SOURCE: “Tractarian Aesthetics: Analogy and Reserve in Keble and Newman,” in The Victorian Newsletter, No. 55, Spring, 1979, pp. 8-10.

In the following essay, Tennyson summarizes Tractarian aesthetics and its emphasis on “the religious character of poetry” as exemplified in Keble's verse.

Among the many aspects of the Oxford or Tractarian Movement that have captured the attention of subsequent students of the subject the matter of aesthetics has until recently been one of the least thoroughly explored. To be sure, theology, politics, social events, ecclesiastical developments, and even personal experience all played their part in the emergence and course of what the participants thought of as a campaign to redeem the Church of England. Recently, however, there has emerged an awareness that an approach through aesthetics casts a good deal of light on the deepest nature of Tractarianism, not in opposition to any of the previously cited aspects but rather...