Arthur Henry Hallam:His Death Inspires Poetic Brilliance

James E. Reynolds

English 742X

September 11, 2006

Arthur Henry Hallam: His Tragic Death Inspires Poetic Brilliance

In 1827 Alfred Tennyson--long before Queen Victoria would dub him, Lord Tennyson--followed his two older brothers to Trinity College. Tennyson would quickly make his mark as a poet by winning the Chancellor's Gold Medal for his poem "Timbuctoo." Competing for the prize was a young man, a year and half younger than Tennyson, but a similarly brilliant literary up-and-comer: Arthur Henry Hallam.

Hallam, born in London in 1811, was the son of noted historian Henry Hallam. A precocious youth, according to his father, Arthur began to study both Latin and French by the time he was seven years old. Hallam would go on to Eton College, where studied Greek and Latin, and showed a great interest in English literature, particularly admiring Fletcher and Shakespeare, and the poet Byron. As he got older his taste in poetry would change and Wordsworth and Shelley entered his personal Pantheon. In 1827, the same year Hallam graduates from Eton, his family moves to Italy where he discovers and is infatuated with the poetry of Dante and Petrarch. Later in '27 Hallam returns to England to enter Trinity College, Cambridge. According to his father, Hallam's health became an issue. Hallam senior writes: In the first year of his residence at Cambridge, symptoms of disordered health, especially in the circulatory system, began to show themselves..."

At Cambridge, Hallam befriended Alfred Tennyson to whom Hallam was the runner-up for the Chancellor's Prize Poem in 1829. That same year, both Hallam and Tennyson are invited to join The Apostles, the college's prestigious and secretive literary and intellectual society. Also, Hallam falls in love with Tennyson's younger sister, Emily.

In 1831, while still an undergraduate, Hallam publishes a prescient essay entitled, "On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry and On the Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson." In the essay, Hallam lays the groundwork for a new theoretical approach to poetry and defines a set of literary marching orders for poets who wrote fifty years later during the Victorian Age. Not too surprisingly, Tennyson's poems receive an enthusiastic endorsement in Hallam's essay as being representative of the more "true" form of poetry: one based on conveying emotional veracity not on the less acute faculty of reflection. For Hallam and his closest friend Tennyson, the goal of poetry is not merely the reflective capacity of a poet's mind which is able to contemplate a thing of beauty and convince his reader of truthfulness of that vision, but more importantly the ability to convey the emotional sensation prompted by that overwhelming beauty. Hallam writes:

It is not true that the highest species of poetry is the reflective; it is a gross fallacy, that because certain opinions are acute or profound, the expression of them by the imagination must be eminently beautiful. Whenever the mind of the artist suffers itself to be occupied, during its periods of creation, by any other predominant motive than the desire of beauty, the result is false in art...for a man whose reveries take a reasoning turn, and who is accustomed to measure his ideas by their logical relations rather than the congruity of the sentiments to which they refer, will be apt to mistake the pleasure he would have in knowing it to be beautiful, and so will pile his thoughts in a rhetorical battery, that they may convince, instead of letting them flow in a natural course of contemplation, that they may enrapture.

The young Hallam has courage--some may call it audacity--to criticize the work of the Romantic poet, William Wordsworth, saying about his work, "...much has been said by him which is good as philosophy, powerful