Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 September 2010
… a great difference of opinion has prevailed among the moderns concerning what the ancients intended by the lotus: for the history of it, as it has come down to us, is mixed with fable, from having previously passed through the hands of the poets.
The name ‘lotus’ was applied by the ancients indifferently to a number of quite different families of plants, notably (1) the true lotus … (2) the shrub or tree Zizyphus, Jujuba, whose berries were eaten by tribes in North Africa (3) trefoils, clovers, and melilots. … The lotus which men really ate was what I have called the true lotus, of which there are two varieties to be considered: (1) Nelumbo, the Indian lotus, and (2) Nymphaea, the Egyptian lotus, both of the family Nymphaeaceae.
1. Anthon, Charles, Classical Dictionary (New York: Harper, 1842), n.p.Google Scholar
2. Page, Denys, Folktales in Homer's Od yssey (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3. The Odyssey of Homer, trans. Lattimore, Richard (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 139.Google Scholar All quotations from The Od yssey are from this translation.
4. The Poems of Alexander Pope, vol. 9, Translations of Homer, ed. Mack, Maynard (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), pp. 307–08.Google Scholar
5. Thomas Blackwell, An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer, 2nd ed. (London, 1736), pp. 250 ff.
6. Turner, Frank M., The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 136.Google Scholar
7. The New Century Classical Handbook, ed. Avery, Catherine B. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962), p. 648.Google Scholar
8. Stewart, Douglas J., The Disguised Guest: Rank, Rale and Identity in the Odyssey (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1976), p. 198Google Scholar; and Pocock, L G., Reality and Allegory in the Odyssey (Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert, 1959), p. 92.Google Scholar
9. Rousseaux, M., “Ulysse et les manguers de coquelicots,” Bulletin de l'Association Cuillaume Bude, No. 3 (October 1971), p. 351.Google Scholar
10. Page, p. 7.
11. Bush, Douglas, Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933), p. 199.Google Scholar
12. Grob, Alan, “‘The Lotos-Eaters’: Two Versions of Art,” Modern Philology, 62 (1964), 118–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar, finds the 1832 text to manifest an “ambiguity of purpose”; Culler, A. Dwight, The Poetry of Tennyson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 54Google Scholar, argues that, despite the condemnatory elements built into the poem. Tennyson is ambivalent about lotos-eating. Carr, Arthur J., “Tennyson as a Modern Poet,” Critical Essays on the Poetry of Tennyson, ed. Killham, John (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), p. 52Google Scholar, claims that Tennyson indulges his impulses toward “slothful ease” through the mariners while affirming die value of responsibility through the frame. Kincaid, James, “Tennyson's Mariners and Spenser's Despair: The Argument of “The Lotos-Eaters,’” Papers on Language and Literature, 5 (Summer, 1969), 273–81Google Scholar, finds an “incomplete irony” in die poem which celebrates the attractions of despair while also hinting, through an allusion to Spenser, at its moral consequences. On the other hand, Buckler, William E., The Victorian Imagination: Essays in Aesthetic Exploration (New York: New York University Press, 1980), pp. 101–18Google Scholar, contends that the poem resolves the conflict between Romanticism and Classicism and presents not unresolved feelings but alternative human possibilities.
13. Martin, Robert Bernard, Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 42.Google Scholar Hereafter cited as Martin.
14. I am grateful to Terry Parssinen for sharing with me his manuscript on “Narcotic Drugs and British Society, 1820–1930,” in which he comments that “The amount of opium sold in the market towns of this area, such as Louth, Wisbeach, and Holbeach, was so remarkable diat Victorian observers termed it ‘die opium district.’”
15. Robert Martin argues persuasively in his biography that epilepsy plagued a number of members of die Tennyson family and that Alfred Tennyson was fearful of being an epileptic himself until late in the 1840s.
16. Ricks, Christopher, Tennyson (New York: Macmillan-Collier, 1972), p. 9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
17. Frederick Tennyson to J. Frere, 2 Oct 1834, in Martin, p. 179.
18. The opium poppy actually is white, but Keats in “Endymion” associates sleep widi a field of “poppies red” (1, 1. 555). Tennyson, who is usually extremely meticulous about such details, may here be deriving his figure from Keats rather than from nature.
19. Campbell, Nancie, Tennyson in Lincoln, vol. 1 (Lincoln, England: Tennyson Society, 1971).Google Scholar
20. Tennyson, Hallam, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir (London: Macmillan, 1905), p. 165.Google Scholar Hereafter cited as Memoir.
21. De Quincey, Thomas, Confessions of An English Opium-Eater (New York: Heritage Press, 1950), p. 61.Google Scholar This is the original 1821 text, not the revised version that De Quincey published in 1856. Hereafter cited as CEOE.
22. Hayter, Alethea, Opium and the Romantic Imagination (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968)Google Scholar discusses the prevalence of this myth, examines die writings produced by known opium users, and concludes that “no clear pattern of opium's influence on creative writing can be deduced” (p. 331). Abrams, M. H., The Milk of Paradise (1932; rpt. New York: Octagon Books, 1971)Google Scholar, discusses the effect of opium on De Quincey, Crabbe, Francis Thompson, and Coleridge. Hereafter cited as Hayter and Abrams.
23. Schneider, Elisabeth, Coleridge, Opium, and “Kubla Khan” (New York: Octagon Books, 1966), p. 25Google Scholar, analyzes both versions of die preface and questions Coleridge's account of the origin of the poem.
24. Schneider, p. 26.
25. Coleridge employed this image in a letter to his brother in April 1798 (Abrams, P. 59).
26. Lowes, John Livingstone, The Road to Xanadu (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927).Google Scholar According to Lowes, Coleridge learned of Aloadine from Purchas His Pilgrimes. Hayter, p. 21, notes that Southey confused hashish with opium and thus identified opium as the drug which transported assassins to paradise.
27. Paden, W. D., Tennyson in Egypt: A Study of the Imagery in His Earlier Works (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1942), pp. 35–36.Google Scholar Hereafter cited as Paden.
28. Paden, p. 13.
29. Savary, Claude-Etienne, Letters on Egypt, 2 vols. (Dublin: Luke White, 1787), 1, 41.Google Scholar
30. All textual quotations are from The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Ricks, Christopher (London: Longmans, Green, 1969).Google Scholar
31. Ricks, Tennyson, p. 91, also observes this similarity.
32. Hallam, Arthur Henry, Review of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830)Google Scholar, Englishman's Magazine (August 1831), pp. 616–28, in Jump, John D., Tennyson: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), p. 36.Google Scholar Hereafter cited as Jump.
33. Buckley, Jerome H., Tennyson: The Growth of a Poet (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), p. 48CrossRefGoogle Scholar, notes the mariners’ “ill-concealed sense of guilt.” Ricks, Tennyson, p. 90, comments that the mariners are rationalizing in their creation of reasons not to go home.
34. Roston, Murray, Prophet and Poet: The Bible and the Growth of Romanticism (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), p. 156.Google Scholar
35. Turner, p. 170.
36. Jenkyns, Richard, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 195.Google Scholar
37. Kermode, Frank, The Romantic Image (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957). P. 6.Google Scholar
38. Courtwright, David, Dark Paradise: Opiate Addiction in America before 1940 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982)Google Scholar, points out that in the early Victorian period most physicians would have viewed addiction as a “vice” which affected the moral faculties of the addict. Later in the nineteenth century addiction began to be regarded as a disease.
39. Taylor, Henry, Philip Van Artevelde (London: E. Moxon, 1834), p. iii.Google Scholar
40. MacLaren, Malcolm, “Tennyson's Epicurean Lotos-Eaters,” Classical Journal, 56 (March 1961), 259–67Google Scholar, shows that Tennyson distorted Epicureanism to suit his poetic purpose and argues that Tennyson's disapproval of Epicureanism in The Vision of Sin sheds light on his attitude toward the mariners.
41. Pattison, Robert, Tennyson and Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
42. Page, passim.
43. Symonds, John Addington, “Nature Myth and Allegories,” Essays Speculative and Suggestive (London: Chapman and Hall, 1893), p. 335.Google Scholar