Sheila Oltra Malfeito
Vicente Forés López
Poesia Anglesa dels segles XIX i XX
17 January 2008
“Death and imagery in Keats and
Tennyson”
I am going to base this
paper on the comparison of two poems, “Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats and “In
Memoriam XXIII” by Alfred Lord Tennyson. I have decided to compare these two
poems because they have in common an important theme, death, and because there
are also similarities in their authors. As I have analysed the poem “Ode to a
Nightingale” in depth in my first paper I am not going to analyse it again. I
am going to start with the analysis of section XXIII of “In Memoriam” comparing
it with “Ode to a Nightingale”. I will put this section XXIII of the poem in
relation to the complete work, to its context and his author comparing it with
the author and context of “Ode to a Nightingale”.
“Ode to a Nightingale” John Keats
1.
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious
plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
2.
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained
mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
3.
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed
despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
4.
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is
no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
5.
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves;
And mid-May’s
eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
6.
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.
7.
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that
oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
8.
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toil me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep
In the next
valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ode_to_a_Nightingale
“In Memoriam XXIII” Alfred
Lord Tennyson
23.1Now, sometimes in my
sorrow shut,
23.2 Or
breaking into song by fits,
23.3 Alone,
alone, to where he sits,
23.4The Shadow cloak'd
from head to foot,
23.5Who keeps the keys
of all the creeds,
23.6 I
wander, often falling lame,
23.7 And
looking back to whence I came,
23.8Or on to where the
pathway leads;
23.9And crying, How
changed from where it ran
23.10 Thro'
lands where not a leaf was dumb;
23.11 But all
the lavish hills would hum
23.12The murmur of a
happy Pan:
23.13When each by turns
was guide to each,
23.14 And
Fancy light from Fancy caught,
23.15 And
Thought leapt out to wed with Thought
23.16Ere Thought could
wed itself with Speech;
23.17And all we met was
fair and good,
23.18 And all
was good that Time could bring,
23.19 And all
the secret of the Spring
23.20Moved in the
chambers of the blood;
23.21And many an old
philosophy
23.22 On Argive
heights divinely sang,
23.23 And
round us all the thicket rang
23.24To many a flute of
http://tspacetest.library.utoronto.ca:8080/html/1778/11641/poem2124.html#poem23
I am
going to analyse section XXIII of the poem “In Memoriam” because it is the one
which has more relation with the poem “Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats. As
“In Memoriam” is a huge poem, it is formed by 133 sections; I am going to make
a brief explanation about the poem in order that we can understand this section
of the poem.
The
complete name of the poem is “In Memoriam A.H.H”. The capital letters refer to Arthur
Henry Hallam. The poem is a requiem for the poet’s friend Arthur Henry Hallam,
who died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage in
The
poem is written in four-line ABBA
stanzas of iambic verse. It is divided into 133 cantos or sections (including
the prologue and the epilogue). The poem contains many different subjects:
profound spiritual experiences, nostalgic reminiscence, philosophical
speculation, Romantic fantasizing and even occasional verse. The death of
Hallam, and Tennyson's attempts to cope with this, remain the strand that ties
all these together.[1]
According
to George P. Landow[2], there are the following
structures in the poem:
1. (1-27) Despair:
ungoverned sense (subjective)
2. (28-77) Doubt: mind governing sense, i.e., despair (objective)
3. (78-102) Hope: spirit governing mind, i. e. doubt (subjective)
4. (103-31) Faith: spirit harmonizing sense and spirit (objective)
The four-part division in relation to
Tennyson's theory of poetry:
1. Poetry as release
from emotion
2. Poetry as release from thought
3. Poetry as self-realization
4. Poetry as mission (or prophecy)
According to these structures and
divisions, we can see that the section of the poem I am going to analyse
(XXIII) is included in a subjective part, despair which means ungoverned sense
where the poet uses poetry as a release from emotion. So, the poet really
despairs of his friend’s death. He talks about his death and shows us his
emotions. This canto is formed by six four-line ABBA stanzas of iambic verse.
Analysis
In
the first stanza, according to Jon Lanestedt (
“Tennyson's skillful and repetitive use of vivid imagery […] gives the reader a powerful idea of the pain experienced when attempting to understand loss”( Melissa E. Buron)[5].
The
major theme in this section appears in the first two stanzas, “the Imminent
Death Personified”, which allows us to compare these two stanzas with the sixth
stanza of “Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats. According to David Stevenson[6],
John Keats and Alfred Lord Tennyson “portray death as an entity that follows
the author”. They personify death. In “Ode to a Nightingale”, “Keats having
called Death “soft names in many mused rhyme”
expresses his past appeals for a gentle end”, and he thinks death is a release
to his sufferings when he says he has been "half in love with easeful Death.” Since now "it [is] rich to die,/ To cease upon the
midnight with no pain," his personification of the concept of death
makes it easier to handle and to express. Tennyson also personifies death when
he says "Shadow cloaked from head to
foot, who keeps the keys of all the creeds”. Death is “an entity with
eminent control”. The poet “approaches this shadow and contemplates death when
he sinks deepest into questioning his past and future”. Keats “accept death in
its imminence and reality; in the poem he has turned to the hope of a fair and
gentle passing”. However, Tennyson “does not come to the same peaceful
conclusions. His picture of death reflects a less Romantic, more Victorian,
questioning of faith and religion: he can only see the "Shadow cloaked from head to foot."
This concealment of its nature disturbs him terribly. Moreover, he comes to its
contemplation when "falling lame."
He, too, needs to know to what end his life is coming to; but he has not found
the serenity of Keats' soft whispers: he breaks "into song by fits." Both men need to understand the end
towards which their lives are heading. Keats approaches his death with a
Romantic serenity; Tennyson approaches his with the inner angst of the
Victorian loss of faith”. (David Stevenson).
I
think that in these two stanzas of section 23 “In Memoriam” the death of his
friend made him think about where he comes from and about where death will
bring him. It made him think about what is after death.
In
the following stanzas, I think he is explaining how life was after the death of
his friend because he says “How changed from where it ran” (third stanza 23.9), there was
happiness “The murmur of a happy Pan:”(third
stanza 23.12). In the third stanza we can also see “A common motif
permeating poetry that deals with mourning is sound, be it in the form of tears
of mourning, a missed language, a song of mourning or a noted silence. A large
number of poems that consider death and mourning utilize images related to
sound” (Abigail Newman[7]).
In 23.9 “And crying, How
changed from where it ran” I think crying is a way to express grief because
his friend has died. Following Newman in “The Role of Conscience”, “Tennyson,
as an evolving narrator, struggles in his efforts to cope with Hallam's death.
He considers thoroughly how he will be affected by different modes of mourning,
and he worries deeply about the effects these will have on him. He is acutely
concerned that in mourning Hallam, he will somehow ease his own suffering;
although he is urgently searching for divine meaning behind Hallam's death, his
conscience continuously discourages him from mourning in any way that consoles
him, and this makes his mourning process even more difficult and painful.”
In
the fourth stanza, I think he is referring to the time when Hallam and he met “When each by turns was
guide to each”. They thought the same things and they shared similar
opinions, so, he says “And
Thought leapt out to wed with Thought”, and they could turn their
thoughts into speech easily because they understand each other perfectly “Ere Thought could wed itself
with Speech;”
In
the fifth stanza, he continues explaining how everything was when his friend
was alive, “And all we
met was fair and good,” (23.17). According to Jon Lanestedt, in this stanza
we can see another example of imagery related to time[8] in 23.18, “And all was good
that Time could bring,”. When he says “And
all the secret of the Spring/ Moved in the chambers of the blood;”
we can see that “Once Hallam blindly descends into death, the speaker's
attitude changes and, likewise, so do his surroundings. The fruitful return of
the spring and the easy cycling of the seasons seem to dissipate once the
speaker describes death, or the Shadow, as something which awaits him in the
waste”(Sarah Eron[9]).
In
the last stanza, the poet makes some references to the ancient Greek world when
he says “And many an old
philosophy/ On Argive heights divinely sang,”. Argive is “of or relating to the ancient Greek city of
Now
we are going to see some common elements in both poems:
The
first and most important common element is death, as we have seen in analysing
stanza 1 and of “In Memoriam XXIII”. Death is personified in both poems; it is
the major theme in both poems. But I also want to compare references to death
in both poems. For example, in “Ode to a Nightingale” in the third stanza when
he says “Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;”, as I said on my first paper[13],
I think he is referring to the death of his young brother Tom, who had died a year before he wrote this poem
because of a disease, probably tuberculosis, the same illness that his mother
had suffered.[14] In “In Memoriam XXIII” in
the 1st and 2nd stanza, Tennyson refers to death as “The Shadow cloak'd from head to foot,/Who
keeps the keys of all the creeds,” here, apart from personifying death we
can see that he is referring to the death of his friend Hallam, we know that
because the poem is a requiem for his friend.1
The poems have in common that they have references to the death of people they
loved, in this case Keats’s brother and Tennyson’s friend. These two deaths
influenced both poets in writing these poems. Talking about death in both
authors, I would like to introduce similarities in their lives which have to do
with death and illnesses. For example, in John Keats his mother and his brother
died from Tuberculosis and, then, Keats also died from this disease (wikipedia[15]).
In Tennyson, his father “suffered from depression and was notoriously
absentminded”[16]. Tennyson’s friend Hallam
also died, and it affected Tennyson in the same way that Keats’s brother death
affected him. These two deaths of Tennyson’s friend and Keats’s brother, as I
have said, influenced them to write their poems.
The
second element I would like to compare is the song. In Tennyson’s poem we have
seen song as an element of imagery in the 1st stanza “Or breaking into song by fits”.
In “Ode to a Nightingale”, we can also see how the poet called the nightingale’s
song in the 6th stanza “high
requiem”, which is “a song for the repose of dead” (Melani[17]),
and in the 8th stanza he calls the song “plaintive anthem”, plaintive “expresses sadness” and anthem means “a sacred choral song generally based on words from the Bible”
(Melani[18]).
All these songs we have seen express grief and suffering because of the death
of some loved people.
The
third element which appears in the two poems is nature. In “Ode to a Nightingale”,
the setting of the poem is nature, for example, when he says “Of
beechen green, and shadows numberless” in the first stanza, or “And with
thee fade away into the forest dim:”, in the second stanza, or “Save what from heaven is with the breezes
blown/ Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways” in the fourth
stanza. In this poem the poet finds a escape from the real world through
nature, so, apart from death, nature is another major element in this poem. In
“In Memoriam XXIII” the poet makes a little reference to nature in the third
stanza “Thro' lands where not a leaf was
dumb; / But all the lavish
hills would hum/ The murmur of a happy Pan”. In this poem, I think the poet also sees
nature as something good; he describes nature in a positive way “lavish hills”, “happy Pan”.
The
fourth element in common is that we can see references to a season of the year
in both poems. In “Ode to a Nightingale”, Keats makes references to summer, for
example, in the first stanza “Singest of summer in full-throated ease”, or in the fifth stanza “The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves”.
In “In Memoriam XXIII” Tennyson makes a reference to another season, spring, in
fifth stanza “And all the secret of the Spring/ Moved in the chambers of the blood”. Another aspect
to highlight here is that although in “Ode to a Nightingale” the poet makes
references to summer, the poem is written in spring, we can see it when he says
“And mid-May’s eldest child” in the fifth stanza, and the reference
to a season in Tennyson’s poem is also to spring. So, spring is a common
element in both. But, I have to point out that in “Ode to a Nightingale”, the
poet anticipates the summer because he wants it to come because in summer days are longer
and it has many more hours of daylight than spring. As in that world of
imagination, which is the world he has created through nature to escape from
the real world, it is dark and it is still spring, he wants it to come now to
have more light, as I said in my first paper.
The
fifth aspect I think is important is related to the muses. In “Ode to a
Nightingale” in the second stanza when he says “the blushful Hippocrene”, Hippocrene is referring to “a spring sacred to the
Muses, located on Mt.Helicon. Drinking its waters inspired poets” (Melani[19]).
So, here the poet wants to be inspired by the Muses. “In Memoriam” “is a
symbolic voyage ending in a vision of Hallam as the poet's muse”[20].
Here the comparison would be that Keats wants to be inspired by the Muses and
Hallam is the muse of Tennyson to write the poem.
The
last element I would like to compare is the reference to the ancient Roman and
Greek world. In “Ode to a Nightingale”, in the fourth stanza he makes reference
to Bacchus when he says “Not charioted by
Bacchus and his pards”. “Bacchus is the Roman God for wine” (Melani[21]).
In “In Memoriam XXIII”, Tennyson makes references to the ancient Greek world
when he says in the last stanza “On
Argive heights divinely sang” and “To
many a flute of
To continue, I would like to put the
section XXIII of the poem “In Memoriam” which I have analysed in relation to
the rest of the poem by commenting some quotations.
In writing this poem, Tennyson
reflects his “difficulty accepting his Hallam's absence. Grief often closes one
off from the world, making it difficult to move forward with life, as seen in
“In Memoriam” […] Tennyson concludes In Memoriam with the realization
that his friend lives in higher forms, symbolized by the marriage described in
the Epilogue. He connects the ideas of life and death in a cyclical fashion —
death eventually brings rebirth and the possibility for life to emerge.
Tennyson isolates himself and his heart, unable to comprehend how someone so
dear to him can be taken from this earth” (Tatiana Kuzmowycz[22]). So, I
think that while he is writing the poem he is trying to understand and accept
the death of his friend, although it is quite difficult for him and he shows
his grief and his suffering.
“Tennyson is worried that by writing poetry
about Hallam, he is avoiding the grieving process and cheapening the emotion.
As he writes the poem, the speaker fears that his representation of Hallam is
inaccurate, because his memories are now distorted by the "haze of
grief" which consumes him. The speaker acknowledges that past experiences
can easily become idealized and romanticized when viewed from the space of
reflection and distance. The representation of Hallam that he is creating is
not only filtered through time, but through the subjective lenses of his own
imagination.” (Breanna Byecroft[23]).
I think that he is worried because the writing of the poem lasts 17 years, it
is a long time and as he fears he is influenced by his emotions. I think he is
very much subjective in writing the poem.
“In
In Memoriam, Tennyson explores time as something which oscillates along
a past-present-past-present continuum. That is to say, even in the here and
now, Tennyson shows that we can experience the immanence of the past, that the
past resurfaces in the present, patterning both large-scale, or natural, and
small-scale, or human, cyclical phenomena. Part of what creates the nonlinear
shape of Tennyson's verse is thus a theoretical sense of nonlinear time. Just
as poetic turns center around shifts in emotion and spiritual beliefs, they
also play a structural part of a world in which the past inextricably links to
the present, in which dreams and illusions intertwine with reality, and in
which nature, often conflated with God, forms a pattern of losses and gains.
All of these binaries thus become part of the cycles within the poem.” (Sarah Eron[24]).
I think that what Sarah means is that in the poem we can see that the past is
present in writing the poem, the poem is based on the death of his friend,
which is something in the past. Moreover, he shows how his feelings change
through the poem when he is writing depending on how he feels about what has
happened, about the death. Therefore, I think that in some parts of the poem
his belief in God is stronger that in other parts. This is more or less what
Claire Dunnigton says “Some of the poem's one hundred and thirty-one sections
delve into the mystical or contain novel revelations about the nature of grief,
even expressing doubt in religión”[25],
and what Hannah Sikorski says “This is a narrative of religious and emotional
trauma and crisis. And though the emotional and the religious can be treated as
two discrete aspects of mourning, Tennyson uses each to explore the other. He
mobilizes his emotional pain to explore issues of religious belief and doubt
and, conversely, works with ideas of religious belief and doubt to survive the
emotional trauma of his friend's death”[26]
“In
Memoriam began as the expression of a passionate, tormented grief. This does
not mean that the verse of the elegies is necessarily vague or uncontrolled.
There is admittedly something oppressive about the poem’s intense subjectivity,
an oppressiveness to which the unvarying stanza lends emphasis; […] Probably
the most impressive thing about “In Memoriam” today, in fact, is the
collectedness of the way in which Tennyson analyses his sorrow.[…] Tennyson had
ambitious to make his poem much more than the expression of merely personal
feelings:
It
must be remembered that this is a poem, not an actual biography…The different
moods of sorrow as in a drama are dramatically given, and my conviction that
fear, doubts and sufferings will find answer and relief only through Faith in a
God of Love. “I” is not always the author speaking of himself, but the voice of
the human race speaking through him.
Readers
today are likely to feel that Tennyson is at his best in this poem precisely
when he is being most personal” (Mayhead 232, 233). As we have seen in this
quotation, he does not want to express only what he feels; he wants to express
through himself what human race would feel if they were him. He wants to
express the sorrow that any human could feel.
I also
would like to make reference to the popularity, the intention and achievement f
this poem. “The poem was immediately popular, appealing to a wide range of
readers, from Queen
“The construction
of the poem in separate sections, some of which are linked together in groups
by continuity of theme, was that which gave freest scope to Tennyson’s genius,
allowing him to make of each section the expression of a single, intense mood.
But the claim for “In Memoriam”,
that it is not merely a collection of poems of varying degrees of beauty but a
great poem, rests on the degree of success with which Tennyson has woven these
together into a poem portraying the progress of the human spirit from sorrow to
joy, not by the loss of love or the mere dulling of grief, but by the merging
of the passion for the individual friend, removed but still living, into the
larger love of God and of his fellow-men” (Ward and Waller[28]).
In “In Memoriam”, Tennyson express a different concrete mood in each section,
and we can compare it with Keats in “Ode to a Nightingale”, Keats is inspired
“by moods of the poet’s own mind” (Colvin[29])
when he writes the poem.
I also want
to point out that “Keats’s works have influenced among others The
Pre-Raphaelites, Oscar Wilde and Alfred Tennyson”[30].
“Tennyson used a wide range
of subject matter, ranging from medieval legends to classical myths and from
domestic situations to observations of nature, as source material for his
poetry. The influence of John Keats and other Romantic poets published before
and during his childhood is evident from the richness of his imagery and
descriptive writing. He also handled rhythm masterfully”[31].
Keats “during his short life, his work received constant critical attacks from
the periodicals of the day, but his posthumous influence on poets such as
Alfred Tennyson has been immense. Elaborate word choice and sensual imagery
characterize Keats's poetry, including a series of odes that were his
masterpieces and which remain among the most popular poems in English
literature”[32]. So, we can see that the
most important influence of Keats in Tennyson is imagery. “Imagery is descriptive language that
deals with any of the five senses (sight, touch, smell, hearing, and taste.)
Imagery is everything that you can smell, taste, hear, touch, and see. Imagery
also makes the reader feel and live the scene around them […] Imagery is any
series of words used to create a mental picture, or sensory experience. Such
images can be created by using figures of speech such as similes, metaphors,
personification, and assonance. Images can also be created by relatable action
words or onomatopoeias that trigger pictures in the reader’s mind. Imagery
helps the reader imagine the sensations described as they are related through
the language of the author”.[33]
To make this clear I will remind you some examples of imagery in Keats’s “Ode
to a Nightingale” and in Tennyson’s “In Memoriam XXIII”. As I analysed in my first paper in “Ode to a Nightingale” in
the 2nd stanza he says “Tasting
of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!” In his imagination he is “combining
the trait of one sense” as it is taste (the taste of wine) “to other
senses” like sight (“Flora and the country green) or movement (Dance) (Melani)[34].
In “In Memoriam XXIII” we have also seen some elements of imagery. For example,
in the 1st stanza “Or breaking
into song by fits”, song3 is an
element of imagery, it has to do with the hearing sense. And in “The Shadow cloak'd from head
to foot”, shadow4 is another element of imagery; I think
it is related to the sight sense.
John
Keats is included in the Romantic period and Lord Tennyson is included in the
Victorian Era. So, first, I am going to give a brief explanation of both
periods in order that we could relate each author in relation to his context
and the relation between both authors and contexts.
Romanticism
is an intellectual and artistic movement which took place in
Victorian
“describes things and events in the reign of Queen
Then,
we can see that “With romantic or expressive theories come all the
criteria with which we are familiar at last: spontaneity, sincerity,
originality, intensity . . . alienation. […] The artist-poet confronts nature
or society, has a reaction that takes the form of a powerful emotional and
imaginative experience that he or she later expresses. […] In objective
theories […] we can turn to the question of Victorianism in literature and the
arts. For all the great poetry and art produced by the romantic generations,
many nineteenth-century readers and writers believed their approach tended
towards egotism and excessive subjectivity. […] The Victorian project involved
finding literary and artistic means of bridging a series of what they
understood to be binary oppositions: self and society, personal and political,
subjective and objective. Above all, as Carlyle managed to do in Sartor Resartus,
Tennyson in In
Memoriam, and Dickens in Great Expectations, they had to find
public uses for very private experiences without either becoming egotistical or
make themselves vulnerable. Thus, the necessity of developing the dramatic
monologue and new forms of both autobiography and autobiographical fictions. In
other words, the Victorians had to find a way to create a synthesis of what
Abrams calls pragmatic and expressive forms of art. Characteristically
Victorian literature therefore attempts bravely, and often successfully, to
combine the individuality, originality, intensity, and above all sincerity of
Wordsworth and Keats with publicly accessibility and social relevance of Pope and
Johnson.”[39]
Now, we
are going to see each author related to his context.
“What
made Tennyson so Victorian was his ready acceptance of the mores of his day,
his willingness to conform to popular taste, to write a poetry that was easily
understood and enjoyed”. He was not rebellious and his behaviour showed no
hypocrisy. We can say that Tennyson was quite linked to the royal family. “He
wrote poems on the death of Lord Nelson, on the birth of Princess Alexandra,
and dedicated the complete Idylls of the King to Albert, the
Prince Consort (Victoria's beloved husband) […] Partly as a result of his
position as a public and nationalist figure, Tennyson was by far the most
popular poet of the Victorian era. No poet was ever so completely a national
poet: Henry James said in 1875 that his verse had become "part of the
civilization of his day”.” (Glenn Everett[40]).
And we cannot forget to say that “It was in 1850 that Tennyson reached the pinnacle of his career, being
appointed Poet Laureate in succession to William Wordsworth and in the same
year producing his masterpiece, In Memoriam A.H.H., dedicated to Hallam”[41]
“Tennyson wrote
radically experimental challenges to narrative in his two great long poems, In
Memoriam and Idylls of the King. Anticipating (and certainly heavily
influencing T. S. Eliot), he builds a poetry of fragments in In Memoriam
that challenges all previous elegies, calling into question their too-easy
linear movement from grief to consolation”[42].
Tennyson is
situated between the Romantics and the Pre-Raphaelites and his “faults could easily be remedied by
more attention to normal human thoughts and activities, and correspondingly by
less infatuation with their own private states of being. […] In their youthful
poems Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold revealed the habits of mind, the emotional
and intellectual leanings, the kinds of imaginative visioning other words, the
native resources at the disposal of each. (2) Subsequently, from a desire to
gain a wide audience for their work and hence to play an influential part in
the life of the times, all three poets showed a willingness to make concessions
to literary fashions with which they were temperamentally out of sympathy. (3)
Resolved, nevertheless, that conformity should involve as little artistic loss
as possible, Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold perfected remarkable techniques for
sublimating their private insights without materially falsifying the original
perceptions at the heart of their creative impulse. (4) The identification of
these insights, along with the recognition of their concealed but vivifying
action within poems ostensibly concerned with subjects of different and
sometimes contradictory import, draws attention to the true centers of poetic
intent in Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold, and thus provides a basis for
reassessing their total achievement.” (E.D.H. Johnson[43]).
So, I think that as Tennyson is so close to Romantics he resembles them in
expressing his own states of mind; he is too subjective compared with other
Victorians. And this is also a similarity with John Keats. Keats is one of the
latest romantic poets, so, he is quite close to Tennyson and he also expresses
his own states of mind and feelings.
John
Keats died so young that he achieved his fame after his death. In his last
poems (as it is “Ode to a Nightingale”), he shows his maturity even though he
was very young. So, we have to take into account that he lost his parents when
he was a child, his brother died young because of a disease, too. He could not
afford a good education, so he learnt through the writing of his works.[44]
As John Keats achieved his fame after death and the following period after his
death was Victorianism, he influenced Tennyson who was one of the first poets
of the Victorian period. But Keats also was popular between the Pre-Raphaelites
movement in the Victorian Era. So, he achieved his fame in the Victorian
period. “During the age of Queen Victoria John Keats's poetry enjoyed the
approval of some major artists and critics, though it was unknown to the
general public.
As well
as Keats’s aesthetic acted as a prelude to Aesthetic Movement, “The illustrated
edition of Tennyson's poems […] is generally considered one of the most
outstanding — indeed, perhaps the greatest — illustrated work of its time”[46].
In
conclusion, I have chosen these two poets because I think they have relation
and we have bee able to see how Keats influenced Tennyson in the use of imagery
and, of course, the most important theme on these “death”. Both poets need to
know about the end of their lives. Keats approaches his death with a Romantic
serenity; however, Tennyson approaches his death with the inner angst of the
Victorian loss of faith. Both of them are also quite subjective when expressing
his feelings and sufferings. They based these two poems we have seen on their
moods. I think these similarities between Keats and Tennyson are due to their
proximity in time. Keats is situated at the end of the Romantic period and he
is the predecessor of Tennyson who is situated at the beginning of the
Victorian period.
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