earticle

영어

The age of Tennyson was the age of change and progress. During the reign of Queen Victoria, England attained a marvellous development throughout all over the areas of politics, economics, culture, and science. In this age of fast-paced expansion, the social function of the poet became a social issue. Victorians’ attitude toward the poet, as much as the poet’s own, was ambivalent. They inherited and in a sense gave more significances to the romantic view of the poet as hero and prophet. They demanded that the poet should guide and edify the public who were put in a spiritually impoverished condition of their society. So they bestowed on the poet the role of prophet and paid excessive tribute to his power for social good. They wanted help from the poet, and some writers complied with the public wish. Tennyson was the poet who was more sensitive to the social demand than any other poet in his age. But in an effort to satisfy the public need, Tennyson was torn between two impulses: his natural bent and public’s insistence. His natural bent was for intensely personal expressions. But to provide a firm guidance in the problems of his age, was a task that sometimes appalled him. The result was a conflict between the poet as a public leader and the poet as an aesthetic recluse which is manifested in Poems, Chiefly Lyrical(1830). To examine this process is the purpose of this paper.