‘Impassioned Song’: Arthur Hallam and Lyric Poetry

Abstract

The issues raised by Arthur Hallam’s review-essay, ‘On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry’, published in the Englishman’s Review in August 1831, whilst ostensibly focused upon Tennyson’s Poems, Chiefly Lyrical published in the previous year, resonate with implications for the status, purpose and aesthetic validity of lyric poetry in the period of modernity as a whole. Whatever the merits of Hallam’s individual categorisation of, say, Wordsworth as an overly philosophical ‘reflective’ poet, or his contrastingly high valuation of Keats and Shelley as ‘poets of sensation’, the crucial implication of his argument is located in his diagnosis of the nineteenth century as ‘a period of degradation’.¹ The integration of poetic material, what Hallam designates ‘the energies of Sensitive, of Reflective, of Passionate Emotion, which in former times were intermingled’ (Hallam, 91), is now in his diagnosis separated out, resulting in that pervasive sense of melancholy which, he claims, ‘so evidently characterises the spirit of modern poetry’ with the characteristic ‘return of the mind upon itself (ibid., 91). Hallam suggests, a propos this creative problematic, ‘that the diffusion of poetry must necessarily be in the direct ratio of the diffusion of machinery’ (ibid., 92), and he furthermore discerns a decline in poetic influence due to a ‘decrease of subjective power, arising from a prevalence of social activity, and a continual absorption of the higher feelings into the palpable interests of ordinary life’ (ibid., 92).