SOURCE: Sendry, Joseph. “In Memoriam: Twentieth-Century Criticism.” Victorian Poetry 18, no. 2 (summer 1980): 105-18.

In the following essay, Sendry provides a comprehensive overview of twentieth-century criticism on In Memoriam.

Twentieth-Century criticism of In Memoriam begins, conceptually as well as chronologically, with A. C. Bradley's A Commentary on Tennyson's “In Memoriam,” first published in 1901. Bradley offered exegesis and informative annotation of the entire poem along with richly concise biographical, bibliographical, and literary background. What he claimed not to offer was “aesthetic criticism,” investigation of what Christopher Ricks (in Tennyson, 1972) calls “the most important critical question about In Memoriam … the first and most obvious one: in what sense do the 133 separate sections ranging in length from 12 lines to 144 lines, constitute a whole, a poetic unity, a poem?” In fact, Bradley had his doubts, which he expressed in an unregarded footnote to his 1914 lecture on “The Reaction against Tennyson” (published in Miscellanies, 1929). Admitting...