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Tennyson's Concepts of Knowledge, Wisdom, and Pallas Athene

While Tennyson's debt to Milton takes the form of many direct verbal echoes, the most important link may well be thematic: both writers repeatedly concern themselves with the moral ambivalence of human knowledge.' A passionate quest for the fullest possible awareness of self and the external world, they know, is surely one of the noblest impulses of civilized man and of the serious poet; at the same time, built into the Western imagination is the certainty that the tree of knowledge is a forbidden growth the mortal tasting of whose fruit brought death into the world, and all our woe. While a vast scholarship has devoted itself to the elucidation of Miltonic "knowledge" in Paradise Lost and elsewhere, a like concentration has not been accorded Tennyson's less profound but, nevertheless, imaginatively quite powerful exploration of the concept. A full assessment of Tennyson's epistemology, one that would, for instance, discuss the issue in its central form within the Idylls of the King, is beyond the scope of a brief essay, and I should therefore like to argue a thesis that for the time being skirts (though it is confirmed by) the Idylls. Bringing together some of Tennyson's references to "knowledge," to the "wisdom" against which it is sometimes pitted, and to the Pallas Athene in whom both abstractions are at times embodied, I should like to trace the emergence of a rather coherent value system. Briefly, according to Tennyson's double and interlocking cognitive hierarchy, an empirical "knowledge" is firmly subordinated to intuitive and mystical "wisdom" on the one hand, while a classical "wisdom" mythically projected in the figure of Pallas Athene pales besides its undogmatically Christian replacement on the other.