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‘Beyond the Forms of Faith?’ Tennyson and the Broad Church

Kirstie Blair

in Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion

This chapter discusses Tennyson, but, like Chapter 4, also reads his work as representative of a particular branch of Victorian Christianity. In Tennyson’s case, In Memoriam was widely read as a ... More

This chapter discusses Tennyson, but, like Chapter 4, also reads his work as representative of a particular branch of Victorian Christianity. In Tennyson’s case, In Memoriam was widely read as a salvo fired by the Broad Church, and Tennyson’s personal friendships with many of the leading figures in this nebulous grouping — F. D. Maurice in particular — added strength to this reading. After introducing the fundamentals of ‘Broad Church’ thought with relation to form, I offer a close reading of form in In Memoriam and its relation to the writings of religious authors such as Maurice, Benjamin Jowett, and F. W. Robertson. The final section of the chapter considers Tennyson’s late poem ‘Akbar’s Dream’, which assesses forms in relation to comparative religion.Less

Alfred Tennyson: Memory and Hope

Peter Mcdonald

in Sound Intentions: The Workings of Rhyme in Nineteenth-Century Poetry

This chapter looks at In Memoriam and verse as ‘sad mechanic exercise’, Tennyson's figuring of intention and lack of will in the poem's rhyme-scheme; rhymes on ‘brain’, and the influence here of ... More

This chapter looks at In Memoriam and verse as ‘sad mechanic exercise’, Tennyson's figuring of intention and lack of will in the poem's rhyme-scheme; rhymes on ‘brain’, and the influence here of Keats. It also examines the abba scheme as parting and restoration, distance and proximity. It looks at the equivocal relation between ‘grief’ and ‘relief’, ‘change’/‘strange’ in In Memoriam, and the relation to Shakespeare's The Tempest. It further examines the prominence of Keats's ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ in In Memoriam, Tennyson on Keats and the ‘daimonisch’, the idea of the ‘waking trance’ in The Princess and elsewhere, Tennyson and the uses of repetition, Wordsworth's ‘Tintern Abbey’ and Tennyson's burden of the self in verse, and rhyme-effects and repetition in ‘Tears, Idle Tears’. Finally it explores Arthur Hallam on rhyme and memory; In Memoriam and Wordsworth's Immortality Ode in terms of pre-birth and after-death ideas of memory; and repetition, rhyme, and the uncanny.Less

Tennyson's Unquiet Brain

Gregory Tate

in The Poet's Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry 1830–1870

This chapter, focusing on Tennyson's poems In Memoriam and Maud, argues that, despite the reservations of Arnold and Clough, psychological analysis remained a central concern of Victorian poetry in ... More

This chapter, focusing on Tennyson's poems In Memoriam and Maud, argues that, despite the reservations of Arnold and Clough, psychological analysis remained a central concern of Victorian poetry in the 1850s. Examining Tennyson's personal knowledge of the doctor Matthew Allen's theories of insanity, and placing the poet's writing in the context of contemporary ideas about physiology and evolutionary psychology, the chapter argues that In Memoriam and Maud share an interest in exploring the physical conditions of thought and the vulnerability of the embodied mind. Despite their differences in tone and formal structure, both poems dramatize a collision between two opposing models of psychology, one founded on the physical brain and the other on the metaphysical soul. Both poems were also appropriated by Victorian theorists such as Lewes and the psychiatrist John Charles Bucknill as evidence of the links between poetry and the study of the mind.Less

‘Raving of dead men’s dust and beating hearts’: Tennyson and the Pathological Heart

Kirstie Blair

in Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart

This chapter examines Tennyson's poetics in detail, arguing that they constitute the most important intervention in the poetic culture of the heart. It shows how Hallam's death from a heart-related ... More

This chapter examines Tennyson's poetics in detail, arguing that they constitute the most important intervention in the poetic culture of the heart. It shows how Hallam's death from a heart-related complaint influences the use of heart metaphor in In Memoriam, a poem which repeatedly references the heart, and where the steady rhythmic beat can be interpreted as the pulse. It then turns to Maud, which is read as a sustained and deliberate investigation of the pathological heart, as the speaker takes on all the characteristics of a medical case-study into heart disease.Less

INTRODUCTION: Rapt Oration

Cornelia Pearsall

in Tennyson's Rapture: Transformation in the Victorian Dramatic Monologue

This introduction argues that Alfred Tennyson’s conception of “rapt oration” is critical to the understanding of a quartet of his major dramatic monologues, “St. Simeon Stylites,” “Ulysses,” ... More

This introduction argues that Alfred Tennyson’s conception of “rapt oration” is critical to the understanding of a quartet of his major dramatic monologues, “St. Simeon Stylites,” “Ulysses,” “Tithonus,” and “Tiresias,” all drafted after the death in 1833 of his friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, though published over the course of the ensuing half-century. An examination of a variety of Tennyson’s works, in particular In Memoriam, establishes “rapt oration” as a state in which both speaker and listener are “transported” by the speaker’s oratorical prowess. A desire for rapture, characterized by both personal and political transformation, motivates the speech and actions of each of Tennyson’s speakers in these dramatic monologues. This introduction additionally argues that these dramatic monologues should be considered in the context of nineteenth-century rapture theology, reform politics, classical scholarship (in particular theories on Homer), and sexological theory, as well as in the context of Tennyson’s relationships with a range of contemporaries, including Thomas Carlyle, William Gladstone, John Stuart Mill, and Heinrich Schliemann.Less

Mourning Species: In Memoriam in an Age of Extinction

Jesse Oak Taylor

in Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire

This chapter develops a reading practice for the Anthropocene by tracing the reflections on extinction that recur throughout Alfred Tennyson’s magisterial elegy, In Memoriam (1850). It asks how the ... More

This chapter develops a reading practice for the Anthropocene by tracing the reflections on extinction that recur throughout Alfred Tennyson’s magisterial elegy, In Memoriam (1850). It asks how the poem’s treatment of extinction changes when it is read as an account of anthropogenic extinction, the decimation of species arising explicitly from human action and linked (both metaphorically and literally) to imperial conquest. In so doing, it traces the emergence of a new kind of human “species being,” that is, the human as geophysical force within the Earth system, which appears in the poem through extended metaphors linking human evolution to industrial processes and imperial conquest thus speaking to one of the most difficult (and controversial) challenges that the Anthropocene lays before the humanities: thinking the human in species terms. In the process, the chapter makes a case for elegy as both an ethical and political stance complement to conservation.Less

But what am I? Alfred Tennyson's In Memoriam

in Labyrinths of Deceit: Culture, Modernity and Identity in the Nineteenth Century

Alfred Tennyson wrote In Memoriam, a collection of lyrics, between 1833 and 1850 as an elegaic response to the death of his close friend Arthur Henry Hallam. Expressions of self-doubt and religious ... More

Alfred Tennyson wrote In Memoriam, a collection of lyrics, between 1833 and 1850 as an elegaic response to the death of his close friend Arthur Henry Hallam. Expressions of self-doubt and religious disorientation characterise In Memoriam, along with moral dilemmas arising from the schism between conventional Christian interpretations of the earth's history, contemporary scientific evidence, and philosophical enquiry. The elegy articulates the poet's subjective grief and loss while philosophically contemplating upon issues that are catalysed by someone's death. Faith and doubt oscillate in the poem, ultimately turning into the transitional process of reconciliation. By returning to orthodox faith and the apparently conventional elegaic utterance, In Memoriam reclaims will, sanity, and identity in the face of overwhelming doubts.Less

Apportioning the Devotional Day: Daily Textbooks, Reading Systems, and In Memoriam A.H.H.

Krista Lysack

in Chronometres: Devotional Literature, Duration, and Victorian Reading

This chapter pursues the systematic dailiness of devotional reading in the form of daily-reading “textbooks,” which came on the market toward the end of the nineteenth century, not all of them ... More

This chapter pursues the systematic dailiness of devotional reading in the form of daily-reading “textbooks,” which came on the market toward the end of the nineteenth century, not all of them explicitly religious. Textbooks extracted and re-arranged for diurnal re-reading of the works of well-regarded writers of the century. These included Alfred Tennyson, whose In Memoriam, famous for its theme of protracted mourning but also for its reputation to console the bereaved, was re-published in excerpted form as Day to Day With Tennyson and many other similar titles. With its assumption of daily and apportioned reading the textbook aligns, furthermore, with Victorian reading systems and with discourses of time-thrift. In other words, late-Victorian devotion was often less about inculcating theological content than it was about materializing reading as non-narrative, modular portions and returning the reader regularly to a sense of time as a series of renewable moments.Less

Grief in Motion: Parallax and Orbing in Tennyson

Anna Henchman

in The Starry Sky Within: Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature

This chapter shows that Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H employs astronomical images to create rapid and disorienting shifts in perspective. Tennyson draws on his extensive knowledge of astronomy to ... More

This chapter shows that Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H employs astronomical images to create rapid and disorienting shifts in perspective. Tennyson draws on his extensive knowledge of astronomy to emphasize a cosmos characterized by flux and vertiginous shifts in point of view. His astronomical images convey the rupture that the sudden death of Arthur Henry Hallam caused in his own sense of identity. This chapter develops an analogy between the unusual form of this elegy and the astronomical technique of parallax, which determines the distance of a star by measuring shifts in its apparent position. Parallax assumes depends on observing an object from two or more disparate positions. Each section of In Memoriam acts as a single perspective on Hallam’s death. Together they stress the discontinuities in Tennyson’s experience, yet it is precisely the range of perspectives that enables the poem to evoke the experience of death with the force and accuracy that it does.Less

Introduction

Jayne Thomas

in Tennyson Echoing Wordsworth

This chapter sets out the scope and methodology of the book, revealing how it moves beyond existing accounts of Wordsworthian influence in Tennyson to uncover new and revealing connections and ... More

This chapter sets out the scope and methodology of the book, revealing how it moves beyond existing accounts of Wordsworthian influence in Tennyson to uncover new and revealing connections and interactions in some of the most emblematic poems of Tennyson’s career – ‘The Lady of Shalott’, ‘Ulysses’, In Memoriam, Maud, and ‘Tithonus’. It explains the book’s use of the term ‘echo’ to track the sometimes loud, sometimes faint, yet always audible Wordsworthian resonances within Tennyson’s poetry, as well setting its analysis of Tennyson’s poetry in relation to the intertextual and allusive process in general and Harold Bloom’s theory of intra-poetic rivalry in particular. It gives an overview of Tennyson’s recorded relationship with Wordsworth, as set out in Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, I and II, edited by Hallam Tennyson, Tennyson’s son. It gives an overview of relevant critical work in the field, and chapter summaries of the five chapters to follow, including a brief acknowledgement of how the book will conclude with an analysis of Tennyson’s valedictory lyric, ‘Crossing the Bar’.Less

‘From scarped cliff and quarried stone a thousand types gone’: Tennyson’s Anglo-Saxon

Chris Jones

in Fossil Poetry: Anglo-Saxon and Linguistic Nativism in Nineteenth-Century Poetry

Tennyson’s knowledge of Anglo-Saxon is reassessed in order to disprove the common opinion that he had only rudimentary knowledge of the language, and relied mainly on his son’s prose translation of ... More

Tennyson’s knowledge of Anglo-Saxon is reassessed in order to disprove the common opinion that he had only rudimentary knowledge of the language, and relied mainly on his son’s prose translation of The Battle of Brunanburh in order to make a poetic version of that text. Detailed examination of manuscript evidence proves that Tennyson applied himself to serious and sustained study of Anglo-Saxon, and this chapter identifies for the first time texts, including dictionaries, that he used to teach himself Anglo-Saxon. It is argued that Tennyson’s poetry exhibits traits of both phases of nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism that Fossil Poetry identifies. The chapter closes by reading the Anglo-Saxonist etymological layer of several poems by Tennyson, including In Memoriam.Less

Before Darwin

Michael Ruse

in Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution

After a slow start, as shown by writers as diverse as Thomas Carlyle and Elizabeth Gaskell, by the mid-nineteenth century Progress was an idea firmly embedded in the Victorian consciousness. Picking ... More

After a slow start, as shown by writers as diverse as Thomas Carlyle and Elizabeth Gaskell, by the mid-nineteenth century Progress was an idea firmly embedded in the Victorian consciousness. Picking up on such currents, Alfred Tennyson wrote extensively on Progress and then, in his great poem In Memoriam, tied this with ideas of evolution—a directed evolution ending with humankind. Yet there were continued worries, not just over Malthusian warnings about false hopes but also about the possibility of moral life if new systems like evolution pushed traditional Christian edicts to one side. The shocking best-seller about an Anglican priest who loses his way, Nemesis of Faith by James Anthony Froude, epitomized the worries. The time was ripe for a new approach.Less