! I had to learn more. And learn more I did. As fortune would have it, the Tennyson Research Centre resumed scanning documents for far-flung scholars like me while I was putting in the final revisions. I was able to (virtually) examine a handwritten catalogue of songs that used Tennyson’s words, as collected during his lifetime. That brought some exciting new insights into the project at the very last moment, and I’m so pleased with the result.
Both of these articles were inspired by calls for proposals for special issues, and I confess that as a non-tenure-track academic, much of my output is driven by deadlines I seek out, such as conference presentations or journal issues that accept your ideas first and then demand the final product later. Hey, I’m only human. And speaking of deadlines, The Book has loomed large throughout this time. But that’s a story for another time.