Maud critical nuggets

• Ackerman: Maud is a 'poorly concealed _____________'

  autobiography
• Tucker: 'The poem represents the most complete fusion of private with public _____ anywhere in Tennyson'

  codes
• Rader: The suicide of the father in Maud is a 'melodramatic ____________ of the essential truth'

  exaggeration
• Smith: Victorian authors 'peopled their works with mad speakers who served as metaphors for the ______ of the entire period gone mad with new scientific information and technological changes, as well as a trampling of love in the rush towards material ______'

  lunacy, wealth
• Tennyson: Maud is 'a little ______, the history of a morbid, poetical soul, under the blighting influence of a recklessly __________ age'

  Hamlet, speculative
• Thackeray: Tennyson 'reads all sorts of things, swallows them, and digests then like a great poetical ___-___________'


  boa-constrictor
• Rawnsley: Rosa Baring of Harrington Hall was four years younger than Tennyson and remarkably beautiful but the match had 'probably been __________ by Rosa's parents'

  discouraged
• Smith: 'In Maud, isolation gives birth to a speaker much like Tennyson himself, one who vacillates between _____ and deepest depression and despair'

  mania
• Smith: 'The speaker, with his paranoia, perceives anyone as conspirators who threaten to rob him of his possessions. He is confident that the world and society will fulfil his worst ____________. He continually builds ________ between himself and the society in which he lives.

  expectations, barriers
• Stott: 'Britannia, Nightingale, Victoria- like all these saving female graces, Maud is a true ________ and lends lyrical charm to war in the most natural of surroundings'

  patriot
• Stott: In Maud, 'fairy tale and ____________ cannot be distinguished, reality is uncheckable'


  recollection
• Stott: 'The speaker finds it difficult to decide whether Maud is truly a noble lady or a woman who has lamentably ___________ herself to the formidable lure of the middle-class economism. The virgin/wh*re _________- tediously intersecting through so much Victorian writing- often emerges in the narrative.'

  prostituted, dichotomy
• Tennyson: The narrator is 'the ____ of madness, an egoist with the makings of a cynic'

  heir
• Bristow: 'Maud presents a case for women as emotional _______ of men and seeks to prove poetry provides full expression of the maddening emotions which constitute proper masculinity'

  healers
• Kincaid: The narrator's 'war with himself, it turns out, is quite different from- and infinitely more important than- his mock ______ with the "wretched race" of man'

  battle
• Edel: The poem reflects Tennyson's 'search for some exit from the __________ of the imprisoned and despairing self.'

  labyrinth
• Colley: 'Tennyson's lovers and their single-minded preoccupations with the objects of their affections conformed to the numerous descriptions of ___________, or chronically depressed people, that crowded the treatises on insanity.'

  monomaniacs
• Shaw: Maud is 'a complex psychological portrait of an __________ narrator'

  unreliable
• Shires: 'For all the intense beauty of the love lyrics, they are fuelled by illusions rather than ________'

  reality
• Shires: Maud is 'one of the ________ poems in Tennyson's corpus.'


  angriest
• Kincaid: 'Romantic love is not a solution in the poem, but a ________ to be overcome.'

  problem
• Smith: The narrator associated Maud with 'a happier ____'

  past
• Mermin: 'The love itself is guilty: is is an attempt to recapture the irrevocable past, a _______ to accept the fact of loss.'

  refusal
• Armstrong: 'The named, "entitled" woman is ______ for by the unnamed, unentitled protagonist'

  spoken
• Smith: Upon the return of Maud's brother, 'the speaker is plunged into depression and ________'

  paranoia
• Drummond: 'At this crux in his story, the narrator's emotions have been _________ down to one basic desire: for his beloved Maud to turn her back on wealth, status and family by committing herself to him.'

  distilled
• Drummond: In Section XXII, the speaker is 'no longer raging in all directions, but ______ in one.'

  hoping
• Ricks: The poem is permeated with 'the pity and ______ Tennyson had felt for his father's plight'

  terror
• Dever: In Victorian fiction, 'the only good mother is a ____ mother'

  dead
• Dever: Absent mothers 'necessitate the character's __________ from the mother as a move towards adulthood'

  separation
• Thaden: 'In Victorian society married women were not ________ and children born in wedlock were the inalienable property of their fathers.'

  entities
• Perry: The poem '___________ Maud and turns her into an object'

  dehumanises
• Drummond: 'Maud may be a most disorientating poem, but it has a moment of absolute _______ at it's heart'


  clarity
• Inglesfield: This conflation of flowers with bruises on a body 'reinforces the suggestion of insane, sexually charged ________, and anticipated the physical violence and his collapse into insanity in Part II'

  fantasy
• Swafford:Maud's garden is a hortus conclusus and 'be extension, the speaker's presence in her garden becomes a violation, especially since he let himself in, incorrectly interpreting the flower as a symbolic ___________.'

  invitation
• Swafford: 'Instead of an innocent troubadour pledging his love, he becomes at best a stalker and at worst, a metaphorical ______.'

  rapist
• Swafford: 'His spying into the garden also alludes to _________'s illict examination of Eden before he jumps over it's walls in 'Paradise Lost.''

  Satan
• Swafford: section XXII 'appears to be a sentimental love song while actually critiquing that ______________: it shows the speaker's dangerous obsession with Maud and the symbolic significance with which he imbues their relationship.'

  categorisation