In existographies, Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) (IQ:170|#215) (CR:12) was an English poet, a Cattell 1000 (#133), noted for []
Overview
In 1835, Tennyson, in his poem “Locksley Hall”, a dramatic monologue written as a set of 97 rhyming couplets, stated (lines 151-52) the following, semi-Empedocles’ chemical aphorism laced couplet: [1]
“Woman is the lesser man, and her passions unto mine
Are as moonlight unto sunlight and as water unto wine.”
Irish mathematical economist Francis Edgeworth cites this couplet as a launching point for the so-called aristocracy of sex in respect to his utilitarianism argument. [2]
In 2002, American physicist turned literary scholar Barri Gold, in her “The Consolation of Physics: Tennyson’s Thermodynamics Solution”, argues that Tennyson’s 1849 poem "In Memoriam" not only anticipates evolution theory, but also, anachronistically, and incorrectly, argues or states that he was theorizing about bound energy, some thirty plus years before the term "bound energy" was even coined and formulated (Hermann Helmholtz, 1882). [3]
References
1. (a) Tennyson, Alfred. (1835). “Locksley Hall”, in: Poems. Publisher, 1842.
(b) Locksley Hall – Wikipedia.
2. Edgeworth, Francis Y. (1881). Mathematical Psychics: an Essay on the Application of Mathematics to the Moral Sciences (end and means, pg. vii; social mechanics, pgs. 12-13). C. Kegan Paul & Co.
3. (a) Gold, Barri J. (2002). “The Consolation of Physics: Tennyson’s Thermodynamics Solution”, Publications of the Modern Language Association, 117(3): 449-64.
(b) Gold, Barri J. (2010). ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science (source/sink, pg. 223). MIT Press.
Further reading
● Jordan, Elaine. (1996). “Tennyson, 1857-67: Divorce, Democracy, and Thermodynamics”, in: Tennyson, ed. Rebecca Scott, Longman.
External links
● Alfred, Lord Tennyson – Wikipedia.