ABSTRACT
Tennyson wrote in a period when the tradition of Romantic aesthetic autonomy was at odds with the important social role being offered to poets as public moralists. Reading Tennyson’s poetry against the social crises of the 1840s, and in the contexts of intense pressure from his friends in the establishment to act as a moralist, we see the causes of Tennyson’s oft-noted self-division. The revival of Tennyson in the 1920s was a matter of discarding the public moralist and creating a new—and still prevalent—canon of Tennyson’s work, drawn from his most symbolic and aesthetic works.
