Tennyson's Poetry: A Norton Critical Edition

Tennyson was a poet of the Victorian age who wrote very sensitively and beautifully about the pains and shortness of life, the growing problems of belief in conventional religion, and about personal grief and loss. His most important poem, In Memorium, focuses centrally on these themes, and is included in this edition with good explanatory notes. As with any selection this doesn't include all of Tennyson's works (which fill a number of volumes) but is fairly representative and also contains good critical essays from Tennyson scholars at the back. And it is readily affordable in price, making it easily available to the lover of poetry and the student or scholar alike.

Tennyson is a master of music, and allegedly among the most technically skilled of the distinguished English poets.There is I believe a considerable difference between the reputation he had in his own Victorian Times and the lesser reputation he has today. For myself the great Tennyson poem is 'Ulysses'. Its inspiring message of setting out again to explore in old age is the predecessor of Eliot's" Old Men should be explorers". I will confess that longer poems like 'Enoch Arden' are not really in my mind and heart.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson-GENIUS, "mediator for God," Poet Laureate, Tennyson was and is the greatest and most beautiful voice to ever bloom from not just 19th century English Literature, but from English Literature as a whole. Simply put, he cleaned up Shakespeare's mess which had been almost cleaned fully by such great voices as Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Dickens. ALL HUMAN EYES WILL MARVEL AT THE BEAUTY OF THE WORDS OF TENNYSON!!!!!

Of Tennyson's poems, In Memoriam A. H. H. and Maud stand out as personal favourites. In these poems he evokes a gentle blend of melancholy, connectedness with the land and countryside, and a tangible sense of the eternity of life and nature and ones personal destiny within these. His poems are mesmerizing, his rhythmic language and masterful blending of words draws a reader in, and has a hypnotic effect. He isn't trite, clumsy, or contrived. His subjects share the spirit of the Pre-Raphaelite painter's subjects, they are often brooding, forlorn, existing an empty, melancholic, roaming life in a garden of Eden. To the reader, his subjects are real, full and beautiful and are at once human and metaphysical.

I am a mariner, in fact a rather old one. The Tennyson poem, Crossing the Bar, as I remember it as a young man and as I read it today as an old man, has taken on new meaning and touched the center of my sensibilities.