SOURCE: Moore, Carlisle. “Faith, Doubt, and Mystical Experience in In Memoriam.” Victorian Studies 7, no. 2 (December 1963): 155-69.

In the following essay, Moore discusses Tennyson's In Memoriam, focusing on the author's struggle with questions of faith and his search for mystical reunion with the deceased Arthur Henry Hallam.

We are still wont to think that Tennyson must abide our question because he confused personal confession and public prophecy. In Memoriam especially, with its wavering progression from a deeply-felt religious doubt to the proclamation of a universal faith, has been dismissed as a typical instance of Victorian rationalization which no longer speaks to us. Yet with all the commentaries, analyses, and keys which have appeared since 1850 the poem still eludes consensus. In its own time readers generally accepted it as a poem of faith and rejoiced with Kingsley to find “in the science and history of the nineteenth century new and...