Abstract
The issues raised by Arthur Hallam’s review-essay, ‘On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry’, published in the Englishman’s Review in August 1831, whilst ostensibly focused upon Tennyson’s Poems, Chiefly Lyrical published in the previous year, resonate with implications for the status, purpose and aesthetic validity of lyric poetry in the period of modernity as a whole. Whatever the merits of Hallam’s individual categorisation of, say, Wordsworth as an overly philosophical ‘reflective’ poet, or his contrastingly high valuation of Keats and Shelley as ‘poets of sensation’, the crucial implication of his argument is located in his diagnosis of the nineteenth century as ‘a period of degradation’.1 The integration of poetic material, what Hallam designates ‘the energies of Sensitive, of Reflective, of Passionate Emotion, which in former times were intermingled’ (Hallam, 91), is now in his diagnosis separated out, resulting in that pervasive sense of melancholy which, he claims, ‘so evidently characterises the spirit of modern poetry’ with the characteristic ‘return of the mind upon itself (ibid., 91). Hallam suggests, a propos this creative problematic, ‘that the diffusion of poetry must necessarily be in the direct ratio of the diffusion of machinery’ (ibid., 92), and he furthermore discerns a decline in poetic influence due to a ‘decrease of subjective power, arising from a prevalence of social activity, and a continual absorption of the higher feelings into the palpable interests of ordinary life’ (ibid., 92).
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Arthur Hallam, ‘On Some Characteristics of Modern Poetry’, in Victorian Scrutinies, ed. I. Armstrong (London: Athlone, 1972), 91. Subsequently cited as Hallam.
James Chandler, ‘Hallam, Tennyson and the Poetry of Sensation’, Studies in Romanticism 33 (1994), 533.
W. David Shaw, The Lucid Veil (London: Athlone, 1987), 58.
Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry (London: Routledge, 1993), 31.
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, tr. H. Zohn (London: Pimlico, 1999), 152, 153. Subsequently cited as Benjamin.
The Poems of Tennyson, ed. C. Ricks (Harlow: Longmans, 1969), 213. Subsequently cited as Poems.
Jason Rudy, Electric Meters (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2009), 58.
Donald S. Hair, Tennyson’s Language (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1991), 43.
John Locke, An Essay on Human Understanding, ed. P. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 117.
William Walker, Locke, Literary Criticism, and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 126.
Eric Grifffiths, ‘Tennyson’s Idle Tears’, in Tennyson: Seven Essays, ed. P. Collins (London: Macmillan, 1992), 41.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, tr. C. Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), 5.
Cited in Martin Blocksidge, A Life Lived Quickly (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2011), 49.
T. W. Adorno, ‘Lyric Poetry and Society’, in The Adorno Reader, ed. B. O’Connor (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 213. Subsequently cited as Adorno.
See Richard Maxwell, ‘Unnumbered Polypi’, Victorian Poetry 47 (2009), 7–23.
Julia Courtney, “The Kraken”: Aunt Bourne and the End of the World’, Tennyson Research Bulletin 9(4), (2010), 348–55.
Stephen Dillon, ‘Canonical and Sensational: Arthur Hallam and Tennyson’s 1830 Poems’, Victorian Poetry 30 (1992), 96.
Walter Benjamin, ‘Diary Entries, 1938’, Selected Writings, vol. 3, ed. H. Eiland and M. W Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), 340.
T. W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, tr. R. Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 2004), 107.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2013 Roger Ebbatson
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ebbatson, R. (2013). ‘Impassioned Song’: Arthur Hallam and Lyric Poetry. In: Landscape and Literature 1830–1914. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137330444_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137330444_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-46102-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-33044-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)