In Memoriam, Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Rob Johnson (essay date 1987)
Rob Johnson (essay date 1987)
SOURCE: Johnson, Rob. “Strategies of Containment: Tennyson's In Memoriam.” In Post-Structuralist Readings of English Poetry, edited by Richard Machin and Christopher Norris, pp. 308-31. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
[In the following essay, Johnson examine Tennyson's deliberately ambiguous rhetoric whereby faith and doubt are explored through various alternative presentations in In Memoriam.]
In defending his commentary on In Memoriam against readers of Tennyson who doubted the necessity or value of such an enterprise, A. C. Bradley declared: “We read for the most part half-asleep, but a poet writes wide-awake.”1 This remark sounds across eight decades with a curiously contemporary ring, closely paralleling Paul de Man's defence of deconstructionist reading against the charge that it is a gratuitous addition to the text: “by reading the text as we did we...
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