5 - Tennyson, Arnold, and the Victorians: The Legacy of Romantic Love

Summary

Love is dead.

Alfred Tennyson, ‘The Burial of Love’ (1830)

In his famous review of Alfred Tennyson's 1830 volume, Arthur Henry Hallam places his friend in the ‘Sensation School of Poets’ along with Percy Shelley and John Keats. Indeed, Tennyson and other Victorian poets who began writing in the late 1820s and 1830s so closely relate to the major Romantics that they can be thought of as a third generation of Romantic poets. Robert Browning's early poems are in many ways imitations of Shelley; Elizabeth Barrett Browning acknowledged her indebtedness to the work of Felicia Hemans; and Matthew Arnold is generally regarded as the most intertextual Victorian poet in relation to the Romantics. Although the Victorian period would not officially begin until the succession of Queen Victoria to the throne in 1837, I consider such poetry of the early Victorian period as part of the final phase of late Romanticism. Much like Shelley saw himself as continuing Wordsworth's poetic program after 1805, and much like Hemans continued the same tradition after Shelley's death in 1822, poets such as Tennyson and Arnold inherited and developed the legacy of Romantic intellectual love between 1830 and 1853.

Scholars have approached the shift from Romanticism to the Victorian period in a variety of ways: socially and culturally, from Romantic Nature to Victorian Culture; politically, from Romantic revolution to Victorian reform; psychically, from Romantic unity to Victorian fragmentation; psychologically, from Romantic joy to Victorian melancholy; and formally, from the Greater Romantic Lyric to Dramatic Monologue, to name just a few. The ways that early Victorian poets adopt and adapt Romantic conceptions of love encompass all of these shifts. Yet, love is often absent from discussions of early Victorian poetry. Tennyson, for instance, was immensely concerned with his place in the literary tradition. Scholars typically read his early work of the 1830s and 1840s as expressing anxiety about entering the new, modern world of Victorian England, with its literary marketplace and disavowal of Romantic sensibilities, but there has been little analysis as to how his engagement with Romantic love informs this poetry. As I demonstrate in this chapter, Tennyson's early love poetry is poised between the poetics of sensation linked to Shelley and Keats and the reflective poetics of Wordsworth.