"Pull not down my palace towers" — a note to Tennyson's "The Palace of Art"
George P. Landow, Professor of English and the History of Art, Brown University
Unlike many evangelicals who remained deeply suspicious of art and literature, Tennyson obviously does not abandon art (and poetry) here but wants to save the Palace of Art for the masses — a major Victorian project to which John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, and many others devoted their lives. Here, in 1832, Tennyson points to one of the main concerns of mid- and late-Victorian culture.
[Back to the passage in "The Palace of Art"]
References
Johnson, E. D. H. The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1952. [full text]
Last modified 11 October 2005