“Who Can Rule and Dare Not Lie”: Tennyson’s Bicameral King

Judith Weissman, Syracuse Scholar, 1984, 5, 1.

Tennyson’s poetry is pervaded by the kinds of auditory hallucinations that Julian Jaynes describes in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Tennyson begins in a late stage of Jaynes’s history, with the voices of demons, and moves backward to Jaynes’s point of origin, the admonitory voice of the tribal king.