Recently added articles from Victorian Poetry:
Guest editor's foreword.(Alfred Tennyson)(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... <Pre>Well--were it not a pleasant thing To fall asleep with all one's friends;To pass with all our social ties To silence from the paths of men;And every hundred years to rise And learn the world, and sleep again;To sleep through terms of mighty wars, ...
Unnumbered polypi.(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... In August 1829, during a "voyage among the Polynesian islands," the surgeon George Bennett acquired a pearly (or chambered) nautilus (nautilus pompilius). This creature had been spotted "floating on the surface of the water ... resembling, as the sailors on Bennett's ship put it, "a dead ...
Tennyson and the ladies.(Alfred Tennyson)(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... In his 1830 Poems, Chiefly Lyrical and 1832 Poems, Tennyson published more than a dozen lyrics now designated "lady poems"--taking his titles from the heroines of Shakespeare and Spenser, modern and classical authors, and letting them evolve, as he put it, "like the camel, from my own ...
Getting it wrong in "The Lady of Shalott".(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Medea in Ovid's Metamorphoses famously declares, "Video meliora proboque,/ deteriora sequor"--I see what is better, and I approve of it; I pursue what is worse. (1) The passage is justly celebrated, because it transforms what could be a simple commonplace--people do wrong, even when they ...
Tennyson and the embodied mind.(Alfred Tennyson)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Some time after the publication of his book The Principles of Psychology in 1855, Herbert Spencer wrote to Alfred Tennyson: <Pre> SIR, I happened recently to be re-reading your Poem "TheTwo Voices," and coming to the verse Or if thro' lower lives ...
Tennyson and Zeno: three infinities.(Alfred Tennyson)(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Though Tennyson left Cambridge without a degree because he refused to climb "the apparently unscalable wall of mathematics," (1) astronomy, physics, and the new geology of Robert Chambers and Charles Lyell continue to fire his imagination with thoughts of two immensities: the infinitely ...
Eight reflections of Tennyson's "Ulysses".(Alfred Tennyson)(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... In Memoriam: Douglas Bush, Dwight Culler, Edgar Shannon I had ambition not only to go farther than any one had been before, but as far as it was possible for man to go. --The Circumnavigator, Captain James Cook, R.N. (1) 1. An Anxiety of Influence (2) ...
The breathing space of ballad: Tennyson's stillborn poetics.(Alfred Tennyson)(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... In April 1851, on Easter Sunday, Alfred Tennyson's first child was stillborn. The child, a boy, was apparently strangled by the umbilical cord. Christopher Ricks reports that the poet never forgot this "'great grief.'" (1) Rather than send a death notice to the newspaper, Tennyson took it ...
Calculating loss in Tennyson's In Memoriam.(Alfred Tennyson)(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Subtraction and Division Contemporary attitudes toward recovery from loss have inevitably been influenced by Sigmund Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917). Freud's essay contrasts the work of mourning, whereby the subject detaches itself from the lost object and retrieves ...
What the laureate did next: Maud.(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... <Pre>I know that I braid too much my ownSnapped-off perceptions of things as they come to me.They are private and always will be.Where then are the private turns of eventDestined to boom later like golden chimesReleased over a city from a highest tower?The ...
"Who knows if he be dead?": Maud, signification, and the Madhouse Canto.(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... The most compelling question in Tennyson's Maud (1855) is not, as some have suggested, "What is it, that has been done?" (1) but rather, "Who knows if he be dead?" (II.119). Both of these inquiries, in their immediate contexts, relate to the speaker's uncertainty surrounding the fate of ...
An adventure in modern marriage: domestic development in Tennyson's Geraint and Enid and The Marriage of Geraint.(Alfred Tennyson)(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Tennyson committed decades of his life to recrafting medieval Arthurian romance into his eventual Victorian epic, Idylls of the King, but his earliest publication from the venture shows that he approached the project with concern for its relevance to modern society. "The Epic," his frame ...
The contemporaneity of The Last Tournament.(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... The Idylls of the King [functioned as] a shell to encase the nineteenth century. --Robert Bernard Martin (1) The single poems making up the collective Idylls of the King were released over a very long period of time, more than sixty-five years if one counts from a ...
Tennyson's Catholic years: a point of contact.(Alfred Tennyson)(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... De Vere--his talk of Catholicism, eloquently vague, sliding into Newmanism and Jesuitry. The T.'s mildly dissentient, I getting angry. T., De V., and I went out under the stars; I flared up at last and asked De V., "Do you yourself entirely believe the account given by the Roman Catholic ...
Delirious bulldogs and nasty crockery: Tennyson as nonsense poet.(Alfred Tennyson)(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... In concluding his 1833 essay "The Two Kinds of Poetry," John Stuart Mill turns to the role of the critic and suggests that, just as a person must be possessed of a certain amount of feeling and philosophy to be poet, so a critic must be possessed of those same qualities to be able to ...
Epistolary Tennyson: the art of suspension.(Alfred Tennyson)(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Probably only Tennysonians know a group of his poems that may loosely be called verse epistles, and as less than a Tennysonian I discovered them myself fairly recently. The occasion was a small course I taught in Victorian writers where Tennyson was the first poet considered and where the ...
Parody and poetic tradition: Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience.(W.S. Gilbert)
Dec 22, 2008; ... Parodies of aestheticism were common fare by the time Patience was produced in 1881. Even so, Patience was recognized as "the most subtle and incisive of all the contributions to the exhaustive satire of aestheticism." It is "deeper than the rest," said the astute reviewer for the ...
Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the politics of childhood.
Dec 22, 2008; ... Aarmazed that despite her prolonged invalidism and two previous miscariages she was able to bear a child at age forty-three, Elizabeth Barrett Browning viewed her son, Robert Wiedeman Barrett Browning--nicknamed Pen--as something akin to a fairy changeling, and her prolific letters ...
Uncanny transactions and canny forms: Rosamund Marriott Watson's Marchen.
Dec 22, 2008; ... There were jewels in the pebbly brook and jewels in the sky, And a thousand fighting Pixies in the snow. --"The Golden Age" (1) In a series of essays at the end of the twentieth century Linda K. Hughes enriched an earlier fin de siecle by restoring to visibility one ...
Charmides and The Sphinx: Wilde's engagement with Keats.
Dec 22, 2008; ... From the Renaissance to the nineteenth century Greece was a primary object of myth-makers' attentions, its history as well as its mythology fodder for the imagination: a ligature exemplified by Oscar Wilde's "The Theatre at Argos" (1877), a sonnet written in situ, "Where once the Chorus ...