SOURCE: Hass, Robert Bernard. “The Mutable Locus Amoenus and Consolation in Tennyson's In Memoriam,” SEL 38, no. 4 (autumn 1998): 669-87.

In the following essay, Hass depicts In Memoriam as a pastoral elegy and focuses on Tennyson's use of locus amoenus to control his grief and find consolation.

If literary criticism judges the success of an elegy by the amount of consolation it can offer, then it is not surprising that Alfred Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam has been read in this century with a cautious skepticism. Although Tennyson's contemporaries praised the poem as a fine representation of Victorian confidence and religious faith,¹ most modern readers have had difficulty accepting the poem's “retreat” into Christian theology as well as Tennyson's belief that evolutionary forces impel all organic life toward higher, perfected types. Perhaps the most damaging assessments of In Memoriam came surprisingly from poets rather than critics. T. S. Eliot responded to...