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The Shade of Homer Exorcises the Ghost of De Quincey: Tennyson's “The Lotos-Eaters”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 September 2010

Extract

… a great difference of opinion has prevailed among the moderns concerning what the ancients intended by the lotus: for the history of it, as it has come down to us, is mixed with fable, from having previously passed through the hands of the poets.

The name ‘lotus’ was applied by the ancients indifferently to a number of quite different families of plants, notably (1) the true lotus … (2) the shrub or tree Zizyphus, Jujuba, whose berries were eaten by tribes in North Africa (3) trefoils, clovers, and melilots. … The lotus which men really ate was what I have called the true lotus, of which there are two varieties to be considered: (1) Nelumbo, the Indian lotus, and (2) Nymphaea, the Egyptian lotus, both of the family Nymphaeaceae.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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References

Notes

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14. I am grateful to Terry Parssinen for sharing with me his manuscript on “Narcotic Drugs and British Society, 1820–1930,” in which he comments that “The amount of opium sold in the market towns of this area, such as Louth, Wisbeach, and Holbeach, was so remarkable diat Victorian observers termed it ‘die opium district.’”

15. Robert Martin argues persuasively in his biography that epilepsy plagued a number of members of die Tennyson family and that Alfred Tennyson was fearful of being an epileptic himself until late in the 1840s.

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24. Schneider, p. 26.

25. Coleridge employed this image in a letter to his brother in April 1798 (Abrams, P. 59).

26. Lowes, John Livingstone, The Road to Xanadu (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927).Google Scholar According to Lowes, Coleridge learned of Aloadine from Purchas His Pilgrimes. Hayter, p. 21, notes that Southey confused hashish with opium and thus identified opium as the drug which transported assassins to paradise.

27. Paden, W. D., Tennyson in Egypt: A Study of the Imagery in His Earlier Works (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1942), pp. 3536.Google Scholar Hereafter cited as Paden.

28. Paden, p. 13.

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30. All textual quotations are from The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Ricks, Christopher (London: Longmans, Green, 1969).Google Scholar

31. Ricks, Tennyson, p. 91, also observes this similarity.

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33. Buckley, Jerome H., Tennyson: The Growth of a Poet (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), p. 48CrossRefGoogle Scholar, notes the mariners’ “ill-concealed sense of guilt.” Ricks, Tennyson, p. 90, comments that the mariners are rationalizing in their creation of reasons not to go home.

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38. Courtwright, David, Dark Paradise: Opiate Addiction in America before 1940 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982)Google Scholar, points out that in the early Victorian period most physicians would have viewed addiction as a “vice” which affected the moral faculties of the addict. Later in the nineteenth century addiction began to be regarded as a disease.

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40. MacLaren, Malcolm, “Tennyson's Epicurean Lotos-Eaters,” Classical Journal, 56 (March 1961), 259–67Google Scholar, shows that Tennyson distorted Epicureanism to suit his poetic purpose and argues that Tennyson's disapproval of Epicureanism in The Vision of Sin sheds light on his attitude toward the mariners.

41. Pattison, Robert, Tennyson and Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

42. Page, passim.

43. Symonds, John Addington, “Nature Myth and Allegories,” Essays Speculative and Suggestive (London: Chapman and Hall, 1893), p. 335.Google Scholar