Tennysonian Love was first published in 1969. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. In the century or so since Alfred Tennyson's poetry reached the height of its popularity and critical acclaim, the pendulum of criticism has swung wide in opposite directions. From the earlier idolatry to the later ridicule, that pendulum has now settled into a position of qualified and selective praise from which a more thoughtful consideration of the poet is possible. Consequently, as this critical study suggests, new values and dimensions are recognizable in his work. Professor Joseph, concentrating on the theme of love but involving in his argument other facets of Tennyson's achievement, demonstrates the thesis that the poet moved as in a "strange diagonal." This phrase used as the subtitle of the book comes from Tennyson's poem The Princess in which the narrator "moved as in a strange diagonal / And maybe neither pleased myself nor them." As the author shows, Tennyson throughout his work moved between a Platonic conception of love in which the highest kind of spiritual love has disencumbered itself of sense and a Neoplatonic ("Dantesque") one in which sense and soul tend to merge. In coming to terms with the nineteenth-century form of this divided Western heritage, the pietism of the evangelical revival on the one hand and the idealized eroticism of his Romantic predecessors on the other, Tennyson became the exemplary poet of Victorian love. No other Victorian poet, Professor Joseph concludes, exhibits quite his representative and successful blending of these clashing strains. For while moving between the alternate traditions of Western love, Tennyson was able to forge a large body of highly disciplined, beautifully wrought, and far-ranging verse.

Seeking to understand Tennyson's poetry as the work of a man concerned with making and then living up to one of the most famous names in Victorian literature, Anna Barton offers close readings of Tennyson's major works. From his obscure beginning as 'A.T.', one of two anonymous brothers, to the height of his success, when he held the impressive title 'Alfred Lord Tennyson, DCL, Poet Laureate', the development of Tennyson's career took place in a period increasingly aware that a name could command considerable cultural capital. In the marketplace goods were sold on the strength of their brand name; in the press the battle for signed articles was fought and won; and in Victorian drawing rooms young ladies collected the autographs of family and friends and pasted them into scrap books. From his early lyrics to his Arthurian Idylls, Barton argues, the laureate's keen sense of professional identity forced him to grapple with modern concerns about the ethics of print in order to establish his own responsible poetic.

How did literature shape nineteenth-century science? Erasmus Darwin and his grandson, Charles, were the two most important evolutionary theorists of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. Although their ideas and methods differed, both Darwins were prolific and inventive writers: Erasmus composed several epic poems and scientific treatises, while Charles is renowned both for his collected journals (now titled The Voyage of the Beagle) and for his masterpiece, The Origin of Species. In The Age of Analogy, Devin Griffiths argues that the Darwins’ writing style was profoundly influenced by the poets, novelists, and historians of their era. The Darwins, like other scientists of the time, labored to refashion contemporary literary models into a new mode of narrative analysis that could address the contingent world disclosed by contemporary natural science. By employing vivid language and experimenting with a variety of different genres, these writers gave rise to a new relational study of antiquity, or “comparative historicism,” that emerged outside of traditional histories. It flourished instead in literary forms like the realist novel and the elegy, as well as in natural histories that explored the continuity between past and present forms of life. Nurtured by imaginative cross-disciplinary descriptions of the past—from the historical fiction of Sir Walter Scott and George Eliot to the poetry of Alfred Tennyson—this novel understanding of history fashioned new theories of natural transformation, encouraged a fresh investment in social history, and explained our intuition that environment shapes daily life. Drawing on a wide range of archival evidence and contemporary models of scientific and literary networks, The Age of Analogy explores the critical role analogies play within historical and scientific thinking. Griffiths also presents readers with a new theory of analogy that emphasizes language's power to foster insight into nature and human society. The first comparative treatment of the Darwins’ theories of history and their profound contribution to the study of both natural and human systems, this book will fascinate students and scholars of nineteenth-century British literature and the history of science.

Alfred Tennyson was a poet all his life, writing more than a thousand works in virtually every poetic genre. Considered by his Victorian contemporaries the pre-eminent poet of the age, he has become a canonical figure who is widely read and studied today. Consequently, his poems appear on the syllabi of both survey courses in Victorian literature as well as upper-division and graduate-level topics courses that cover Victorian studies or address subjects such as environmental studies, religion, elegiac poetry, and Arthurian literature. This companion makes Tennyson's poetry accessible to contemporary readers by identifying some of the formal elements of the poems, highlighting their relevance to Tennyson's Victorian contemporaries, and explaining their enduring appeal and value. Entries in the companion, organized alphabetically, provide essential details about Tennyson's most anthologized poems, offer suggestions for reading and interpretation, and elucidate unfamiliar historical and literary allusions. Additional entries, a biography of Tennyson, and a selected bibliography of recent criticism offer information about the people, places, events, and issues that influenced Tennyson or were important to him and his contemporaries.

British literature of the Victorian period has always been celebrated for the quality, innovativeness, and sheer profusion of its love poetry. Every major Victorian poet produced notable poems about love. This includes not only canonical figures, such as Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Christina Rossetti, but also lesser-known poets whose works have only recently become widely recognized and studied, such as Augusta Webster and the many often anonymous working-class poets whose verses filled the pages of popular periodicals. Modern critics have claimed, convincingly, that love poetry is not just one strain of Victorian poetry among many; it is arguably its representative, even definitive, mode. This collection of essays reconsiders the Victorian poetry of love and, just as importantly, of intimacy—a more inclusive term that comprehends not only romance but love for family, for God, for animals, and for language itself. Together the essays seek to define a poetics of intimacy that arose during the Victorian period and that continues today, a set of poetic structures and strategies by which poets can represent and encode feelings of love. There exist many studies of intimate relations (especially marriage) in Victorian novels. But although poetry rivals the novel in the depth and diversity of its treatment of love, marriage, and intimacy, that aspect of Victorian verse has remained underexamined. Love among the Poets offers an expansive critical overview. With its slate of distinguished contributors, including scholars from the US, Canada, Britain, and Australia, the volume is a wide-ranging account of this vital era of poetry and of its importance for the way we continue to write, love, and live today.

This study of Caryle and Tennyson explores their mutual influence and the effect of each on his own time. The author analyzes the specific Carlylean ideas (social, political, religious, aesthetic) and examines the ways in which Tennyson resisted and transformed these ideas and their impact.

This work is the result of the fifth Symposium in the University of Ottawa Symposia series which focused on the life and work of Isabella Valancy Crawford (1850-1887). Acclaimed scholars of Canadian Literature joined to speak on Crawford's life, read and listen to her poetry, and critically examine some of her major works. Contributors include Dorothy Livesay, Penny Petrone, Margo Dunn, John Ower, Orest Rudzik, Elizabeth Waterston, Fred Cogswell, Kenneth Hughes, S. R. MacGillivray, Catherine Ross, Louis Dudek, Anne Paolucci, and Clara Thomas.

Tennyson shared the assumptions of his age concerning the value of family life, and treated the domestic as the source of the heroic in both action and character. This book provides a critical examination of these major Victorian themes as they appear in Tennyson's poetry and demonstrates how the poet's assumptions illuminate his use of elegy, idyl, and epyllion and his treatment of romance. Professor Hair analyses In Memoriam, the English Idylls, The Princess, and Idyls of the King; he examines Tennyson's view of the family as the model of social order, a civilizing influence on the nation, and a place where the greater man, or hero, is nurtured; and he reveals how much of Tennyson's poetry explores the link between domestic and heroic. He also discusses the patterns into which these pervasive domestic concerns fall, with emphasis on the most significant: separation and reunions. The myth of Demeter and Persephone, the Biblical story of Ruth, and the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale are all versions of Tennyson's treatment of this pattern. The English Idylls and other idyls and epyllia are explored as varying combinations of romance, satire, tragedy, comedy, and irony, with a detailed analysis of The Princess, the most complex of these medleys. Idylls of the King, wherein the fate of Camelot rests on the marriage of Arthur and Guinevere, is treated as the fullest exploration of the link between domestic and heroic.

The study of language was central to the thinking of Tennyson and his circle of friends. The period of his education was a time of interest in the subject, as a new form of philology became widely known and accepted in Britain. In this study, Donald S. Hair discusses Tennyson's own view of language, and sets them in the context of the language theories of his day. The scope of the book is broad. Hair draws upon a wide range of Tennyson's poetry, from a quatrain he wrote at the age of eight to an 'anthem-speech' he wrote at the age of eighty-two, and pays particular attention to two major works: In Memoriam and Idylls of the King. He explores these in relation to the two theoretical traditions Tennyson inherited. One is derived from Locke and the language theory set out in Book III of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the other from Coleridge and the language theory of what Mill called the 'Germano-Coleridgian' tradition. He goes back to Plato's Cratylus and Aristotle's On Interpretation, and forward to the continental philology introduced into England by Tennyson's friends, Kemble and Trench, among others. Finally, he links Tennyson's language to thinkers such as Whewell, Hallam, and Maurice, who are not in themselves philologists but who make language part of their concerns--and Whewell was Tennyson's tutor, Hallam and Maurice his friends. Hair offers a significant contribution to the development of linguistic theory in Britain while also providing some close readings of key passages of Tennyson's work and examinations of the poet's faith and views of society.