Elegy and Epithalamium in In Memoriam

Abstract

If literature is a map, then scholars and critics are surveyors and cartographers. Our task is to take new bearings and to draw new contours, not just to complete the work of our predecessors, but to determine where we have moved from those predecessors in relation to the landmarks that we study. As literary works recede into the past, some perspectives—immediacy of response and personal recollection, for example—become closed to us, but new perspectives open out. Critical studies of In Memoriam written during the last twenty-five years show us a poem more complex and serious than readers of the two previous generations would have been willing to accept, and a different kind of poem from the one that Tennyson's Victorian readers acclaimed. Yet despite the increasing sophistication of our map-making skills In Memoriam remains stubbornly puzzling, and the questions that puzzle its readers can be reduced to two: 'Is it possible to apprehend the In Memoriam sequence as a whole poem?' and 'What kind of poem is it?' In other words, the central issues are structural and generic, and if we could give assured answers to those two questions, we would know better how to read In Memoriam.