Abstract
The early 1840s was a period of depression and creative inactivity for Tennyson. His work remained largely unacknowledged, and inspiration seemed to be failing him. Apart from revisions of earlier work, few new poems can be dated to the period between 1840 and 1845. Tennyson’s unsettled personal life, a loss of direction and sense of failure contributed to his writer’s block. As early as 1837, he had replied sarcastically to the ‘prosperous and talented’ Richard Monckton Milnes, who had annoyed him by demanding a poem for a journal: ‘Had I been writing to a nervous, morbidly-irritable man, down in the world, stark-spoiled with the staggers of a mismanaged imagination and equally opprest by Fortune and by the Reviews, it is possible that I might have halted to find expressions more suitable to his case’ (Letters, I, 148).
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Notes
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© 1993 Leonée Ormond
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Ormond, L. (1993). The Poet of the Age. In: Alfred Tennyson. Macmillan Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22998-7_5
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