SOURCE: Peterson, Linda H. “Sappho and the Making of Tennysonian Lyric.” ELH 61, no. 1 (spring 1994): 121-37.

In the following essay, Peterson notes the literary influence of Sappho's poetry on Alfred, Lord Tennyson and, more broadly, on the “feminine” tradition in nineteenth-century English lyric verse.

In 1830, on a summer tour in southern France and the Pyrenees, Alfred Tennyson wrote the poem now known as “Mariana in the South.” When Arthur Henry Hallam, Tennyson's travelling companion on that tour, sent a copy of the poem to their mutual friend W. B. Donne, he included a paragraph of critical commentary that has since become part of Tennyson studies—although, as I shall argue, in a strangely half-acknowledged way. Hallam noted that the poem was a “pendant to his [Tennyson's] former poem of Mariana, the idea of both being the expression of desolate loneliness”; that the southern Mariana required “a greater lingering on...