SOURCE: Joseph, Gerhard. “Producing the ‘Far-Off Interest of Tears’: Tennyson, Freud, and the Economics of Mourning.” Victorian Poetry 36, no. 2 (summer 1998): 123-33.

In the following essay, Joseph examines loss in In Memoriam through a Freudian lens, focusing on several sections in which the critic illustrates Tennyson's use of economic terminology to express grief.

I live, live intensely, and am fed by life, and my value, whatever it might be, is my own kind of expression of that. Art makes life, makes interest, makes importance.

Henry James, to H. G. Wells

Art makes interest; it is a way of investing something that might be called life or experience—that is a species of risk.

Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery¹

Like Alice's Humpty Dumpty with his self-interested definition of “glory,” when I make a word do a lot of work, but especially when that work is double if not...