The Study Of Tennyson's Spiritual Growth: The Speaker In His Poems

The Victorian Poet Laureate Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) is renowned to his countrymen and the study of his poems has been in full swing in the past decades. Traditionally, Tennyson is studied from two approaches which are often overlapped: biographical approach represented by his son Hallam Tennyson's Memoir, and psychological approach, namely the study of Tennyson's religious concerns. This thesis focuses on Tennyson's spiritual growth from the perspective of relation between the poet and the speaker in his poems. The speakers in his poems are often identical with the poet.This thesis is divided into five parts, including introduction and conclusion.In Chapter One, the focused poem "The Palace of Art" shows the sprout of Tennyson's spiritual growth. The artist in the poem, as the speaker, changes his degree of involvement in the poem. The analysis of this change reveals Tennyson's ambivalent attitudes towards life, art, and social obligations in his early life.In Chapter Two, Tennyson's In Memoriam is studied. This collection of poems stimulated by the poet's friend A.H. Hallam's death records the poet's spiritual growth. The analysis of the speaker's intentional choices of different hearers illustrates Tennyson's emotional and spiritual evolvement. These hearers are the impersonal hearers, Hallam as the hearer, the singular "I" and the plural "we" as hearers.In Chapter Three, Idylls of the King, a narrative poem modeled on the legends of King Arthur and his Round Table Knights, is studied as a thematic extension of In Memoriam. It manifests the final phase of Tennyson's spiritual growth. This part of the thesis analyzes the narrator's omniscience revealed in his psycho-analysis of characters and his comments and substantiates Tennyson's recognition of social commitment.In conclusion, the speaker's change of his degree of involvement in the poem, the speaker's choices of different hearers, and the narrator's omniscience, these three aspects related to the speaker in Tennyson's poems are in concord with Tennyson's spiritual growth and properly reveal Tennyson's thematic concerns.