Alfred Tennyson (Lord Tennyson)

“For Tennyson, as for a man imbued with the richest and rarest poetic impulses, we have an admiration — a reverence unbounded. His ‘Morte D’Arthur,’ his ‘Locksley Hall,’ his ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ his ‘Lady of Shalott,’ his ‘Lotos Eaters,’ his ‘Ænone,’ and many other poems, are not surpassed, in all that gives to Poetry its distinctive value, by the compositions of any one living or dead. And his leading error — that error which renders him unpopular — a point, to be sure, of no particular importance — that very error, we say, is founded in truth — in a keen perception of the elements of poetic beauty. We allude to his quaintness — to what the world chooses to term his affectation. No true poet — no critic whose approbation is worth even a copy of the volume we now hold in our hand — will deny that he feels impressed, sometimes even to tears, by many of those very affectations which he is impelled by the prejudice of his education, or by the cant of his reason, to condemn. He should thus be led to examine the extent of the one, and to be wary of the deductions of the other. In fact, the profound intuition of Lord Bacon has supplied, in one of his immortal apothegmns, the whole philosophy of the point at issue. ‘There is no exquisite beauty,’ he truly says, ‘without somestrangeness in its proportions.’ We maintain, then, that Tennyson errs, not in his occasional quaintness, but in its continual and obtrusive excess.”  (“Our Amateur Poets — William Ellery Channing” (A), from Graham’s Magazine, August 1843)

“In minor poetical efforts, indeed, we may not so imperatively demand an adherence to the true poetical thesis. We permit trifling, to some extent, in a work which we consider at best but a trifle. Although we agree, for example, with Coleridge, that poetry and passion are discordant, yet we quarrel not with Tennyson, when he brings to the intense passion which prompted his ‘Locksley Hall,’ the aid of that terseness and pungency which are derivable from verse. The effect he produces, however, is a purely passionate, and is not (unless in detached portions of that magnificent phillippic) a properly poetic effect. His ‘none,’ on the other hand, exalts that soul — not into passion — but into a conception of pure Beauty, which, in its elevation, its calm rapture, has in it a fore-shadowing of the spiritual life, and as far transcends earthly passion, as the holy radiance of the sun does the feeble and glimmering phosphorescence of the glow-worm. His ‘Morte D’Arthur’ is in the same majestic vein. The ‘Sensitive Plant,’ or the ‘Christabel’ — does this indisputable fact prove anything more than that the majority of mankind are more susceptible of the impulses of passion, than of the impressions of beauty. Readers do exist, however, and always will exist, who, to hearts of a fervor that maddens, unite, in perfection, the sentiment of the beautiful — that divine sixth sense, which is yet so faintly understood — that system which Phrenology attempts to embody in its organ of ideality — that sense which is the basis of all the dreams of Cousin — that sense which speaks of God, through his purest, if not through his sole attribute — that sense which demonstrates, and which alone demonstrates, His existence.” (This section is repeated from Poe’s review of Orion, Graham’s Magazine, 1844.)

“From Alfred Tennyson, although in perfect sincerity I regard him as the noblest poet that ever lived, I have left myself time to cite only a very brief specimen. I call him, and think him the noblest of poets, not because the impressions he produces are, at all times, the most profound — not because the poetical excitement which he induces is, at all times, the most intense — but because it is, at all times, the most ethereal — in other words, the most elevating and most pure. No poet is so little of the earth, earthy.”