Alfred Lord Tennyson

dynamics of naming and the triangulation of erotic desire based on Anne Carson's model in Eros the Bittersweet (1986) rather than Rene Girard's or Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's.In both 1832 poems and Sappho's fragments, the poetic speaker is named by the addressee, triggering the poet's intensified desire.Sappho prays to Aphrodite in Fragment 1 and moves closer to erotic fulfillment when the goddess names Sappho in reply; and when Elenore addresses the speaker by name he swoons with desire.Proper names label without truly identifying a person, Gray and others aver, yet names can become intimate when used by another.If, as classical scholar and poet Anne Carson argues, desire is triggered by a third, blocking agent in a relationship, Gray suggests that naming itself can function as this agent and hence a motor driving desire.As he wittily observes, Tennyson's and Sappho's erotic poems feature no consummation; rather, it is language and naming that impel eroticism without sating the desiring lover.Michael Sullivan revisits Tennyson's early intertextuality with Byron in the unpublished "I dare not write an Ode" (see Poems of Tennyson, 2nd ed., ed.C. Ricks [Longman], 1:169-72).Sullivan's essay "Sesta Rima as a Mode of Imitation: Hybrid Forms in Anglo-Italian Verse" (Review of English Studies 74: 829-42) focuses principally on Byron's experimental hybrid forms and stanza-switching among decasyllabic lines and balladic meter as he began to move away from Spenserian stanzas and heroic couplets even before he moved to Italy.It was to sesta rima rather than ottava rima that Tennyson likewise turned to imitate Byron and Whistlecraft in "Ode to Pamplea."Mark Llewellyn offers an intricate interlace of Tennyson's intertextuality with exemplars of Decadence, specifically Oscar Wilde and Olive Custance, and more distantly D. H. Lawrence-or rather, their intertextuality with Tennyson springing from his image of a white peacock in "Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white" in The Princess (1847).Moving beyond "influence" or adaptation, "On Peacocks: Feathered Re-encounters in the 1890s" (Victorian Poetry 61, no.2: 225-43) advances a framework of "encounter, re-encounter, and influence" (p.240).Llewellyn's principal reference points are the fifty, then one hundred, white peacocks Herod offers to Salome in Wilde's