SOURCE: Hinchcliffe, Peter. “Elegy and Epithalamium in In Memoriam.” University of Toronto Quarterly 52, no. 3 (spring 1983): 241-62.

In the following essay, Hinchcliffe considers whether In Memoriam is a complete poem or an anthology and asserts that Tennyson specifically organized the individual poems comprising it to form an elegy.

I

If literature is a map, then scholars and critics are surveyors and cartographers. Our task is to take new bearings and to draw new contours, not just to complete the work of our predecessors, but to determine where we have moved from those predecessors in relation to the landmarks that we study. As literary works recede into the past, some perspectives—immediacy of response and personal recollection, for example—become closed to us, but new perspectives open out. Critical studies of In Memoriam written during the last twenty-five years show us a poem more complex and serious than readers of...