Selected Poems : Penguin Classics - Alfred Lord Tennyson

Selected Poems

By: Alfred Lord Tennyson

Paperback | 6 December 2007 | Edition Number 1

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The works in this volume trace nearly sixty years in the literary career of one of the nineteenth century's greatest poets, and show the wide variety of poetic forms he mastered. It gives some of Tennyson's most famous works in full, including Maud, depicting a tragic love affair, and In Memoriam, a profound tribute to his dearest friend. Excerpts from Idylls of the King show a lifelong passion for Arthurian legend, also seen in the dream-like Lady of Shalott and in Morte d'Arthur. Other works respond to contemporary events, such as Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, written in Tennyson's official role as Poet Laureate, or the patriotic Charge of the Light Brigade, while Locksley Hall provides a Utopian vision of the future, and the late poem Crossing the Bar is a haunting meditation on his own mortality.

About The Author

Alfred Lord Tennyson was born in 1809 at Somersby, Lincolnshire, the sixth of eleven children of a clergyman. He went up to Cambridge in 1828 but did not obtain a degree. He never had any other occupation than poet. In 1850 he was created Poet Laureate and in 1883 he accepted a peerage. His first important book, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, was published in 1830, and was not a critical success, but his two volumes of Poems, 1842, which contain some of his finest work, established him as the leading poet of his generation. Nine years earlier his close friend Arthur Hallam had died and this event had a lasting influence on his life and writing.

In Memoriam, a series of lyrics and speculations on mortality in tribute to Hallam, appeared in 1850. This was followed in 1855 by Maud, judged by many to be as important as In Memoriam, and which J. R. Lowell described as ‘the antiphonal voice to In Memoriam’. The principal work of Tennyson’s later years, Idylls of the King, was composed in two creative spells (1856–9 and 1868–74). T. S. Eliot wrote of Tennyson: ‘He has three qualities which are seldom found together except in the greatest poets: abundance, variety and complete competence. He had the finest ear of any English poet since Milton.’ After a short illness Tennyson died in 1892 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
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"[Tennyson] had the finest ear of any English poet since Milton."
-T. S. Eliot

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