Tennyson’s Sounds

Abstract

This chapter examines the links between Alfred Tennyson’s poetry and scientific theories of sound. Tennyson’s reading in acoustic science shaped his ambivalent conception of sound as simultaneously permanent and evanescent, and of the human voice as both a spiritual signifier of identity and a transient disturbance of the air. His preoccupation with the duality of sound informed his views on personal immortality, his politics, and his understanding of poetry’s relation to the rhythms of the natural world. In turn, Victorian physicists such as James Clerk Maxwell and John Tyndall used quotations and parodies of Tennyson’s poetry to illustrate the ways in which sound, existing at the same time as a material wave-pattern and as a subjective sensation, exemplified the epistemological authority and the limitations of scientific models of nature.