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TENNYSON, ARNOLD, AND THE WEALTH OF THE EAST

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2004

Emily A. Haddad
Emily A. Haddad
Affiliation:
University of South Dakota
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Extract

It is not indeed necessary to own a country in order to do trade with it or invest capital in it.—J. A. Hobson, 1902 WHEN WE EXAMINE Alfred Tennyson's and Matthew Arnold's poetic depictions of the wealth of the East, we find that most poems respond to one of two impulses. Some poems seem motivated mainly by the same classic orientalism that is exemplified by those poems of the Romantic period that represent the East as a world apart, untouched by time. But Arnold and Tennyson also wrote poems driven more by the imperialist currents that strengthened throughout the Victorian period; these poems show the East becoming increasingly assimilated into the very modern world of commerce within the British imperial system. In their poems on Eastern wealth, then, Arnold and Tennyson seem not only to be working through their inheritance from Romanticism (specifically, Romantic orientalism), but also to be negotiating between more traditional notions of value and those specific to the developing political and economic systems of the Victorian age. Ultimately, these poems' conception of the wealth of the East is at least consistent with, if not also implicated in, the conflicted evolution of imperialist ideology.

Type
WORK IN PROGRESS
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , September 2004 , pp. 373 - 391
Copyright
© 2004 Cambridge University Press

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