"Recollections of The Arabian Nights and Recollections of Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale'"

Abstract

The object of this reading of Tennyson’s poem “Recollections of the Arabian Nights” is to retrieve the poem from misplacement in the Romantic tradition evident in several critical assumptions that revolve around it. One assumption is treating the piece as an echo of Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.” The current study asserts that Tennyson does not experience Romantic transcendence into Nature but rather recollects Keats’s act of sublimation. His interest is a humanistic one in which he recollects the figure of Haroun Alraschid as a model human being