“The Poet of Science”: How Scientists Read Their Tennyson
Alfred Tennyson’s attitude to science has been a perennial crit ical theme. s cholars have debated its overall tenor as well as his responses to particular theories, but two fundamental proposi tions have held sway. The first is that Tennyson eagerly followed scien tific developments, reading widely and carefully in several different sciences, including geology, astronomy, and biology, and building up a detailed knowledge of contemporary science in the process. The second is that his response to science as a whole was ambivalent. A. C. Bradley set the terms of the debate in a 1914 lecture, “The r eaction against Tennyson.” For Bradley, Tennyson was “the only one of our great poets whose attitude towards the sciences of Nature was what a modern poet’s ought to be . . . the only one to whose habitual way of seeing, imagining, or thinking, it makes any real difference that Laplace, or for that matter Copernicus, ever lived” (31). At the same time, the nature revealed by science, with its “conflict, pain, and waste” (10), posed a “problem” (11) for Tennyson that William Wordsworth, with his unscientific view of nature’s benevolence, did not have to face. Tennyson’s critics have been tasked with determining the nature and extent of this problem and Tennyson’s response to it. At best, in Henry sidgwick’s words, he was acutely conscious of science’s “inade quacy to satisfy our deepest needs” (qtd. in H. Tennyson 1: 303); at worst,