"To Look on Common Things Uncommonly": the life and poems of Arthur Henry Hallam

“To Look on Common Things Uncommonly”: The Life and Poems of Arthur Henry Hallam is a textually and contextually annotated edition of the complete poems of Arthur Henry Hallam (1811–1833). Hallam, the subject of In Memoriam, was the man that Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892) held “as half-divine,” but he was also the son of a complicated father, the lover of Tennyson’s sister Emily, and the beloved friend of many who became eminent Victorians. Collecting his extant poems in the company of many types of annotation (allusion, biographical accounts, familiar letters, and images), this dissertation seeks to take him out of others’ words and locate him among his own. After Hallam died of a brain hemorrhage at twenty-two, his father privately printed forty of his son’s poems in Remains, in Verse and Prose, of Arthur Henry Hallam. More than one hundred years later, T. H. Vail Motter expanded these poems to one hundred and thirteen in The Writings of Arthur Hallam (1943). Since then, thirty-seven poems not therein collected have been printed in various articles or in The Letters of Arthur Henry Hallam (ed. Jack Kolb, 1981). This dissertation collects those poems printed in articles and in Letters, along with the known poems in Writings, and eleven poems never printed, bringing the number of extant poems to one hundred and sixty-two. Except in four instances, the text is either that published by Hallam or taken from manuscript, and supplies textual variants. Using Hallam’s letters (unprinted by Henry Hallam), as well as unpublished archival material, this dissertation corrects inaccuracies, textual and contextual. Bibliographical information for each poem restores accurate dating to poems that have long been misdated. Aspects central to Hallam’s life and poetry give a fuller sense, with a chronology and excerpts from his letters, as well as biographical information about his circle of friends and their reactions to his death; a selection of unpublished letters on the making of Remains; a discussion of his Theodicæa Novissima, highly praised by Tennyson but little known; and an unpublished translation of his postmortem.2024-02-24T00:00:00