Tennyson's Poetics of Melancholy and the Imperial Imagination

Abstract

Ever since Arthur Hallam's early review of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Poems, critics have recognized that Tennyson's early work attempts to establish kind of authority, and that its characteristic power is grounded melancholy. The best recent criticism, by Herbert Tucker and Isobel Armstrong, argues that Tennyson was especially eager to establish poetic authority as as an urgent project [in the] context of society which seemed on 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 source of authority that draws not only on 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 political agenda, noted that which so evidently characterizes spirit of modern would ultimately exercise politically conservative function as a check acting for conservation against propulsion toward change. Though Hallam worried that such poetry in proportion to its and is likely to have little immediate authority over public opinion, his reference to depth and truth suggests that authority of melancholy proceeds from depths of self, and carries with it of feeling that Thomas Carlyle called felt indubitable certainty of Experience.2 Melancholy is 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 poetics of melancholy as the royal way through which humanity transcends grief of separation from supposed lost wholeness of being.3 Tennyson, indeed, would seem,