The Teaching of Tennyson Author:John Oates General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1898 Original Publisher: J. Bowden Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can selec... more »t from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: The poem teaches that the meaning of life cannot be found in selfish solitude and sensuous enjoyment. Love of beauty in itself is noble, but love of beauty all for self is fatal to religious life. Nature and art and culture, may not take the-place of religion. We may love the beautiful without feeling any pulse of pity for the world ; but to love God and man is to feel the pain of creation, and to awake out of self and the sensuous to a life of pure sacrifice and helpful service. The To mingle imagination with philosophy, and Two write the purest poetical diction while en- ' gaged in metaphysical analysis, is the problem of the poet. Tennyson, in " The Two Voices," has solved the problem by giving us in a philosophical poem sublime poetry. While sounding the deeps of personality, and showing the conflict of soul with direst doubt and tormenting fear, his music never falters, but flows on until it falls into peaceful triumph. Two voices are represented as speaking within the soul. The one voice stands for faith, and the other voice stands for doubt. Doubt sees no way out of the " curse," nor how to solve " the riddle of the painful earth," but thinks death is the endof all being, and truth a phantom on far-off hills alluring the soul into blinding mist. It urges self- destruction as giving instant relief to the agony of being. Faith relies chiefly on the " inner evidence" of soul against sense, on its hunger for God and immortality, which is ever the protest from within against the doubt that would make God the fiction of fancy and immortality the dream of delusion. ...« less