We’re All Anglo-Saxons Now: Alfred Tennyson and the United States

This article traces Tennyson’s changing relationship to the United States. The poet first associated Americans with what he saw as the exploitative practices of the transatlantic literary marketplace, before the Civil War modified his opinion. After this conflict, he would maintain a personal preference for Southerners along with a distaste for ‘Yankees’. This discrimination paralleled an increased suspicion of the United States’ imperial ambitions, though his attitude to postbellum America was also mixed with admiration. As a result of what he understood as its superior federal system of political organisation, he came to see the United States as the likely successor to a declining British Empire. He would eventually adopt an ideology akin to Manifest Destiny in ‘Kapiolani’ (1892), a work that encapsulated his sense of a coming shift in global power.