Arthur Henry Hallam Biography

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Dictionary of Literary Biography on Arthur Henry Hallam

Arthur Henry Hallam is remembered chiefly as the youthful friend of Alfred Tennyson, whose companionship with Hallam is celebrated in the laureate's elegy In Memoriam (1850). But during his brief life, Hallam numbered among his other friends such Victorian luminaries as William Ewart Gladstone, Richard Monckton Milnes, Fanny Kemble, and Richard Chenevix Trench, all of whom testified to his considerable promise and enormous personal appeal. A recent commentator has argued that following the departure of Frederick Denison Maurice, Hallam became the ruling spirit of the Cambridge Apostles Society, and thus exerted a decisive influence upon an important group of his contemporaries. Moreover, a volume of Hallam's poems and several of his influential essays had been published before his death at twenty-two; his 1831 review of Tennyson's Poems, Chiefly Lyrical became a sort of manifesto for some of the English aesthetes. Yeats, for example, by his own admission, sought to embody Hallam's precepts in his early writings.

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