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A “Lost” Poem by Arthur Hallam

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

T. H. Vail Motter
T. H. Vail Motter*
Affiliation:
Wellesley College
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Extract

The centenary of the death of Arthur Hallam, noted in England by a leading article in The Times Literary Supplement (September 14, 1933) and in America by an exhibition of Hallam's works in the Yale University Library (January, 1934), served as a reminder not so much of what we know of the youth who was so important an influence on Tennyson as of what we do not know fully, a partial ignorance which results from the difficulty with which the study of Hallam is attended. The “lost” poem here reprinted after more than a century is lost only in the sense in which nearly half the printed poems of Hallam are unknown because they are missing from the editions commonly available. When Hallam died in 1833 in his twenty-third year, he left behind him one small and now very scarce volume, privately printed in 1830, and other poems and essays, some of which were collected by his father, Henry Hallam the historian, and privately issued as the Remains of 1834. Most of this material, also edited by Henry Hallam, was privately printed in 1853, and this volume is the basis of such subsequent collections of Arthur Hallam's work as have appeared.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , June 1935, pp. 568 - 575
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1935

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References

1 For a list of the printed sources of Hallam's writings, see “Arthur Hallam's Centenary: A Bibliographical Note,” by T. H. Vail Motter, The Yale University Library Gazette, viii (1934), 104–109. The LTLS leader was by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.

2 Curiously enough Arthur Hallam's Cambridge friend, W. H. Brookfield who ought to have known better, also ignored the “Stanzas” when he wrote in a letter of August 17, 1834, that the Remains “comprise all that has been separately printed before.” (Cf. Mrs. Brookfield and Her Circle [New York, 1905], pp. 15–16.)

3 Alfred Lord Tennyson; A Memoir, by his son (London, 1897), i, 80–81.

4 At some future time I hope to expand this statement. I believe that some of Tennyson's biographers unduly stress Hallam's individual contribution to the strain in Tennyson which laid him open to the sobriquet, “schoolmistress Alfred,” and that Hallam merely reflected perhaps more acutely than the others a spirit common to the Cambridge group.

5 So far as I know, none of Emily's letters to Arthur survive. Like Tennyson's letters to him they were doubtless destroyed by Henry Hallam.

6 Here follow the five stanzas beginning, “When two complaining spirits mingle,” printed in the Remains of 1834 (and all subsequent editions) as “A Lover's Reproof.”

7 Here follow mailing directions.

8 Here follow some lines of Italian.

9 From a letter to her husband, October 7 [1842]. Charles and Frances Brookfield, Mrs. Brookfield and Her Circle (New York, 1905), p. 118.

10 The poem was not reprinted. The one early loved was a friend met in Italy in the winter of 1827–28. Hallam writes of her to Emily Tennyson in a letter dated October 1, 1831, printed privately by Clement Shorter in London in 1916 under the title, The Love Story of “In Memoriam”: Letters from Arthur Hallam to Emily Tennyson. There are two letters in this collection.

11 In the Spring of 1828 Tennyson moved from Rose Crescent to King's Parade, No. 57 Corpus Buildings, and bought a pet snake. He is described as “watching its sinuosities upon the carpet” through clouds of tobacco. (Cf. Harold Nicolson, Tennyson [London, 1925], p. 63.)