Guide to the Year's Work: General Materials

In such a narrative, the prosodie experiments of Sydney Dobell and Alexander Smith represent an extreme version of what motivated Victorian poets across the board: the struggle to forge a "rhythmic epistemology," involving "the communication of knowledge and feeling through physiological pulses" conveyed via the reading of verse (p. 80). Paul Stevens and Rahul Sapra assess Tennyson's poem as part of an imperial attempt to "Indianize" the British Raj by presenting it as the fulfillment of Akbar's religious aspirations; yet the poem (however unintentionally) represents reverse transculturation in suggesting that tolerance, a key virtue of the Enlightenment, originated not in Europe but India.