Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Abstract

After Wordsworth, Tennyson was the most famous poet of the nineteenth century. He was admired particularly for his descriptive and narrative poetry, in which he exercised a superb technical mastery. He took notice of adverse criticism and became an habitual reviser of his work, which is best shown in the revision of many 1830 and 1832 poems subsequently published in 1842: good examples of such revisions are the opening, and the ending, of The Lady of Shalott.