ИСТИНА

Though a number of famous literary interpretations of the myth of Tiresias belong to the age of Modernism (G. Appolinaire’s “The Breasts of Tiresias”, T.S. Elliot’s “The Waste Land”), Victorian contributions also deserve critical attention. On a very general level the myth develops several elements: controversial relations between Tiresias’ transgression and punishment, his superhuman cognitive power seen both as a gift and a curse, his moving beyond established gender roles. All this alongside with involvement into a number of ethical and historical conflicts opened many opportunities for Victorian poets to rewrite the myth of Tiresias in different ways. The paper focuses on three eponymous narrative poems by A.C. Swinburne (1867), A. Tennyson (1885) and T. Woolner (1886). Each of them follows its own genre pattern. The core of Swinburne’s two-part monologue written in sestets using iambic pentameter is to pass the prophetic initiative from Tiresias to himself in order to prophecy about contemporary Italy. Tennyson unravels the story of Tiresias using his tools of subtle subversion of the speaking subject, but combines the blanc iambic pentameter familiar from his earlier dramatic monologues with elegiac quatrains for Hallam. Woolner elaborates the most formally complex structure of a long dramatized dialogue between Tiresias and his mother that culminates in a hymn to imagination as a privileged mode of cognition. Tiresias’ blindness and, by contrast, his extraordinary hearing justify the use of a rich variety of metres.