SOURCE: Boyd, John D. “The Principles of Analogy and the Immortality Question in Tennyson's In Memoriam.” University of Toronto Quarterly 45, no. 2 (winter 1976): 123-38.

In the following essay, Boyd focuses on the congruence of different conceptions of immortality in Tennyson's poem. The critic also discusses Tennyson's predisposition to analogy.

Since metaphor and simile are special kinds of analogies, there is a sense in which all poetry, at its very roots, exemplifies analogical thinking. Beyond this, however, some poets show a special predisposition toward the imaginative exploration of analogies. Tennyson is one of these. Speaking in the context of intellectual history, one might remark that Tennyson's mind, while thoroughly absorbing the dominant nineteenth-century paradigm of Reality-as-Process, also seems to have retained the analogical way of apprehending truth so characteristic of the Medieval, Renaissance, and Enlightenment outlooks. All of Tennyson's more philosophical poems reveal the importance which analogy had in his...