SOURCE: Day, Aidan. “The Spirit of Fable: Arthur Hallam and Romantic Values in Tennyson's ‘Timbuctoo’.” The Tennyson Research Bulletin 4, no. 2 (November 1983): 59-71.

In the following essay, Day analyzes Hallam's Timbuctoo and Tennyson's poem of the same name. Day concludes that Tennyson's poem is influenced considerably by Hallam's version.

In attempts to identify external factors which may help account for the Romantic bias marking Tennyson's 1829 Cambridge Prize Poem “Timbuctoo” commentators tend to refer only to general influences: the broad currency of Romantic ideas at Cambridge in the late 1820s and the special enthusiasm for Romantic literature among members of the Society known as the Apostles. I shall suggest in the following discussion that in his conception of Romantic values in “Timbuctoo” Tennyson was indebted specifically to notions advanced by Arthur Hallam. Much has been made of the formative role played by Hallam in Tennyson's early intellectual and artistic development...