Tennyson: A Selected Edition

by Alfred Tennyson, Christopher Ricks (Editor)

This is the only fully annotated and comprehensive selection of Tennyson's poetry. Acknowledged as a major achievement of editorial scholarship, it has established itself as the standard edition of Tennyson.

The collection contains in full all four of Tennyson's long poems: "The Princess, In Memoriam, Maud," and "Idylls of the King." Other key works are included from "Mariana," "The Lady of Shallott, Morte d'Arthur, Ulysses," and "Tithonus" through Tennyson's middle life and the "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington," to his last years and "Crossing the Bar."

Genres: Poetry, Classics, 19th Century

1072 pages, Paperback

First published October 18, 2006

About the author

Works, including In Memoriam in 1850 and "The Charge of the Light Brigade" in 1854, of Alfred Tennyson, first baron, known as lord, appointed British poet laureate in 1850, reflect Victorian sentiments and aesthetics.

Elizabeth Tennyson, wife, bore Alfred Tennyson, the fourth of twelve children, to George Tennyson, clergyman; he inevitably wrote his books. In 1816, parents sent Tennyson was sent to grammar school of Louth.

Alfred Tennyson disliked school so intensely that from 1820, home educated him. At the age of 18 years in 1827, Alfred joined his two brothers at Trinity College, Cambridge and with Charles Tennyson, his brother, published Poems by Two Brothers , his book, in the same year.

Alfred Tennyson published Poems Chiefly Lyrical , his second book, in 1830. In 1833, Arthur Henry Hallam, best friend of Tennyson, engaged to wed his sister, died, and thus inspired some best Ulysses and the Passing of Arthur .

Following William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson in 1850 married Emily Sellwood Tenyson, his childhood friend. She bore Hallam Tennyson in 1852 and Lionel Tennyson in 1854, two years later.

Alfred Tennyson continued throughout his life and in the 1870s also to write a number of plays.

In 1884, the queen raised Alfred Tennyson, a great favorite of Albert, prince, thereafter to the peerage of Aldworth. She granted such a high rank for solely literary distinction to this only Englishman.

Alfred Tennyson died at the age of 83 years, and people buried his body in abbey of Westminster.

Reviews

[Gareth Reeves · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best selection of Tennyson's poetry in print, certainly that I've seen. All the masterpieces are here - 'The Lady of Shalott', 'The Palace of Art', 'The Eagle', 'Ulysses', 'Tithonus', 'Enoch Arden' - with complete versions of Maud, In Memoriam A. H. H., The Princess, and Idylls of the King.

A grand, towering poetic voice is his gift, though it is not to everyone's taste (an academic friend of mine called him a "pompous windbag"). He does not have the absolute perfection of Alexander Pope (who does?!), but he often soars, with extraordinarily powerful stretches of verse. Maud, for instance, is an uneven poem, but it features the following passage:

Dead, long dead,
Long dead!
And my heart is a handful of dust,
And the wheels go over my head,
And my bones are shaken with pain,
For into a shallow grave they are thrust,
Only a yard beneath the street,
And the hoofs of the horses beat, beat,
The hoofs of the horses beat,
Beat into my scalp and my brain,
With never an end to the stream of passing feet,
Driving, hurrying, marrying, burying,
Clamour and rumble, and ringing and clatter,
And here beneath it is all as bad,
For I thought the dead had peace, but it is not so;
To have no peace in the grave, is that not sad?
But up and down and to and fro,
Ever about me the dead men go;
And then to hear a dead man chatter
Is enough to drive one mad.

A delightfully grim and eloquent passage, with a pounding pace. The "handful of dust" was of course used by T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land, then by Evelyn Waugh for the title of his 1934 masterpiece. Fans of Eliot's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' will enjoy Maud:

But the broad light glares and beats,
And the shadow flits and fleets
And will not let me be;
And I loathe the squares and streets,
And the faces that one meets,
Hearts with no love for me:
Always I long to creep
Into some still cavern deep,
There to weep, and weep, and weep
My whole soul out to thee.

Not just "faces that one meets" but the whole rhythm and sense of pain and loneliness evokes Eliot ("to creep/Into some still cavern deep" is very close to "I should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas"). Poe's 'Raven' feels close to this too, but Poe lacked rigour and often his rhythm descends into singsong silliness for its own sake; Tennyson's diction is occasionally off (I would strike "forehead" from his vocabulary), and the repetition sometimes needless, but he has far better control of his verse.

In 'Ulysses', Tennyson creates an Odysseus who is sick of his "aged" wife and "cannot rest from travel" - perhaps shocking to those who have read Homer's epic - but the Victorian's hero is a vital and noble quester who wants more than life can give him: "How dull it is to pause, to make an end,/To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!" The insertion of a verse about his son is a stroke of genius, providing much-needed contrast. Telemachus is a hard-working, decent son; Ulysses professes to love him, but there is no special bond there: "He works his work, I mine." Ulysses is in love with adventure, fighting against time and his own mortality: "Death closes all: but something ere the end,/Some work of noble note, may yet be done,/Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods." Strove with gods, but not gods themselves.

A note on the edition before I'm done. Barring a couple of font-size issues (in the Roman numerals for Maud, for example, and the text of Locksley Hall), it is done very well. It features excellent notes on the composition of poems and variant textual versions of certain lines, but if you want tons of notes explaining the content, you're better off with a Norton or Penguin edition. This selected edition is about half the size of the complete three-volume edition, and a fraction of the cost. A worthy purchase, especially for anyone studying Tennyson beyond A level.

[Alexis H]

As a longstanding fan of Pre-Raphaelite art and poetry, this annotated poetry collection was a veritable treasure trove.