'Enthusiastic sorrow': Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Eliot thinking loss (William Wordsworth, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, T. S. Eliot)

“‘Enthusiastic Sorrow’: Wordsworth, Tennyson and Eliot Thinking Loss” considers how the idea of a beneficent Nature is mourned in works broadly considered as elegiac: William Wordsworth's “Tintern Abbey,” “Immortality Ode,” the portion of Book V of the Prelude centering on the Drowned man at Esthwaite, and “Peele Castle”; Alfred Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam; and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Beginning with the Lacanian notion of the “objet (a),” I argue that for all three poets, Nature is embraced as an ideal yet unattainable object in the mind. Hence, the picture of the subject that emerges from each of the poets considered here: it is one in which the act of mourning is always constitutive. While this mourning may be precipitated by an identifiable event or loss, it also pre-exists in the subject as what Wordsworth termed “a sadness at the depths of reason.” This sadness, centered on a sense of self coherence or ontological independence that the person imagines she or he should possess but does not, brings into focus a lack at the center of being human and of being subject to language. The very power of this relationship, however, necessarily blocks off the less grandiose but perhaps more viable possibility of trust in Nature as a “good object” in the sense outlined by Melanie Klein. Ostensibly embraced by Tennyson and Wordsworth, it is left entirely aside by Eliot.