ABSTRACT
Hallam Tennyson shares John Keats's impulse to enclose, as well as his penchant for lists and luxury. The poem's epigraph, perhaps, says it all; the quote is attributed to 'Chapman' but since decades of scholarship have been unable to unearth any such original text, it seems plausible that the real source of the epigraph's luscious sentiment is Keats, Tennyson's inspiration and, as Keats's sonnet testifies, Chapman's inspiree. Matthew Reynolds agrees, asserting that when he had prefaced 'Timbuctoo' with a couplet ascribed, falsely, to 'Chapman' Tennyson was alluding, not to anything in the works of Chapman himself, but to Keats's sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer. Perhaps in deference to the Laureate's wishes, most modern anthologies of Tennyson's work begin with 1830's Mariana, but the project's twin interests in literary inheritance and the luscious aesthetic demand that 'Timbuctoo", strange and disdained, launch the discussion here.
