Tennyson's Rapture

Abstract This book explores Tennyson’s representation of rapture, or being carried away, as a radical mechanism of transformation—theological, social, political, or personal—and as a figure for critical processes in his own poetics. The poet’s fascination with transformation is figured formally in the genre he is credited with inventing, the dramatic monologue. Situating Tennyson within communities of Victorian classicists, explorers, politicians, theologians, and sexologists, this book offers substantial original readings of a range of Tennyson’s major poems. Tennyson’s Rapture investigates the poet’s previously unrecognized intimacy with the theological movements in early Victorian Britain that are the acknowledged roots of contemporary Pentacostalism (with its belief in the oncoming rapture), and its formative relation to his poetic innovation. Tennyson’ work recurs persistently as well to classical instances of rapture, of mortals being borne away by immortals, a pattern illuminated by the poet’s intellectual and emotional investments in advances in philological scholarship and archeological exploration, in particular the contested discovery of Homer’s raptured Troy. Tennyson’s attraction to processes of personal and social change is bound to his significant but generally overlooked Whig ideological commitments, informed by the political and philosophical writings of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam (the subject of In Memoriam) and a half-century of interaction with William Gladstone. Pearsall shows the comprehensive engagement of seemingly apolitical monologues with the rise of democracy over the course of Tennyson’s long career. Proposing a new approach to reading all Victorian dramatic monologues, this book argues against a critical tradition that sees speakers as unintentionally self-revealing and ignorant of the implications of their speech, demonstrating instead the commanding cultural ambitions of dramatic speakers and the poet himself.