The lives of the poets from The Dictionary of National Biography ...

until 1850, when it closed with the wedding of a different sister of Tennysonʹs (Cecilia) to a family friend
(Edmund Lushington) who could not but call up Arthur Hallam.
Tennyson had written what became sections of In Memoriam within a month of Hallamʹs death (September
1833).
The sections were written at many different places, and as the phases of our intercourse came to my
memory and suggested them. I did not write them with any view of weaving them into a whole, or for
publication, until I found that I had written so many. (H. Tennyson, Memoir, 1.304)
On 30 November 1844 Tennyson wrote to his aunt Russell:
With respect to the non‐publication of those poems which you mention, it is partly occasioned by the
considerations you speak of, and partly by my sense of their present imperfectness: perhaps they will not see
the light till I have ceased to be. I cannot tell, but I have no wish to send them out yet. (Letters, 1.231)
On 29 January 1845 FitzGerald wrote to W. B. Donne:
A. T. has near a volume of poems—elegiac—in memory of Arthur Hallam. Donʹt you think the world
wants other notes than elegiac now? Lycidas is the utmost length an elegiac should reach. But Spedding
[their Cambridge friend] praises: and I suppose the elegiacs will see daylight—public daylight—one day.
(Letters of Edward FitzGerald, 1.478)
The day dawned: it was in part the loving respect in which the poem (passed on to her, in manuscript or in
proof, by her cousin) was held by Emily Sellwood, soon to be Emily Tennyson, in April 1850 that fortified
Tennysonʹs confidence in the poem that he published (anonymously) next month, and that was to win him,
immediately and despite the mild fiction of anonymity, the laureateship and incontestable fame.
Tennyson had used the octosyllabic quatrain rhyming abba in his patriotic poems of 1832–3.
As for the metre of In Memoriam I had no notion till 1880 that Lord Herbert of Cherbury had written his
occasional verses in the same metre. I believed myself the originator of the metre, until after In Memoriam
came out, when some one told me that Ben Jonson and Sir Philip Sidney had used it. (H. Tennyson, Memoir,
1.305–6)
(For 1880, read 1870; see letter of 8 August 1870, Letters, 2.553–4.)
It is rather the cry of the whole human race than mine. In the poem altogether private grief swells out into
thought of, and hope for, the whole world. It begins with a funeral and ends with a marriage—begins with
death and ends in promise of a new life—a sort of Divine Comedy, cheerful at the close. It is a very
impersonal poem as well as personal. (Knowles, 182)
George Eliot saw the poem under a different aspect: ‘Whatever was the immediate prompting of In
Memoriam, whatever the form under which the author represented his aim to himself, the deepest
significance of the poem is the sanctification of human love as a religion’ (Westminster Review, Oct 1855; G.
Eliot, 191) .
Both human love and divine love faced the challenge not only of the ages but of the aeons. In ‘Parnassus’,
written three years before he died, Tennyson was to imagine the two powers that were now seen to tower
over all poetic aspirations: ‘These are Astronomy and Geology, terrible Muses!’ In Memoriam did not stand
in need of or in dread of Darwinʹs Origin of Species, for the poem preceded the work of science by nine
years. Moreover Tennyson owed much not only to Charles Lyell and his Principles of Geology (1830–33),