The Two Voices

Tennyson wrote the poem, titled "Thoughts of a Suicide" in manuscript, after the death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam in 1833.

199-201)[5] "The Two Voices" attracted the attention of the nineteenth-century philosopher and social scientist Herbert Spencer, who believed some of the theories between the poem and his own book, The Principles of Psychology, were interconnected.

[6] Jerome Buckley asserted that the poem is "tinged with Satanic irony", and "the voice of negation, cynical and realistic, puncturing a desperate idealism, forced upon the reluctant ego an awareness of man’s fundamental insignificance" and that it "remains intense as the colloquy of denial with doubt in the dark night of the soul".

The Socratic voice, whose "optimistic arguments are all objective", "utilizes a full assortment of rationales ranging from scientific faith in progress to Platonic ideas of immortality.

Published after a ten-year dry spell, being a more experimental poem for Tennyson, there are those who believe it does not exemplify his poetic genius as well as some of his other pieces.

"The Two Voices" has been criticized as unnecessarily long and lacking any sort of literary resolution, that it "seems to be one of those works whose end cycles back to the beginning".