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Alfred Lord Tennyson’s adaptation of the elegy in In Memoriam

Updated: Feb 27, 2022

By Serena Kerrigan-Noble - English Language and Literature Student @ Lincoln College, Oxford

 

In Memoriam A. H. H. is an extended elegy written by the Victorian poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, published in 1850, a year before he was appointed Poet Laureate. Tennyson’s In Memoriam is both a personal elegy for the death of his friend Arthur Hallam in 1833, as well as an expression of cosmic and universal grief. Hallam’s death became a catalyst in the poem for wider reflection on the destabilising scientific and industrial changes of the Victorian era. Personal loss becomes