Art and Madness in Maud: Tennyson's exploration of the psychology of the self Felix Morrison College

The relationship between art and the self is a reoccurring theme in Tennyson’s poetry; indeed in The Palace of Art the narrator declares “I built my soul a lordly pleasure-house”[i]; bridging the gap between the interior (soul) and exterior (palace) through art. In Maud we are given a poem which also deals with external and internal landscapes, seen through the subjective lens of the poet attempting to navigate his broken inner identity in a world apparently devoid of meaning. His muse, in the form of the ethereal Maud, acts as a vehicle for which the narrator can construct a sense of selfhood, which ultimately deteriorates in her absence and later death. Tennyson links the artist and his medium with the psychology of the self, highlighting how the breakdown of the relationship between the artist and his muse resembles, and can even be correlated to, the breakdown of the self.

The self is immediately thrown into question in the opening of the poem, as the narrator must face the harsh realities of an apparently meaningless world. The catalyst arrives in the form of the death of the patriarch – the narrator’s father - whose body lies “mangled, and flatten’d and crush’d”, with the brutal imagery reflected in nature itself as the “...