THE METAPHYSICS OF THE FORM BEAUTY AND REALITY IN THE ART OF ALFRED LORD TENNYSON

Abstract

THE METAPHYSICS OF THE FORM: AESTHETIC REALITY AND SPECULATIVE REALISM IN THE ART OF ALFRED LORD TENNYSON

Abstract

In the Victorian poetry of A. L. Tennyson, formal artistry acts as the starting point of questioning fixed ideas and creating new perceptions of what is beautiful, pure, and real. Tennyson’s works are symbiotic not only with its contemporary movement of Aestheticism but also with posterior movements focusing on the relation between Form, Object, and Reality. His poetry, although it belongs to a specific period, acts in an axis of formal significance and Speculative Realism. Much of Tennyson’s poetry focuses on the beauty of form and the form as subject matter. Despite Tennyson’s dual oriented poetic interest on form as beauty and subject matter, his artworks act as an unlimited field of multiple changes, relations, and creations that open the discussion about a metaphysics of the form. Tennyson uses the form as resistance towards a limited context and, overall, artistically inspires new perceptive realities or innovative organic schemata towards an alternative understanding of what reality is.

Keywords

• Form
• Aesthetic
• Realism
• Tennyson

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