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Alfred, Lord TennysonA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
In Memoriam is a revolutionary repurposing of the elegy, a genre of poetry that dates to Antiquity. Before Tennyson’s take on the genre, elegies were designed to provide a poet the opportunity to expound on death as an abstract, a concept, the poet offering wisdom, strategies that would, in turn, help readers by inspiring them to view death, such a private and painful experience, within a wider context; that is, to give loss a context. The poet approached death impersonally—in John Milton’s Lycidas (1638), before Tennyson’s take considered among the defining elegies in British literature, Milton takes the occasion of the death of a young poet in a tragic shipwreck to fashion an elaborate pastoral centered on a character, a young, dreamy, and doomed shepherd named Lycidas. Elegies seldom spoke of a death too personal—often, as is the case in Walt Whitman’s several elegies after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, elegies addressed the loss of some titanic public figure, a head of state, a general, a poet. The tone of such elegies was heightened and ornate, the rhetoric dressed for public recitation, the poet a helpful conduit of such sorrow.
By Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Crossing the Bar
Crossing the Bar
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Idylls of the King
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Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The Charge of the Light Brigade
The Charge of the Light Brigade
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The Eagle
The Eagle
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The Lady Of Shalott
The Lady Of Shalott
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Ulysses
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Alfred, Lord Tennyson