Pressing Forward

Louis A. Markos places the poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson in the context of the crisis of faith that marked the Victorian Age, whose notable figures included Thomas Carlyle, Charles Darwin, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Huxley, John Henry Newman, and John Stuart Mill. In particular Markos reveals the significance of Tennyson's great poem In Memoriam for the transition from Romantic to Victorian literature, as well as the importance of his Idylls of the King for its refusal to accede to the Victorian myth of progress. Tennyson emerges as a strong critic of the materialistic philosophy and literature of the period.