ABSTRACT
Tennyson seems initially an unpromising subject for an environmental or ecocritical reading. Yes, he was noted from his earliest poetic successes as a “poet of nature” but, coming from rural Lincolnshire, he never seems to have seen “nature” as vulnerable, as worthy of protection. His most famous line paints “her” in very different colors-as “red in tooth and claw” (In Memoriam LVI 15)—as an indifferent, indeed, Monstrous Mother. Where Matthew Arnold can praise Wordsworth as one who “laid us where we lay at birth, / In the cool, fl owery lap of Earth” (“Memorial Verses” 48-9), Tennyson seems rather the ruthless Victorian poet of science, for whom “nature” is at best indifferent to, at worst the enemy of human aspirations.
