ABSTRACT
In ‘Lucretius’, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s interpretation of the Roman poet’s atomic theories allowed him to consider the effects of a materialist philosophy on a pre-Christian consciousness and so avoid any obvious partisanship or heresy among the advocates of Victorian science or religion. For Victorian readers of ‘Lucretius’, the discrepancy between the circumstances and the motives of his death allowed two very different interpretations of the poem. Some thought the poem was meant as an interpretation of Lucretius’s character and his personal tragedy. In ‘The Ancient Sage’, however, Tennyson uses the speaker to describe his own deeply felt beliefs and to challenge directly the Romantic rhetoric of an advocate for a materialist approach to life. The dangers of scientific romanticism resided for Tennyson in the kind of social and moral chaos that might occur if the limits of human understanding were breached and made to serve the interests of a particular point of view.
