denial with doubt in the dark night of the soul". Basil Willey claimed: "Tennyson, in my view, should not be blamed…for failing to find a solution where no solution exists; nor should he be accused of wishful thinking when he asserts... that the Heart has its reasons of which Reason knows nothing." William R. Brashear's "Tennyson's Third Voice: A Note" points out that the argument is between "Dionysian" (emotional human nature) and "Socratic" (intellectual) voices. The Dionysian ("the still small voice") is of conscious, subjective fact. It "does not call upon the poet to reason, only to see that "it were better not to be". 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. But...it is feeble and impotent against the subjective fact." The third voice is "hopeful rather than optimistic" and "simply bolsters the poet against the overpowering vision of futility". The poem has also received a considerable amount of criticism as one of Tennyson's less impressive poems. 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" The ambiguity between all the voices involved has been considered to be too much for even the experienced reader to interpret and the meaning is too difficult to decipher. References Further reading Hill, Robert W., Jr., ed. (1971). Tennyson's poetry; authoritative texts, juvenilia and early responses, criticism. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. . The Two Voices and A Dream of Fair Women by Alfred, Lord Tennyson ( integral text) Poetry by Alfred, Lord Tennyson 1842 poems