Varieties of geological experience: Religion, body, and spirit in Tennyson's In Memoriam and Lyell's Principles of Geology

Victorian Poetry

Volumn 42, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 113-133

  Tomko, Michael ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950599829     PISSN: 00425206     EISSN: 15307190     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/vp.2004.0044     Document Type: Article

References (37)

1. Herbert Tucker, "The Fix of Form: An Open Letter," VLC 27 (1999): 535, 533
2. The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks, 3 vols. (Berekley: Univ. of California Press, 1987)
3. Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, 3 vols, repr. with an introduction by Martin J. S. Rudwick (1830-33; Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990). Subsequent references to Tennyson and Lyell will be made parenthetically
4. See Denise Gigante, "Forming Desire: On the Eponymous In Memoriam Stanza," NCL 53 (March 1999): 480-504
5. Sarah Gates, "Poetics, Metaphysics, Genre: The Stanza Form of In Memoriam," VP 37 (1999): 507-519
6. and Stephen Jay Gould, "The Man who Set the Clock Back," New York Review of Books 48, no. 15 (October 9, 2001): 53
7. I will also follow recent analyses of In Memoriam and religion by Donald Hair, "Soul and Spirit in In Memoriam," VP 34 (1996): 175-191
8. James Hood, "Tennyson, D.W. Griffith, and Victorian Pneumatography," VIJ 25 (1997): 59-75
9. and W. David Shaw, The Origins of the Monologue: The Hidden God (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1999), pp. 78-79
10. Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 256
11. Robert Bernard Haas, "The Mutable Locus Amoenus and Consolation in Tennyson's In Memoriam," SEL 38, no. 4 (Autumn 1998): 674, 679
12. J.M.I. Klaver, Geology and Religious Sentiment: The Effect of Geological Discoveries on English Society and Literature between 1829 and 1859 (New York: Brill, 1997), pp. 15-86
13. David Dean, '"Through Science to Despair': Geology and the Victorians," in Victorian Science and Victorian Values: Literary Perspectives, ed. James Paradis and Thomas Postlewait, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 360 (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, April 1981), p. 131
14. For Eleanor Mattes, Tennyson is "recording his shock" at the implications of Lyell's theory. See "The Challenges of Geology to Belief in Immortality and a God of Love," in In Memoriam, ed. Robert H. Ross, p. 122. Despite acknowledging the strong religious commitments of many geologists, Klaver writes that Tennyson always regards science with "a more emotional attitude" than they (p. 170)
15. Steven Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998), pp. 188-195
16. Armstrong, p. 256. Roy Porter, "Charles Lyell and Principles of the History of Geology," British Journal for the History of Science 9, no. 32 (1976): 91-103
17. Mattes writes that Lyell "did everything possible to conceal the disturbing religious implications of his theories," (p. 122)
18. Tucker suggests that In Memoriam is a "Poet Laureate's gag" that likewise conceals, behind the text, Tennyson's "private doubt" (p. 535)
19. Matthew Arnold, "Dover Beach," in The Oxford Authors: Matthew Arnold, ed. Miriam Allott and Robert H. Super (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986). Further reference to Arnold's works will use line numbers in the text
20. Leonard G. Wilson, Charles Lyell, The Years to 1841: The Revolution in Geology (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1972), p. 267
21. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Eolian Harp," in The Oxford Authors: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed, H. J. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 27-29, ll. 59-60
22. Susan Gliserman, "Early Victorian Science Writers and Tennyson's 'In Memoriam': A Study in Cultural Exchange," VS 18 (1975): 306
23. The best summary of Coleridge's philosophical and theological thought in Aids to Reflection is Douglas Hedley, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion: Aids to Reflection and the Mirror of the Spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000)
24. For Coleridge's influence on Maurice, the Apostles, and the Broad Church movement, see Olive J. Brose, Frederick Denison Maurice: Rebellious Conformist (Oxford, Ohio: Ohio Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 23-27
25. Richard Deacon, The Cambridge Apostles: A History of Cambridge University's Elite Intellectual Secret Society (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986), pp. 8-10
26. and Charles Richard Sanders, Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement (Durham: North Carolina Press, 1942)
27. Vergil, The Georgics, trans. H. Ruston Fairclough (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986), book IV, ll. 221-222. The original reads "deum namque ire per omnia, / terrasque tractusque maris caelumque profundum." Fairclough translates as "for God, they say, pervades all things, earth and sea's expanse and heaven's depth" (l. 211)
28. For Tennyson's early engagement with competing geological systems and early reception of Lyell's work, see David Dean, Tennyson and Geology (Lincoln: The Tennyson Society, 1985), pp. 1-8
29. For the Romantics' involvement see Nigel Leask, "Mont Blanc's Mysterious Voice: Shelley and Huttonian Earth Science," in The Third Culture: Literature and Science, ed. Elinor S. Shaffer (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1998), pp. 182-204
30. and John Wyatt, Wordsworth and the Geologists (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995)
31. For the parallelism of the Psalms, see Murray Roston, Prophet and Poet: The Bible and the Growth of Romanticism (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 19-28
32. and C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1958), pp. 3-5
33. For the Biblical resonance of In Memoriam see Joseph Sendry, "In Memoriam as Apocalypse," in Sense and Transcendence: Essays in Honour of Herman Servotte, ed. Ortwin de Graef, Vik Doyen, Erik Hertog, Roger Janssens, Guido Latré, and Hedwig Schwall (Leuven, Belgium: Leuven Univ. Press, 1995), pp. 59-60
34. F. B. Pinion, A Tennyson Companion: Life and Works (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984), p. 15
35. For Tennyson's rejection, following Maurice, Coleridge, and the Apostles, of external religion, see Alan G. Hill, Tennyson, Wordsworth & the "Forms" of Religion (Lincoln: The Tennyson Society, 1997), pp. 24-30, 35-41
36. For the influence of the Apostles on Tennyson, see John Croyle and Richard Cronin, "Tennyson and the Apostles," in Rethinking Victorian Culture, ed. Juliet John and Alice Jenkins (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000)
37. Charles Lyell, The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, 2nd ed. (London, 1863), p. 504