In Memoriam, Alfred, Lord Tennyson - James G. Taaffe (essay date 1963)

James G. Taaffe (essay date 1963)

SOURCE: Taaffe, James G. “Circle Imagery in Tennyson's In Memoriam.” Victorian Poetry 1, no. 2 (April 1963): 123-31.

[In the following essay, Taaffe offers a close reading of In Memoriam, focusing on its circle imagery and connecting the poem to Dante's Divina Commedia.]

In Memoriam, Tennyson tells us, “was meant to be a kind of Divina Commedia, ending with happiness.” The poem, beginning with the burial of Arthur Henry Hallam, he says, “concludes with the marriage of my youngest sister Cecilia.”1 This statement has been generally believed to indicate the movement of the poem from a Tennysonian Inferno to a Victorian Paradiso: from a “wasteland” to a “mystical vision … assuredly the sanction of his faith.”2 In an article entitled “The Symbolic Imagination” Allen Tate has perceptively discussed the central symbol and...

[The entire page is 4122 words long]

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

eNotes Pass