‘What hope is here for modern rhyme …?’ The doubts that In Memoriam entertains about its own progress and procedures echo other kinds of self-consciousness that we have heard in Tennyson – the way that a rueful disquiet about his art's habitual distance from the ordinary marks the Arthurian poetry, say; or the way that a dramatic interest in extreme states of mind is invoked to license the lyrical inventiveness of Maud; or the way that, elsewhere, a tenacious Apostolic concern to address issues of ‘the life’ distracts a voice disposed to melodious selfdelight. Such creative concerns all turn upon the relationship that poetry should properly strike up with the non-poetic: when Tennyson sought to defend in The Princess ‘what some have called the too poetical passages’ (M. i. 253–4) he voiced a telltale uneasiness. I began to suggest (in Chapter 1) that a way of understanding the intricately conflicted life of Tennysonian lyricism would be to place it in the aftermath of the great Romantic poets; and not least among the wide and contradictory legacy that Romanticism bequeathed to its successors was a fruitful vacillation about the ends of poetry: between the absolute allure of the poetical and the resolute refusal to succumb to any such charm.

Not only the poets inherit that predicament, of course: the critics do too. For F. R. Leavis – as for the contemporary critics I quoted in the Introduction – the central critical question is what sort of rapport poetry enjoys with the actual world outside it: the poets of whom Leavis disapproved (like Shelley) were those with a ‘weak grasp upon the actual’; and he held Tennyson largely responsible for perpetuating the attenuated sort of Romanticism that regarded ‘the actual world’ as ‘alien, recalcitrant and unpoetical’. That kind of remark gives Tennyson a practically proto-symboliste air, a connection that Marshall McLuhan once suggestively pursued: McLuhan found in Hallam's great essay on Poems, Chiefly Lyrical an implicit statement of ‘Symbolist and Imagist doctrine’ and an insistent case (anticipating Mallarmé, Eliot, and Valéry) for the creative self-sufficiency of ‘pure poetry’.