• DOI:10.1353/sel.2000.0040
Corpus ID: 154831984

Tennyson's Poetics of Melancholy and the Imperial Imagination

@article{Riede2000TennysonsPO,
  title={Tennyson's Poetics of Melancholy and the Imperial Imagination},
  author={David G. Riede},
  journal={SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900},
  year={2000},
  volume={40},
  pages={659 - 678}
}

• D. Riede
• Published 1 December 2000
• Philosophy
• SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

Ever since Arthur Hallam's early review of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Poems, critics have recognized that Tennyson's early work attempts to establish a kind of poetic authority, and that its characteristic power is grounded in melancholy. The best recent criticism, by Herbert Tucker and Isobel Armstrong, argues that Tennyson was especially eager to establish "poetic authority as such" as an "urgent project [in the] context of a society which seemed on the verge of revolution and lawlessness. 1 It has not been sufficiently recognized, however, that Tennyson's melancholy, usually regarded as an apolitical character trait, is itself a source of authority that draws not only on the intensity of mood, but also on current sexist and colonialist discourses, and upon an idiom of eroticized political imperialism. Hallam, however, even while denying that Tennyson had a political agenda, noted that the "melancholy which so evidently characterizes the spirit of modern poetry" would ultimately exercise a politically conservative function as "a check acting for conservation against a propulsion toward change." Though Hallam worried that such poetry "in proportion to its depth and truth is likely to have little immediate authority over public opinion," his reference to "depth and truth" suggests that the authority of melancholy proceeds from the depths of the poetic self, and carries with it the truth of feeling that Thomas Carlyle called the "felt indubitable certainty of Experience."2 Melancholy is a physical sensation and seems therefore unarguably "natural," not ideological, so it is not surprising that generations of critics have seen Tennyson's best and most characteristic poetry as apolitical. Julia Kristeva has suggested a poetics of melancholy as "the royal way through which humanity transcends the grief" of separation from a supposed lost wholeness of being.3 Tennyson, indeed, would seem, in