Despite a strong cultural conviction that genius transcended death, the 19 th century British public was intensely preoccupied with the dead bodies and remains of famous poets such as Burns, Byron and Wordsworth, since they constituted a direct physical link to immaterial genius. This fascination was sustained by conventional metaphorization of the poets' works as an immortal textual body. By the 1890s confidence in poetic continuity was unsettled, leading to compensatory attempts to represent the volatile corpse as a recuperative icon of Poetry. When the Poet Laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson died in 1892, his love of privacy was defeated and ironized by unprecedented press and public curiosity about his death, burial and grave. This paper argues that, although Tennyson's body was never on public display, its image circulated widely through written and graphic representations of the idealized moonlit deathbed, which 'immortalized' his decaying corpse. The discussion concentrates on newspaper and eye-witness accounts of the funeral at Westminster Abbey on 12 October 1892, which construct the event in spectacular and symbolic terms. The paper concludes that fin de siècle anxiety determined the presentation of Tennyson's body to the people materially and rhetorically.
Reprints and Corporate Permissions
Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?
To request a reprint or corporate permissions for this article, please click on the relevant link below:
Academic Permissions
Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?
Obtain permissions instantly via Rightslink by clicking on the button below:
If you are unable to obtain permissions via Rightslink, please complete and submit this Permissions form. For more information, please visit our Permissions help page.
Related research
People also read lists articles that other readers of this article have read.
Recommended articles lists articles that we recommend and is powered by our AI driven recommendation engine.
Cited by lists all citing articles based on Crossref citations.
Articles with the Crossref icon will open in a new tab.