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Collective Solipsism in Alfred Tennyson’s “The Lotos-Eaters”

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DOI: 10.18848/2327-7912/CGP/v20i01/85-95

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The International Journal of

Literary Humanities

__________________________________________________________________________

Collective Solipsism in Alfred Tennyson’s

“The Lotos-Eaters”
AHMED SHALABI AND OGAREET KHOURY

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 Collective Solipsism in Alfred Tennyson’s
“The Lotos-Eaters”
Ahmed Shalabi,1 Al-Ahliyya Amman University, Jordan
Ogareet Khoury, Al-Ahliyya Amman University, Jordan

Abstract: Solipsism and solitude are almost the core of the Romantic poetry and experience. Many romantic poets
encourage people to abandon society and have a moment of interaction between nature and the self to transcend the
materialistic, industrial, and capitalist society. For example, in “Frost at Midnight.” Coleridge experiences the harsh side
of nature as he spends the night in a freezing place. Also, Wordsworth’s speaker wanders lonely as a cloud as he solitarily
interacts with nature. This article aims at tracing the solipsistic experience in Alfred Tennyson’s “The Lotos-Eaters.” This,

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of course, suggests that the Romantics influenced Tennyson to encourage such an experience. However, the major concern
of this article is to show that Tennyson, in his poem, extends and complicates the solipsistic experience; that is, the
individual’s solipsism in the Romantic poetry becomes a collective solipsism in Tennyson’s poetry.

Keywords: Solipsism, Collective Solipsism, Romantic Poetry, Tennyson, The Lotos-Eaters

Introduction
“I told you, Winston,” he said, “that metaphysics is not your strong point. The word
you are trying to think of is solipsism. But you are mistaken. This is not solipsism.
Collective solipsism, if you like. But that is a different thing: in fact, the opposite
thing. All this is a digression,” he added in a different tone. “The real power, the power
we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men.”
—George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, p. 336

A ccording to the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, solipsism which originates

from the Latin solus, meaning “alone,” and ipse, meaning “self,” refers to the doctrine
that only oneself exists. Among the earliest meditations about this doctrine, Gorgias
states that “Nothing exists; even if something exists, nothing can be known about it; and even if
something can be known about it, knowledge of it cannot be communicated to others. Even if it
can be communicated, it cannot be understood.” (quoted in Myers and Noebel 2015, 151). In
Appearance and Reality, solipsism is described by Bradley as “nothing beyond my self exists”
(1893, 238).
The term was first used in Giulio Clemente Scotti’s La Monarchie des Solipses (1652), but
it is believed to be used for the first time in English in a philosophical sense during the
nineteenth century by philosophers who either embraced or refuted solipsism (e.g., Russell
1945; Bradley 1893). Today, it is mostly used in a psychological sense to refer to self-
indulgence or self-centeredness.
A literature review of philosophical doctrines reveals that there are different views
associated with the term. Despite the fact that philosophers indirectly touched on aspects of
solipsism but great philosophers avoided espousing any extreme form of it for its remoteness
from common sense. Solipsism has been simply regarded as an implausible, insane notion by
several Philosophy theorists (e.g. Pihlström 2020). The term solipsism in its proper meaning
was rarely referred to in philosophical theorizing nor was it scientifically analyzed as a

1
Corresponding Author: Ahmed Shalabi, Department of English Language and Literature, Al-Ahliyya Amman
University, Amman, Jordan. email: a.shalabi@ammanu.edu.jo, shalabi87@yahoo.com

The International Journal of Literary Humanities

Volume 20, Issue 1, 2022, https://thehumanities.com
© Common Ground Research Networks, Ahmed Shalabi,
Ogareet Khoury, All Rights Reserved. Permissions: cgscholar.com/cg_support
ISSN: 2327-7912 (Print), ISSN: 2327-8676 (Online)
https://doi.org/10.18848/2327-7912/CGP/v20i01/85-95 (Article)
THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF LITERARY HUMANITIES

phenomenon or doctrine. However, the Cartesian egocentric search for truth with hyperbolic
doubts of the external world was continuously argued to be a doctrine lying in the shades of
solipsism. As cited in Marcil-Lacoste (1982), the great philosopher Claude Buffier sees a
version of the Cartesian Cogito at the basis of solipsism. The Cartesian dualism; the distinction
between Res Extensa (outside physical world) and Res Cogitans (the mind and consciousness)
is believed to lead eventually into “hopeless solipsism” (McTeigue 2020, 27).
Literary theorists regarded solipsism as an expression of hyperbolic loneliness and thus
whenever solipsism is embraced by two or more it can be argued that there is pseudo-solipsism
since it implies that ‘the Self’ does acknowledge that other selves do exist out there. It was not
until 1949, that the term collective solipsism was coined by Orwell in his political-social satire

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Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell 1949). However, typical of Orwell’s opposition to totalitarianism,
the context within which collective solipsism was employed was a form of anti-socialism; a state
of breaking out of extreme individualism toward an alignment with the group; the Party.

Solipsism in Romanticism

The major Romantic poets, whether British or American, advocate for individual self-
indulgence away from the bustle of society. To them, nature is the operating space dedicated to
the birth of the polished self. This process of meditation contributes greatly to the shaping of the
new, purged Self. However, this romantic experience requires not only a journey to nature but
also activation of the individual’s five senses; people go to nature and actively interact with it.
The absence of this interaction causes this experience to fail. However, depending on the
duration and distance of the trip, the level of this experience may vary too. For example, the
Wordsworthian romantic experience entails a short walk to nature and momentary enjoyment of
tender natural elements. While in Coleridge’s view, it is much deeper and harsher; the ancient
mariner travels thousands of miles in the sea and faces storms and supernatural elements to
come back with his newly attained experience. Also, Shelley’s level of experience is rather
harsh. The speaker of “Ode to the West Wind”(1816) pleads to the wind, not breeze, to change
the world around him.
In calling for individualistic experiences in nature and the need for people to break from
social cloaks and restrictions, the British and American Romantics meet. However, Ralph
Waldo Emerson complicates the romantic experience as he favors the spiritual interaction with
nature over the physical one. In Walden (1854) Henry David Thoreau depicts the merits of
simple living alone in nature, as he spent about two years in the desert. Emerson and Thoreau,
the American romantics and transcendentalists who sustained the notion that self-reliance and
indulgence, away from society, encourage the Self to transcend the materialistic, capitalist
world. Thomas De Quincey extended the romantic experience to include the interaction
between the self and books. This can happen when the individual’s emotions are purified after
reading or watching a Shakespearean tragedy. Accordingly, for the major Romantics, the
romantic experience demands an interaction between the self and nature or objects; the self
needs to be in seclusion meditating and appreciating nature to transcend the materialistic life.
Thus, fundamentally, to achieve the romantic experience, two major demands must be met:
isolation and activation of the five senses.
Tennyson’s Solipsistic View
In many ways, traces of romanticism can be spotted in Tennyson’s poems. Despite the obvious
influence of Romantic Poetry in Tennyson’s work, it is argued here that Tennyson’s solipsistic
view was a rather puzzling, complicated, and rebellious one. For instance, in “The Palace of
Art,” in which Tennyson depicts the interdependence of goodness, knowledge, and beauty, the
speaker builds a pleasure house of art where all beauties of nature dwell. The speaker who
unites and interacts with living nature—for self-indulgence—seems to entirely change the

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perspective toward the end of the poem. Living nature in the built palace could not eventually
satisfy the still soul. In a way, the narrative voice portrays that the internal senses; the Cartesian
Cogitans, cannot be fully satisfied with total isolation. For Woolford (2006), Tennyson here
seeks to overcome or reject total isolation.
In “Maud” (1855), the speaker’s solipsistic state is perceived as distorted and rather
irrelevant to the Romantic solipsistic view (Thomas 2019) and a state of solipsistic withdrawal
(Slinn 1991). In “The Lotos-Eaters” (1832), traits of Romanticism are present since the poem
depicts the mariners’ journey, their interaction with nature, and transcendence. However, the
current paper’s main purpose is to scrutinize the poem as a manifestation of Tennyson’s
tendency to extend and complicate the romantic experience; that is, the individual’s self-

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solipsistic experience in the Romantics’ poetry becomes a collective-solipsistic experience in
the Tennysonian sense. The authors of the present paper argue that in “The Lotos Eaters”, there
is a clear reflection of collective solipsism. Tennyson’s solipsistic view—in this poem—is
envisaged as a rebellious one to the conventional individualistic view; typical of Romanticism.
Discussion
In their book Key Concepts in Literary Theory, Wolfreys, Womack, and Robbins (2002, 93)
define solipsism as “the belief that one can only ever have proper evidence of one’s own
existence; an absolute egotism which depends on refusing to admit the existence, demands and
needs of others.” Michael Kremer (2004, 60) also defines solipsism as “an intellectual, moral
and mystical exercise aimed at bringing about a change in one’s spiritual life.” Accordingly,
solipsism is nourished by seclusion, and the change of the self occurs when the world is
relocated to the background of the individual’s consciousness; the center of the world is the “I,”
and the “I” alone decides what should be taken or refuted. The notion of solipsism is
fundamentally philosophical. According to Bertrand Russell, in the romantic period,
“philosophy, under the influence of German idealism, became solipsistic, and self development
was proclaimed as the fundamental principle of ethics” (Russell 1945, 647). At this level, the
self tends to declare a denial of the world outside its realm or cognition. However, philosophy
has always been a ground for men of literature to rely on. Therefore, “literary theorists may
regard solipsism as an expression of extreme human loneliness, the inevitable isolation of an
individual consciousness” (Pihlström 2020, 15). In light of such an argument, it is this “extreme
human loneliness” that major Romantic poets promoted. To them, the self can attain some
intimations of immortality and transcend the mundane life only when it is reserved from the
materialistic needs that society around it seeks. Thus, the self becomes completely secluded
from the world outside its consciousness. For that said, solipsism may feed the Self’s egoistic
tendency to see the world centered only around its existence.
In her chapter “Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice,” Beth Lau refutes other critics’ claim
that “women Romantic writers generally are less prone to the egotism and individualism of
male Romantic writers” (1999, 242). According to Lau, Austin fought for a balance between
individual needs and social obligations as male Romantics did.. Major male Romantic poets
“struggled with the competing claims of personal fulfillment and interpersonal or social
obligations” (1999, 242). Therefore, and in Lau’s view, those male Romantics were against the
complete isolation of the Self from society, which promoted an anti-solipsism notion. This
rejection of the solipsistic self, to borrow Lau’s words, can be spotted in “Coleridge’s Rime of
the Ancient Mariner…[which explores] the horrors of solitude and the problems inherent in
overweening individualism”; also, “ Shelley’s Alastor is…a cautionary tale about the dangers of
solipsism” (1999, 242). Nevertheless, one can argue with what Lau tries to defend. For those
major male Romantic poets, solitude is the ground for the romantic experience. Therefore, the
Self fails to attain such an experience without having a journey to nature abandoning the busy
life of the city. Furthermore, in case Lau alludes to the mariner’s selfish decision of killing the

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Albatross with no justifiable reason, her argument can be valid in terms of the dangers of “
overweening individualism” ( 242). However, as we continue hearing the story of the mariner,
after the death of the crew, he unintentionally frees himself from the Albatross’s curse when he
praises the beauty of the snakes. Only when he is alone and in solitude, the mariner is saved and
driven by the wind to the shore. Therefore, as the mariner’s individualistic decision is the cause
of his misery, it is also his solitude that contributes to his safety.
In Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude (1816), as its title also suggests, Shelley celebrates the
poet’s solitude, not the other way around. The poem “represents a youth who is happy in study
and the contemplation of nature” (Havens 1930, 1099). It also presents the function of the poet
and poetry since poetry, composed in solitary, immortalizes and uplifts the poet to the status of

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a hero. This elevation of the poet’s stature can only happen in solitude, away from society.
Thus, contrary to what Lau argues, major male Romantic poets, Shelley and Coleridge as
examples, encouraged and emphasized the repudiation of society and, by extension, the self’s
solipsistic need.
The bedrock of the current argument is what Harold Bloom states in his seminal book The
Anxiety of Influence (1997). He emphasizes the infinite dialogue among poets since “every poet
is a being caught up in a dialectical relationship (transference, repetition, error, communication)
with another poet or poets”(1997, 91). Influence in the Bloomian sense can occur upon a
misreading or misinterpretation of a literary text which delves deeply into the reader’s
unconscious and affects his yet-to-come literary production. Furthermore, Bloom asserts that a
poet might not exist without communicating with other poets. The fact that the Victorian
Tennyson (1809–1892) was a contemporary of the Romantics can prove that he had
communicated with, transferred, and repeated the Romantic experience. The traces of
Romanticism have been explored and spotted by many critics, but Bloom takes it to the extreme
as he remarks that “ without Tennyson’s reading of Keats, we would have almost no Tennyson”
(1997, xxii). Bloom’s statement can be clear-cut evidence that Romanticism and the Romantics
are almost always present in Tennyson’s poetry.
The apparent influence of Keats on Tennyson has been addressed by many scholars and
critics. For example, Felix Grendon conducts a comparative study that scrutinizes Tennyson’s
use of epithets that Keats bequeathed to him; a point of convergence with Bloom’s assertion
that “Tennyson was as legitimately the heir of Keats as Browning was of Shelley” (Bloom
2010, xii). Thus, Gredon’s study is a successful attempt to show how Keats’s influence affected
Tennyson’s diction. According to Grendon, Keats’s use of compound epithets is evident in
“Tennyson’s use of compound words, in such descriptive phrases as, “light-glooming brow,”
“sudden-curved frown,” and “golden-netted smile’” (1930, 288). Also, concerning language,
Margaret A. Lourie varifies Tennyson’s indebtedness to Keats as she points out that “Tennyson
has been rightly perceived…as the inheritor of much of Keats’s epistemology, language, and
subject matter”(Lourie 1979, 4). However, Lourie’s study adds Shelley as another source of
inspiration and influence of Tennyson. She remarks that “Tennyson specif[ies] that he
especially favored Alastor and Epipsychidion, that he also admired Prometheus Unbound and
Adonais” (1979, 6). In their article “Traits of Romanticism in Tennyson’s Poetry” (2008),
Obaidullah and Bhuiyan explore the traces of Romanticism in Tennyson’s poetry. They argue
that “Tennyson shows his romantic sensibility through his romantic rebellion against the harsh
facts and creation of visionary worlds in his poems” (2008, 172). To make their argument valid,
they support it with a comparison between Tennyson’s “ The Lotos-Eaters” and Keat’s “ Ode to
a Nightingale” in terms of the setting of the two poems. According to Obaidullah and Bhuiyan
“The Lotos Land bears much resemblance with the ideal world of Keats as described in…‘Ode
to a Nightingale’” (2008, 173). These seminal studies clearly accentuate the influence of two
major Romantic poets on Tennyson. Consequently, the Romantics’ influence on Tennyson is a
settled matter. In many ways, Tennyson is proved to be a disciple of Keats and Shelley.
However, the current article extends upon this foundation in a new direction, namely to show

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that not only Tennyson is influenced by the Romantics, but he also extends, complicates, and
takes the Romantic experience farther; the solipsistic, revolutionary Self in the Romantic poetry
becomes the solipsistic, revolutionary Selves in “The Lotos-Eaters.”
As the quotation at the top of this paper shows, the term “collective solipsism” appears in
George Orwell’s masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-four (1949). O’Brien, as he tortures Winston,
explains to him the Party’s ideology and philosophy. At this point, Winston tries to recall the term
that can perfectly fit this kind of thinking. O’Brien then replies, as shown in the quotation above,
that the suitable term is not solipsism, but “collective solipsism” (1949, 128). Here, Winston
reveals the Party’s intention to control humans’ minds by forging history and, most importantly,
making people abdicate their real history, knowledge, and affiliation to easily control them. The

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term itself is oxymoronic in which two contradictory philosophies are joined. In this case, the
solipsistic Party, which has its preserved, secret notions, imposes its malicious beliefs on people so
that everybody takes them for granted, abandons their true history, and keeps moving with the
boundaries of the same circle of thought. Thus, the arena of the Party’s ideology expands to
incorporate a collective consensus of what it dictates. Analogously, just like the Party’s collective
solipsism, the mariners in “The Lotos-Eaters” collectively subscribe to the same notion of leaving
their laborious life in Ithaca and enjoying the rest of their life on the island.
To make a fair analogy here, it has to be stressed again that collective solipsism was used in
two different senses by Tennyson and Orwell. While there was a clear utterance and full
consciousness of the term ‘collective solipsism’ in Orwell’s, it was only envisaged by Tennyson’s;
sensed by the reader but never uttered by the speaker(s). In Orwell’s socio-political satire, it had a
political connotation while in Tennyson’s, it was of a metaphysical nature. One essential
difference between the two experiences is that it is found to be an abdication of the independent
thought in virtue of torture in Nineteen Eighty-Four while it is a voluntary one in “The Lotos
Eaters” for self-indulgence. The only common ground on which both views rest is that solipsism is
used in a reversed sense; that is, the exact opposite of conventional romantic solipsism.
Also, in his book Metaphysical Horror (1988), Leszek Kolakowski claims that the
individualistic experience of an object or idea doesn’t indicate that what it perceives is
absolutely tangible by others. In his view, “real is what is real within the historically established
rules of human communication” (1988, 24–25); that is, the collective experience of humanity is
the standard by which an object or idea is proven to exist. He refers to the solipsistic experience
by giving an example of the pink elephant. The example illustrates that what a person, while
alone, may see does not necessarily exist; this experience of the Self is only profitable for the
individual. It reads, “this pink elephant I am just seeing in the corner of my room is unreal in the
sense that I am alone to perceive it and no-one else shares my vision which can for this reason
be dismissed as a result, say, of my alcoholic delirium” (1988, 25). Therefore, according to
Kolakowski, the existence of objects or ideas can only be confirmed through collective
solipsism and, by extension, collective experience.
In “The Lotos-Eaters,” Tennyson revisits Homer’s Odyssey and uses his imagination to
trace the mariners’ way back home after the end of the Trojan war. While on their way,
Odysseus encourages his men to find a shore to anchor. They finally arrive on land and are
immediately enchanted by its beauty; they see mountains covered with snow, valleys, and other
breathtaking natural scenes. The natives of the land appear and approach the mariners with
branches of trees covered with the lotos flowers. Except for Odysseus, all of the mariners eat
the fruit and are instantly hypnotized. Infatuated with the island’s landscape, the mariners
declare their intention not to go back to their laborious, miserable life in Ithaca. They now
believe that returning home is pointless because their spouses and children have forgotten about
them and their lives have changed dramatically. They joyfully describe what they see and
experience on the lotos-eaters’ island. The poem concludes with the men assuring one another
that their journey is coming to an end. The island is now their utopia, where nothing, not even
death, will bother them.

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The vivid description of nature is considered a salient feature of Tennyson’s poetry. For, in
addition to his other poems, “The Lotos-Eaters” represents “a peculiar phase of nature”
(Whipple 2010, 33). This, to borrow Bloom’s words, makes Tennyson “a romantic poet and not
a Victorian anti-romantic” (Bloom 2010, xii). “The Lotos-Eaters” begins with a description of
the natural scene before Odysseus’ eyes. In this land, in which “it seemed always afternoon”(4),
there are some breathtaking natural scenes. The moon shines over a stream and the river flows
down the mountains. The island is embraced by an atmosphere of silence and beauty. This
smooth air is akin to the gentle breeze that Wordsworth enjoys in The Prelude: “there is
blessing in this gentle breeze / beats against my cheek” (1). The Wordsworthian romantic
experience can be easily identified in the first two stanzas; a lonely speaker who mediates on

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the landscape around him and enjoys the smooth, soft air of his surroundings. Romantically,
Tennyson’s speaker reports to the mariners, and the reader as well, what he sees and
appreciates. However, this experience is still the speaker’s personal experience; he alone can
feel what he sees. Therefore, the poem opens with a traditional Wordsworthian Romantic
experience in which the self alone interacts and enjoys the delightful elements of nature such as
the smooth air and the moon’s reflection on the stream.
Tennyson takes the romantic experience to the extreme, even further than the saturated
Romantic, Lord Byron. The poem declares its collective solipsistic tone at the closing three
lines of the first part. After encountering the natives of the land (the Lotos Eaters), eating the
lotos flower, and being intoxicated, a mariner (a Self) declares, on behalf of the rest of the
mariners, that “‘we will return no more’” (43) to our home country. The mariners continue,
“‘Our island home / Is far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam.’’ (44–45). The Self-nature
interaction that the romantic experience entails is obvious as the mariners eat the lotos flower
and enjoy the scene till these last three lines. In these lines, Tennyson takes the romantic
experience, from the sensual to the sensuous level, from the individualistic level to the
collective one; that is, the “I” or “me” of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron, and Shelley
becomes “we” or “our” in Tennyson’s poem. The mariner, who first speaks, presumes that the
others do agree with him as they also enjoy what he has just experienced. Thus, with reference
to Kolakowski’s assumption that a personal experience is not enough to affirm the existence of
the objects around us, the collective experience of the mariners makes it more convincing that
the lotos-eaters’ land is really enchanting.
Inspired by the weary journey of Odysseus, the poem depicts the mental and physical
suffering of a group of mariners. The mariners were never disunited neither before or after
being mesmerized by the empty spell of the enchanting nature. The focus of the present analysis
lies in the second part of the poem after which the sailors enter the solipsistic state. The choric
song, as a title given to the second part, implies that a song was sung by a chorus; a group of
singers. They collectively acknowledge that they have a shared past and suffering as it is stated
in the second stanza of part II. The mariners’ first interaction with nature, by eating the lotos
flowers, makes them ponder and reconsider their lifestyle:

While all things else have rest from weariness?

All things have rest: why should we toil alone,
We only toil, who are the first of things,
And make perpetual moan,
Still from one sorrow to another thrown;
Nor ever fold our wings,
And cease from wanderings,
Nor steep our brows in slumber’s holy balm;
Nor harken what the inner spirit sings,
“There is no joy but calm!”—
Why should we only toil, the roof and crown of things? (60–70)

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The ultimate goal of the Romantic experience is to finally reach joy and peace of mind and soul.
The above stanza reflects this notion perfectly. The mariners’ obsession with the rest they have
on the island leads them to pose rhetorical questions about their lives as well as human life in
general. They wonder why they should “toil alone” (61) while they are “ the first of things”, the
most important creature on earth. They believe that their lives are like a vicious circle of toiling
and working as they cannot “ fold” their “ wings; they cannot have rest at all. Like the rest of
humans, the mariners cannot also “cease from wanderings”(66) because of the harsh living
conditions they face. The stanza can also be interpreted as a critique of English society since the
industrial revolution turned the English individual into a machine that is built to work endlessly
to thrive in a materialistic society. Thus, as the mariners are the product of their society, their

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collective solipsism contributes greatly to their epiphany that people should seek refuge in
nature to get some rest away from the polluted, industrial cities.
There is a unanimous consciousness that their journey was a form of unnecessary suffering
that had to come to an end. They agree on common distress and weariness. In the conventional
Romantic solipsism, speakers normally acknowledge and admit their own individual pain,
denying that of others. In Tennyson’s stanza, there is a group admission that the pain is our
pain, rather than my pain of which solipsism is characterized.
Throughout the second part of the poem, which consists of eight stanzas, the mariners
compare and contrast their previous life in Ithaca and their life on the island. They try to justify
their resolution to settle in the Lotos land for good since nature is their ultimate refuge from the
destructive, laborious life of the urban society. In the first stanza, they interact with the sound of
the music they hear or “night-dews on still waters between walls” (48), just like Keats’s speaker
in “Ode to a Nightingale” as he is relieved from his pains upon hearing the nightingale.
Nevertheless, the mariners, unlike Keats’s speaker who finally disengages with nature and falls
down, merge with nature and never disengage. They swear an oath that “In the hollow Lotos-
land to live and lie reclined” (154). Also, it parallels Wordsworth’s speaker’s relived grief when
he listens to the bird’s “joyous song” (19) in “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from
Recollections of Early Childhood” (1807).
While in solipsism “the Self” believes that nothing or no one exists beyond its own
consciousness, in the choric song, there is full consciousness of fellow sailors as it becomes
apparent in the first four lines of the fifth stanza:

Falling asleep in a half-dream!

To dream and dream, like yonder amber light,
Which will not leave the myrrh-bush on the height;
To hear each other’s whisper’d speech (101–104)

In their attempt to leave their past behind and enjoy their dreamy mood, the mariners still seem
to refuse individualistic, total isolation. They are keen to keep interacting by hearing each
other’s speech as an integral part of their interaction with mother nature.
In fact, Tennyson is pushing the solipsistic state to its limits in the way he portrays dreams
and death in the fourth and the fifth stanzas of the Choric song. With reference to the fifth
stanza (cited above), there seems to be a unanimous call by the mariners for inter-subjectivity or
rather a state of telepathic dreams. In the fourth stanza, the speakers reflect a desire for a
collective peaceful death, fusing into one tree where each leaf dies when time is right as seen in
the third and fourth stanzas.
While, several experiences in waking life such as singing or interacting with nature can be
practiced collectively in a harmonious manner, dreams and death are rarely depicted in such a
manner. Once again, solipsism is taken by Tennyson beyond the conventional romantic view; a
collective one in every single detail throughout the second part of the poem.

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With reference to the definitions suggested for solipsism (discussed previously), it is a

denial of the existence of anything beyond one’s own consciousness and mind. In the “Lotos-
Eaters,” it is the opposite. There seems to be full awareness of the existence of “others.” The
speakers fully admit that others (fellow mariners) do exist and those “others” have wives and
children who also exist as it is evident in the sixth stanza:

Dear is the memory of our wedded lives,

And dear the last embraces of our wives
And their warm tears; but all hath suffer’d change;
For surely now our household hearths are cold,

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Our sons inherit us, our looks are strange,
And we should come like ghosts to trouble joy. (114–119)

For the major Romantic poets, solitude or self-indulgence is the only way to attain the
romantic moment. It is the time when the Self makes its journey to the metaphysical realm of no
restrictions, degradation, or materialism. Thus, the reader can see how Wordsworth’ speaker, in
“Daffodils” (1807), “wandered lonely as a cloud” (1); Shelley’s poet “lived,…died,…sung, in
solitude.” (46) in Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude; and in Coleridge’s “Frost at
Midnight”(1798), the speaker acknowledges that solitude “suits” (5) him. This solipsistic state,
we can argue, leads to the Self’s journey to attain the elevated, romantic state. Nevertheless, in
the sense of these major Romantic poets, this can happen only when the Self is alone with the
company of its physical parts and mind. Tennyson, in “The Lotos-Eaters” takes this individual-
solipsistic moment farther to make it a collective one. It is not a self that needs to withdraw
from society, but the selves of the mariners; the romantic experience is not attained upon a self-
nature interaction, but a selves-nature interaction; the “I” of the speaker in the Romantics
poetry, “the solipsist…[who] imagines a higher mode of selfhood or spirit to whom the world is
like a dream” (Choudhury 1953, 381), is the “we” in Tennyson’s poem. The mariners’
collective solipsism is boldly expressed as they ask the world to “Let us alone” (90); a
collective consensus that reflects the mariners’ shared appreciation of nature and a life of
leisure. Moreover, their collective decision to live in solitude, beyond the bounds of the busy
society is further explicitly made as they invite each other to “ swear an oath, and keep it with
an equal mind,” (153) that all should “In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined/ On the
hills like Gods together, careless of mankind” (154–155). Their collective solipsism drives them
to collectively declare in the final line that they “will not wander more” (173). Therefore, to
some extent, one can argue that Tennyson’s romantic experience is more substantial since the
beauty of the landscape is appreciated by more than one Self.
Solitude in the sense of the major Romantic poets is confined to a limited period of time in
which some “intimations of mortality” occur. The speaker or the poet is obliged to go back to
society and revisit that experience to transcend the materialistic world. As Wordsworth’s
speaker states in the last stanza of “Daffodils”:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils. (18–24)

The speaker describes how he spends his time after his trip to nature. He is at home recalling the
bliss of solitude he has experienced when he has been in the middle of nature. Therefore,
solipsism is, to some extent, temporary; the self goes to nature, interacts, transcends, and then

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goes back to society. While the Tennysonian collective solipsism is much more complicated.
The mariners collectively agree to live in seclusion for the rest of their lives and not return to
society where they “are we weighed upon with heaviness, / And utterly consumed with sharp
distress” (58-59). Therefore, Tennyson’s poem not only reflects a Romantic experience but also
takes its temporal dimension to the extreme; to the no-return.
“The Lotos-Eaters,” like the poetry of the major Romantic poets, carries a revolutionary
spirit, but in a new direction. In “Prometheus Unbound” (1820), Shelley “portrays—indeed
repeatedly—the dawning of a new age and the awakening of a new humanity” (Brown 1993,
41). He unties Prometheus as a metaphor for the self’s revolt against society, norms, and
materialism. The poem functions as a rallying cry for individuals to rebel against social shackles

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and to have an embellished self that rejects what society blindly embraces. Byron’s Don Juan
(1819) is also a revolutionary poem in which Byron states in the first stanza that he wants “an
uncommon” hero who is of course labeled with the traits of a Byronic hero; mad, bad, and
dangerous to know. Moreover, Childe Harold’s revolution against society is evident as the
speaker states, in canto I stanza V, “For he through Sin’s long labyrinth had run.” It is the “sin”
of revolution. The sin of rebellion against society. Shelley’s speaker in “Ode to the West Wind”
longs for a change in society as he pleads to the wind, as a metaphor for revolution, to blow and
change the materialistic, industrial society. Accordingly, the Self’s decision to disengage with
society is a revolution in itself. However, it is the revolution of a Self, not Selves. Tennyson
promotes this personal revolution to the level of a participatory one. In Isabel Armstrong’s
view, “The Lotos-Eaters” is a poem “[ that] ends with a revolutionary situation without
revolution” (Armstrong 2019, 84) (emphasis in original). Armstrong also attributes the poem’s
revolutionary notion to Tennyson’s “critique of oppression–but this time in a male world”
(2019, 84). This revolutionary taste of the poem can also be interpreted as a reaction to the
industrial revolution of nineteenth-century England. Our concern here is Tennyson’s belief in a
communal revolution against social norms; that is, in the Tennysonian sense, what the
solipsistic Self may conclude as the best for it, can be also a shared experience that other Selves
may believe in and advocate.

Conclusion
Many critics have addressed the influence of the major Romantic poets on the Victorian poet
Alfred Tennyson. This influence can be marked in his use of a descriptive-meditative language
in his poetry and almost the same epithets that Keats uses to unveil a Romantic experience. The
current article concludes that Tennyson is not only influenced by the Romantics experience, but
he also adds to it in “ The Lotos-eaters.” He transforms the individual solitude (solipsism) into a
collective one; solipsism that universalizes a notion or belief. For instance, the Self that seeks
isolation in Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley develops into many Selves who share
the same solipsistic tendency. Tennyson ’s collective solipsism can be even more effective since
its collective consensus, among its participants, makes the argument more valid. Moreover,
Tennyson transforms the temporary transcendence of the Self in the poetry of the major
Romantics into a permanent state of living as his mariners decide to leave their old lives behind
and settle on the island. Unlike the Romantics’ personas who develop and embrace new
ideologies or ways of thinking while alone in a solipsistic atmosphere. Tennyson’s speakers’
collective solipsism leads to a collective rebellion, isolation and, most importantly, an ever-
lasting disengagement with society.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Ahmed Shalabi: Lecturer, English Language and Literature, Al-Ahliyya Amman University,
Amman, Jordan

Ogareet Khoury: Assistant Professor, English Language and Translation, Al-Ahliyya Amman
University, Amman, Jordan

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International Journal
The International JournalofofLiterary
LiteraryHumanities
Humanities The International Journal of Literary Humanities
is
is one
one of five thematically
of ÿve thematically focused
focused journals
journals inin the
thefamily is a peer-reviewed, scholarly journal.
of journals that support the New Directions in the
Humanities Research Network—its journals, book
imprint, conference, and online community.
section of The International Journal of the Humanities.
The International Journal of Literary Humanities
analyzes and interprets literatures and literacy
practices, seeking to unsettle received expressive
forms and
stabilize conventional
bodies of work interpretations. Thisgenres.
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explores these dimensions of the literary humanities, in
a contemporary context where the role and purpose
of the humanities in general, and literary humanities in
particular, is frequently contested.

As well as papers of a traditional scholarly type, this

journal invites presentations of literary practice—
including unpublished literary pieces. These can either
be short pieces included within the body of article
or if longer, referenced pieces that are readily available
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