SOURCE: Pollard, Arthur. “In Memoriam as a Personal Poem.” Tennyson Research Bulletin 3, no. 5 (November 1981): 175-84.

In the following essay, originally delivered as a lecture to the Tennyson Society in 1981, Pollard describes In Memoriam as a personal poem with universal application as the author relates his own experience of loss and bereavement.

First of all, I should like to express my thanks and also my sense of humility at the honour you have conferred upon me in asking me to deliver the Tennyson lecture this year. The year just past saw great activity and success in securing the vast bulk of the Tennyson material and particularly the rightly-named Lincoln manuscript of In Memoriam for permanent deposit at the Research Centre (and I should like to pay my own personal tribute to all those, and not least the Lincolnshire County Council—most enlightened action for a local authority—who did...