Book Description
The Norton Critical Edition of Tennyson's Poetry, Second Edition, represents a significant revision of its predecessor and assimilates the Tennyson scholarship of the last twenty-five years. The texts of the poems are based on the Eversley edition of Tennyson's Works (published in nine volumes, 1907-09). Under earlier interdiction, the significant Trinity College, Cambridge, manuscripts have been incorporated here. The poems are organized chronologically, from "Unpublished Early Poems" and "The Devil and the Lady" through "Poems" (1872-92). "The Princess" appears in its entirety. Each poem is accompanied by ample explanatory annotation. 'Contexts" includes early assessments of Tennyson and his poetry by Arthur Henry Hallam, John Wilson, John Wilson Croker, John Stuart Mill, John Sterling, James Spedding, and James Knowles. "Criticism" collects seven seminal essays-six of them new to the Second Edition-on both Tennyson and the major poems. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, I S. Eliot, Isobel Armstrong, Herbert F. Tucker, Christopher Ricks, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and Robert W Hill, Jr., present their varied perspectives. A Chronology, Selected Bibliography, and Index are also included. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Editorial qualms
As editor of this collection, Robert W. Hill has, I feel, made some rather poor choices. For instance, in the Preface he audaciously writes that he removed "indisputably 'bad'" poems. In this capacity, he omitted "Godiva" -- a great loss -- as well as many charming short verses, well represented in other collections.

Additionally, although he claims deliberately not to have modernized Tennyson's spelling, he nevertheless Americanizes both spelling and punctuation (e.g. "honor" instead of "honour"; consistent placement of the full stop within quotation marks; and so on). This badly affects the very Englishness of Tennyson's voice, I should think.

I would recommend the edition for its highly informed annotations, but not as a source for the poems themselves.

Nice collection of Tennyson's works
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.

Sloppy editing
Do not buy this book.I adopted it as a text book for a course I am teaching but have found typos in just about every poem I have read in it.Some you can figure out:

"How sweet--while warn airs lull us,blowling lowly"

"Warn" is supposed to be "warm." But others are really confusing:

"Thro' many a womenacanthus-wreath divine!"

"Women" is supposed to be"woven."I checked these in the first edition of the NortonCritical--the first edition has the correct lines.I guess Norton justscanned the first edition and put it on the shelves as a second"edition" without even editing it.

Very sloppy work--pleasedon't buy the book.The texts are well selected--it is nice to have ThePrincess available.And the critical readings are also well chosen.Butthe texts are hardly readible. ... Read more

Book Description
Series Editors: Kinley E. Roby, Northeastern University; Herbert Sussman, Northeastern University; Joseph Bartolomeo, University of Massachusetts; George Economou, University of Oklahoma; Arthur F. Kinney, University of Massachusetts

Twayne's United States Authors, English Authors, and World Authors Series present concise critical introductions to great writers and their works.

Devoted to critical interpretation and discussion of an author's work, each study takes account of major literary trends and important scholarly contributions and provides new critical insights with an original point of view. An Authors Series volume addresses readers ranging from advanced high school students to university professors. The book suggests to the informed reader new ways of considering a writer's work. A reader new to the work under examination will, after reading the Authors Series, be compelled to turn to the originals, bringing to the reading a basic knowledge and fresh critical perspectives. Each volume features:

• A critical, interpretive study and explication of the author's works
• A brief biography of the author
• An accessible chronology outlining the life, work, and relevant historical background of the author
• Aids for further study -- complete notes and references, a selected annotated bibliography, and an index
• A readable style presented in a manageable length

Book Description
1899. Volume 1 of 2. Other volumes in this set are ISBN(s): 0766183734. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

weird but wonderful
This book takes on a seemingly hopless project: Rowlinson uses deconstructionist methods to show how Tennyson's poetry was influenced by psychoanalytic theory.The biggest problem with this work is that Tennyson predated Freud by 75 years or so, and Freud predated deconstructionism by 30 years or so, and deconstruction also predated Rowlinson himself by 25 years or so. Also, Tennyson is (on the surface at least) perhaps the least psychologically introspective poet since Homer.Rowlinson's work seems doomed from the start--- but it works, thanks to the author's fierce sense of humor and relentless intellect. ... Read more

Book Description
A commonplace of literary criticism has been the pejorative judgment of 19th century drama. Yet at the height of his fame as Poet Laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson devoted eight valuable years and all his rich gifts to seven plays that he considered to be the best work he had done, and, like the "Idylls of the King", to form an epical history of England. This book examines the plays of Tennyson and argues that current criticism that neglects, ignores, or denigrates Tennyson's drama does a great disservice to the importance of the poet's dramatic works. ... Read more

Book Description
Alfred, Lord Tennyson was a more complex writer than his status as Queen Victoria’s favorite poet might suggest. Though capable of rendering rapture and delight in the most exquisite verse, in another mode Tennyson is brother in spirit to Poe and Baudelaire, the author of dark, passionate reveries. And though he treasured poetic tradition, his work nevertheless engaged directly with the great issues of his time, from industrialization and the crisis of faith to scientific progress and women’s rights. A master of the short, intense lyric, he can also be sardonic, humorous, voluptuous, earthy, and satirical.

This collection includes, of course, such famous poems as “The Lady of Shalott” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” There are extracts from all the major masterpieces—“Idylls of the King,” “The Princess,” “In Memoriam”—and several complete long poems, such as “Ulysses” and “Demeter and Persephone,” that demonstrate his narrative grace. Finally, there are many of the short lyrical poems, such as “Come into the Garden, Maud” and “Break, Break, Break,” for which he is justly celebrated. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Excellent and Portable Collection
This book (and all in the portable poets collection from Everyman's Library) is wonderfully presented, bound, printed and the size is truly perfect for carrying around day to day or packing for a trip. The selection of Tennyson's work is broad - as such it is has something for everyone and every occasion, though if you have or desire a complete collection your money would be best spent elsewhere, unless you don't mind duplicates. As with all Everyman's Library publications it is hardcover with a nice cloth page marker, making it all the more portable.

" Home They BroughtHerWarrior Dead "
According to Wikipedia , Tennyson is the second most quoted author in the English language, after Shakespeare. This collection provides a surprisingly broad survey of a poetic career spanning more than sixty years. The book is portable , attractively packaged and needing you, to take it on a trip tomountain or beach.( Or a mid-winter's read by the fireside.) The selections are often stirring and profound and there is an over-arching ambience of melancholia...." Come down , o maid , from yonder mountain height "...It's all high drama I tell ye.

A collection of Tennyson's best
This is one of the best collections of Tennyson's poems I have ever read.Tennyson's wonderful poems are artfully compiled into this book. I would recommend it to anyone who loves Tennyson's poetry or just wants to seewhat its all about. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Not the best bio of a most interesting person
Back in May of 1981 I read Tennyson:The Unquiet Heart, by Robert Bernard Martin, and I thought that was the perfect biography.Because I had such good memories of that great book, I decided to read this bio by Peter Levi.It does a good job, but whether I am not as interested in Tennyson as I was in 1981 or what, I did not enjoy the book as much.In my youth I committed to memory a few of Tennyson's poems (including Locksley Hall) and that memorizationhas been a source of enjoymnet to me for many years. ... Read more

Book Description
Norman Page uses poems, memoirs, letters, and more than 70 photographs (many of which have never before been reproduced) to disentangle the man from the Poet Laureate, and to illuminate the life of one of the most memorable of the Victorians. ... Read more

Book Description
Questions of survival were much discussed during the nineteenth century, ranging from debates over the likelihood of a personal immortality, to anxieties over the more dispersed and unpredictable aftermath of particular acts and utterances. Some of these questions emerged in the intellectual and stylistic preoccupations of individual writers, such as Dickens, Tennyson, and FitzGerald. Others contributed towards the cultural atmosphere they shared, in which shifty and overlapping ideas of 'influence' (from the seductive touch of the mesmerist to the contagious breath of the poor) became central to attempts to work out how far-reaching were the effects which people had on one another and themselves.Victorian Afterlives sets out to recover this atmosphere, and to explain why its pressures are still being exercised on and in our own ways of thinking. Moving freely between different fields of enquiry (including literary criticism, philosophy, and the history of science), and written in a lively and accessible style, this major new study redraws the map of nineteenth-century culture to show what the Victorians made of one another, and what they might still help us make of ourselves. ... Read more