Tennyson's In Memoriam furnishes a case study, a vexed and difficult one, in the persistence of literary tradition. Though it is not, strictly speaking, a pastoral elegy, In Memoriam yet retains unmistakable markings of the traditional form. A. J. Carr, for one, has recently insisted upon the importance of pastoral motifs “to provide the personal themes of In Memoriam with a formal structure responsive to both private instinct and the elegiac traditions.” On the other hand, others as early as A. C. Bradley and as recently as Elton Edward Smith have offered what amounts to the opposite judgment on the significance of the pastoral tradition as a key to the structure of In Memoriam. In Smith's words, “the classical elegiac conventions are observed, but not in such a way as to provide either a framework for the whole or dividing lines within the work.”