One of Keats' finest sonnets begins: "Much have I traveled," yet Keats traveled very little, only to Italy where he died. Shelley, also an introspective and intellectual, dabbled in politics, often with a comic effect and although he could not swim, he was devoted to sailing. Wordsworth marched to France, praising the Revolution, which he later regretted. Coleridge wandered to Germany and German metaphysics. Later he created the Ancient Mariner which is the mythic centerpiece of the Romantic period. Each of these poets feels that the occupation of a poet demand a dedication to a life of action as well as inward discovery. Consequently, the image of "the journey," with its double reference to natural and psychic realities, is one of the unifying motifs of nineteenth-century poetry. Alfred Tennyson, the author claims, was one of the last poets able to make both voyages, but he could only do so with great effort and at great expense. By nature introspective , he found the life of the mind far more appealing than the life of action; yet he knew, like Milton and Keats before him, that great poetry demands the voyage without as well as the voyage within. His early poetry, then, is concerned with the pull of the two voyages, and thus it becomes, in Arnold's worlds, the dialogue of the mind with itself. There is for modern readers something intensely interesting about such a divided personality, for we see in Tennyson almost the same dilemma that faces contemporary artists. Often when we read his poems we feel that Tennyson is of our age. But then at times he seems as remote from us as Bishop Wilberforce and his anti-Darwin fulminations. What, then, is there about Tennyson that makes him appear so modern and yet so dated? The answer is not easily given, although this has been one of the primary concerns of Tennyson's critics. In this book, the author shows how Tennyson became the mental voyager exploring both the inner and outer worlds, and further, how in making the two voyages he followed the pattern of development of other Romantic artists of the nineteenth century. He examines certain themes and images in Tennyson's early verse which in their frequent recurrence attain symbolic status, and by doing so, he shows that there is a very clear-cut pattern in Tennyson's poetry, one which is repeated time and again throughout the poet's work to 1850.

The poet's reputation has weathered even the most vitriolic attempts to discredit both the man and his writings; and as criticism of the late twentieth century demonstrates, Tennyson's claim to pre-eminence among the Victorians is now unchallenged."

By analyzing Tennyson's use of memory in his poetry, this study shows Tennyson as the abiding experimentalist in the use of the poetic memory—through it, he presents his diverse themes in a variety of ways. Discussed in this book are selections from his earliest volumes and “Poems (1842)”, “In Memoriam”, “Maud”, and “Idylls of the King”, which are chosen not only for their rich illustrative variety in the use of memory but also because they span the whole of his poetic career and, therefore, attest to his consistent concern with memory.

First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Conflating deconstructive theory with psychoanalysis, Rowlinson (English, Dartmouth College) proposes an analytic formalism as the appropriate model for reading Tennyson, and demonstrates the utility of the approach with close readings of fragments and poems written from 1824 to 1833, focusing on the nature of place the structuring of desire. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The great nineteenth-century English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson received an unusually thorough education in the classical languages, and he remained an active classical scholar throughout his lifetime. His intimate knowledge of both Greek and Latin literature left an indelible stamp on his poetry, both in terms of the sound and rhythm of his verses and in the themes that inspired him. Stateliest Measures, the first full-length study of Tennyson's thematic and metrical uses of classical material, examines the profoundly important role that his classical background played as he fashioned himself into a poet in the 1820s and 30s, and as he defined himself as poet laureate as of 1850. A.A. Markley examines Tennyson's objectives in developing the classical dramatic monologue, which, together with In Memoriam and his experiments with classical meters, indicate the degree to which he patterned himself after the Roman poet Virgil in attempting to provide modern Britain with a literature worthy of a new and rapidly expanding world empire. Stateliest Measures demonstrates that Tennyson's engagement with the long-running and complex nineteenth-century debates concerning Hellenism, Imperialism, and modern British culture was much more profound than his critics have recognized.

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.

With a wealth of papers in its pages, this book examines that fundamental of human philosophy, the relationship between human beings and time. Having the human subject – the creator – at its center, literature is essentially engaged in temporality whether that of the mind or of the world of life through the creative process of writing, stage directing, or the reader’s and viewer’s reception. This text examines, among others, the work of Proust and Kafka.