FLLD Academic Speech 
"Alfred Lord Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Intersecting Fame, Experimentalism, and Poetic Forms"

Speaker: Linda K. Hughes, Addie Levy Professor of Literature Emerita, Texas Christian University

Time: Wednesday, 16 April, 10:10–12:00
Venue: Room 26415, Hsiu-chi Building
Moderator: Prof. Min-Tser Lin (林明澤教授)

Abstract: 
Both Alfred Tennyson and Elizabeth Browning were proposed as successors to the position of Poet Laureate after William Wordsworth died. Both poets were greatly admired by Edgar Allan Poe. And both enjoyed popular and critical admiration during their lifetimes. Yet the career arcs and achievements of these two are seldom compared. This lecture redresses their understudied intersections across four categories: their early Romantic ballads, their war poems of the 1850s, their novelized long poems of 1856 and 1864, and their most famous sequence poems that rely on abba quatrains, both published in 1850.