A Contrastive Review of Subjectivity: Tennyson and Arnold
Md. Nazmul Huda1, Mohammad Tajuddin2
1Md. Nazmul Huda, Assistant Professor, Dept. of English Language and Literature, International Islamic University Chittagong, Bangladesh.
2Mohammad Tajuddin, Assistant Professor, Dept. of English Language and Literature, International Islamic University Chittagong. Bangladesh.
Manuscript Received on November 11, 2014. | Revised Manuscript Received on November 12, 2014. | Manuscript published on November 15, 2014. | PP: 6-9 | Volume-1 Issue-2, November 2014.
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© The Authors. Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering and Sciences Publication (BEIESP). This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)
Abstract: This article makes an attempt to scrutinize the influence and motivation of Christianity upon the minds of the Victorians as to how they welcome or react the principles of their religion which they considered the only ultimate life-shaping creed in every sphere of their lives as well as those of mankind. The crisis started as there appeared tremendous contradiction between the scientific truth and their Biblical regulations and predictions. Faith, then, suffered a stone-hard blow. To them, failure of Christianity stood for the total collapse and meaninglessness of human life. Many lost their trust; some tried to restore it by rationalizing their frustration, but most of them turned nonchalant to religion, church and church authority, enthusiastically embracing tenets of humanism. The pain and anguish springing from the loss of faith resulted in the trends of the fluctuation between faith and misgiving, which was mirrored in most of the Victorians and their poems. Tennyson and Arnold were in the eerie of this whirlwind. General decay of faith in religion direly accounted for their melancholy and despondence. Reason rather than faith began to preoccupy their saddened minds. This article aims to record the personal pang, depression, inertia, agitation, and, at last, their consoling haven in their poems. Manifestation of subjective feelings especially of sadness was generally vented in lyricism which is superbly manipulated by both of them. The objective of this article is also to put forward some recommendations concerning how the poets could have got rid of these bleak sentiments of agnosticism, of swinging between doubt and faith, between science and religion.
Keywords: Faith, doubt, conflict, agnosticism, and philosophic reflections.