"THE THEWS OF ANAKIM": POSTULATIONS OF THE SUPERHUMAN IN TENNYSON'S POETRY
Edgar F. Shannon
Most men and women, whether or not they give serious thought to the matter, wish in various ways to transcend the limitation of their humanity. As Browning's Cleon says, "Life's inadequate to joy, / As the soul sees joy." Like the caged skylark in Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem by that name, the spirit, imprisoned in the ribs of the human body often in fits of "fear or rage" seeks to burst its barriers. Man, recognizing that he is bound by the human predicament—the necessity of change and death— nevertheless aspires to be more than human—to be in physical prowess or beauty a superior creature, to penetrate the mystery of his origin and destiny, to attain freedom from the restraints of mortality, to reach union with the ultimate power of the universe, whether revered as God or designated by another name—in short, to become superhuman.
As the quotations from Browning and Hopkins suggest, the poet is likely to feel more intensely than ordinary mortals the constraints of the human condition and to long more fiercely than his fellow men and women to escape them. No English poet exceeds Alfred Tennyson as an exemplar of this characteristic—what with him might be called a continuing crisis of the spirit. His earliest writings through his last volume, published two months after his death at 83, reveal his constant engagement with questions of man's individual self-fulfillment and of the potential perfectibility of human beings
