THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

[p. 424
This acute, passionate attachment to place, one so akin to Catherine Earnshaw’s self identification with the rocks and
the moorland, is not paralleled in the work of Emily’s sisters. Anne’s placid verse may reinforce the impression we
have of a woman who was ‘a very sincere and practical Christian’ with a ‘tinge of religious melancholy’, but it is
insipid in comparison. Even Charlotte’s poetry, which occasionally flickers with the narrative assertiveness of her
fiction, seems otherwise unexceptional and unadventurous.
Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelite Poets
Arthur Hallam (1811-33), Alfred Tennyson’s intimate friend and his most immediate early critic, recognized the
extent to which Tennyson’s early poetry was derived from the emotional norms evolved by the second generation of
Romantics, and especially from Shelley and Keats. These norms were still far from universally accepted by early
Victorian readers, as the unfavourable reviews of Tennyson’s second volume of verse proved. A poetry ‘of sensation
rather than reflection’, Hallam argued, had been created by those whose lives had consisted ‘in those emotions, which
are immediately consonant with sensation’. But for his own time, an age now dominated by the ‘diffusion of
machinery’, Hallam looked for a new poetry which would express a ‘decrease of subjective power ... and a continual
absorption of the higher feelings into the palpable interests of ordinary life’. The ‘melancholy’ which he saw as
characteristic of modern literature turned ‘the mind upon itself’, where it sought relief ‘in idiosyncrasies rather than
community of interest’. Hallam’s essay, which appeared in the Englishman’s Magazine in August 1831, both publicly
pressed the idea that Tennyson was the poet of the new age and privately served as a prompt to Tennyson to turn away
from ‘idiosyncrasy’ towards an alternative interest in ‘ordinary life’ and ‘community’. The process by which
Tennyson became the most influential and admired poet of the Victorian era owed much to his intellectual and
emotional debt to Hallam. It was a debt which was richly, but posthumously, repaid in In Memoriam.
Tennyson (1809-92gz) published three early volumes of verse, the last being dated 1833, the year of Hallam’s
untimely death in Vienna. The volumes published in 1830 and 1833 most clearly exhibit his quite extraordinary
power, so much admired by Hallam, of embodying himself in characters, or moods of characters, and his ‘vivid,
picturesque delineation of objects, and the peculiar skill with which he holds all of them fused ... in a medium of
strong emotion’. That this emotion was still predominantly melancholic runs as a warning subtext through Hallam’s
criticism. Many of the poems, which include ‘Mariana’, ‘The Kraken’, ‘The Ballad of Oriana’, ‘The Lady of Shalott’,
and ‘The Lotos-Eaters’, deal exquisitely with death-like states, or with death itself as a climactic and releasing
experience. Emergence into a world of work,
[p. 425]
action, sensation, or merely unsettling emotion seems to threaten or destroy the cushioned retreats forged by art or
guarded by sleep. The hypnotic echoes, the repetitions, and the subtle, often lulling lyricism of the poems also
reinforce the impression they convey of a protective and isolating artifice.
Following Hallam’s traumatic death, Tennyson retreated into a period of mourning in which he seems to have
indulged in a painful purgative process which was both personal and professional. Many of the short lyrics which date
from this extended period of bereavement were later shaped into the elegiac ‘mechanic exercises’ which make up the
early sections of In Memoriam (1850). Other, less direct tributes to Hallam appeared after a period of public silence,
in the two volumes of Poems published in 1842. This collection, which reprinted much of the earlier verse as well as
revisions of certain key poems, also balanced the old mood of narcotic drowsiness with the urgent simplicity of a lyric
such as ‘Break, break, break’:
Break, break, break,
On thy cold grey stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.
O well for the fisherman's boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!
And the stately ships go on