SOURCE: Johnson, Rob. “Strategies of Containment: Tennyson's In Memoriam.” In Post-Structuralist Readings of English Poetry, edited by Richard Machin and Christopher Norris, pp. 308-31. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

In the following essay, Johnson examine Tennyson's deliberately ambiguous rhetoric whereby faith and doubt are explored through various alternative presentations in In Memoriam.

In defending his commentary on In Memoriam against readers of Tennyson who doubted the necessity or value of such an enterprise, A. C. Bradley declared: “We read for the most part half-asleep, but a poet writes wide-awake.”¹ This remark sounds across eight decades with a curiously contemporary ring, closely paralleling Paul de Man's defence of deconstructionist reading against the charge that it is a gratuitous addition to the text: “by reading the text as we did we were only trying to come closer to being as rigorous a reader as the author had to be to...