SOURCE: “Keble and The Christian Year,” in Victorian Devotional Poetry: The Tractarian Mode, Harvard University Press, 1981, pp. 72-113.

In the following essay, Tennyson evaluates the structure and poetic style of The Christian Year, a work he regards as a “practical application of Tractarian poetics.”

Now through her round of holy thought The Church our annual steps has brought 

—The Christian Year, “Sunday Next before Advent”

Keble's modern biographer, Georgina Battiscombe, uttering a general sentiment, has observed that The Christian Year has become for twentieth-century readers the obstacle rather than the avenue to an understanding of Keble.¹ One could add that The Christian Year has become for twentieth-century readers the obstacle to an understanding of The Christian Year. Few volumes of poetry so influential in their own day can have fallen into such obscurity and even disrepute in aftertimes as the volume that helped launch the Oxford Movement and...