SOURCE: Dillon, Steven. “Canonical and Sensational: Arthur Hallam and Tennyson's 1830 Poems.” Victorian Poetry 30, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 95-108.

In the following essay, Dillon critiques Hallam's “On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry, and on the Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson.” Dillon claims the essay establishes an artificial distinction between reflection and sensation in order to canonize Tennyson.

In an important essay, Gerald Bruns suggests that the movement from Romanticism to Victorianism could be characterized as a paradigm shift from transcendence to immanence.¹ The vertical axis of imagination and epiphanic nature (“spots of time”) moves towards a horizontal axis of empirical perception and continuous history. The terms of Arthur Hallam's essay on Tennyson's 1830 Poems, Chiefly Lyrical seem to reproduce just this shift. Hallam skips over the complex language of transcendental faculty psychology to be found in Coleridge and Kant, and effectively goes back to the Enlightenment discourse of “sensation” and...