ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -In Memoriam A.H.H. is the extended, fragmentary elegy that Tennyson wrote for his closest friend Arthur Henry Hallam, after Hallam’s sudden death at age 22. Scholars agree that this was the most important event in Tennyson’s life, and the one which most shaped his work.

Detailed explanation-2: -The poem “In Memoriam A.H.H.” (1850) by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, is an elegy for his Cambridge friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died of cerebral haemorrhage at the age of twenty-two years, in Vienna in 1833.

Detailed explanation-3: -Their shared interests led to a close friendship, and Arthur became engaged to Tennyson’s sister, Emilia Tennyson. While travelling abroad with his father, he died suddenly at Vienna, of a brain haemorrhage.

Detailed explanation-4: -Tennyson dedicated one of his most popular poems to Hallam (In Memoriam), and stated that the dramatic monologue Ulysses was “more written with the feeling of his [Hallam’s] loss upon me than many poems in [the publication] In Memoriam". Tennyson named his elder son after his late friend.

Detailed explanation-5: -In Memoriam connects the despair Tennyson felt over the loss of his friend Arthur Hallam and the despair he felt when contemplating a godless world. In the end, the poem affirms both religious faith and faith in human progress.