Out Flew the Web and Floated Wide
Betsy Winakur Tontiplaphol · 2016
Hallam Tennyson shares John Keats&s;s impulse to enclose, as well as his penchant for lists and luxury. The poem&s;s epigraph, perhaps, says it all; the quote is attributed to &s;Chapman&s; but since decades of scholarship have been unable to unearth any such original text, it seems plausible that the real source of the epigraph&s;s luscious sentiment is Keats, Tennyson&s;s inspiration and, as Keats&s;s sonnet testifies, Chapman&s;s inspiree. Matthew Reynolds agrees, asserting that when he had prefaced &s;Timbuctoo&s; with a couplet ascribed, falsely, to &s;Chapman&s; Tennyson was alluding, not to anything in the works of Chapman himself, but to Keats&s;s sonnet On First Looking into Chapman&s;s Homer . Perhaps in deference to the Laureate&s;s wishes, most modern anthologies of Tennyson&s;s work begin with 1830&s;s Mariana , but the project&s;s twin interests in literary inheritance and the luscious aesthetic demand that &s;Timbuctoo", strange and disdained, launch the discussion here.