The Pridi Banomyong Library Rare Book Room, Thammasat University, Tha Prachan campus, owns a number of rare and useful items of potential interest to students and researchers, especially those interested in history, literature, education, political science, Asian studies, and related subjects.

Among them is Poetical works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate.  

The TU Library collection includes several other books by and about Tennyson.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson was an English poet.

He was the Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria’s reign.

The British Poet Laureate is an honorary position appointed by the monarch of the United Kingdom (UK) on the advice of the prime minister.

The role does not entail any specific duties, but there is an expectation that the holder will write verse for significant national occasions.

The laureateship dates to 1616 when a pension was provided to Ben Jonson, but the first official Laureate was John Dryden, appointed in 1668 by Charles II.

On the death of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who held the post between November 1850 and October 1892, there was a break of four years as a mark of respect.

Many untalented and deservedly forgotten writers have served as Poet Laureates of the UK because they are appointed by politicians instead of by people informed about literature.

Several of the greatest UK poets have refused to be considered for the honor as they did not want to write verse on order for special occasions.

Nevertheless, Tennyson remains a major author for today’s readers.

In his day, he was photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron, who captured the images of some of the most eminent Victorians.

Wystan Auden, another excellent English poet, wrote about Tennyson in the preface to a selection of his works:

In 1846 the grant of a pension from the Civil List made him financially secure, and in 1850 he published his masterpiece In Memoriam, married, and succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate.

From then on he led the life of a famous author. He bought a house in the Isle of Wight, he wrote, he grew a beard, he visited Queen Victoria at Osborne, he built another house in Surrey, he went on writing, he visited the Queen at Windsor, he was gazetted to the Peerage, he still wrote. On October 8, 1892, he died, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

He had a large, loose-limbed body, a swarthy complexion, a high, narrow forehead, and huge bricklayer’s hands; in youth he looked like a gypsy; in age like a dirty old monk; he had the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet; he was also undoubtedly the stupidest; there was little about melancholia that he didn’t know; there was little else that he did.

In his excellent study of the poet, Mr. Harold Nicolson divides his literary development into four phases.

The first, which extends from the Poems by Two Brothers in 1827 to the publication of the 1842 volume, represents his luxuriant period — the period in which, whatever people may say, he was under the influence of Keats and, in a lesser degree, of Coleridge. He sings throughout to “one clear harp in divers tones,” but beautiful as the poems are, there is little impression of any central or directing purpose or inspiration.

The second phase, which the first slightly overlaps, begins with the death of Hallam in 1833 and concludes with Maud in 1855. To this period, which is clearly the most important of the four, belong The Two Voices, and Break, Break, Break, which were actually published in the 1842 volume, The Princess in 1847, and In Memoriam in 1850.

The magnificent Ode to the Duke of Wellington, which appeared in 1852, falls also within this period. With 1857 we come to the third, the unfortunate mid-Victorian phase of Tennyson’s development, and we enter upon the series of the Idylls, the Enoch Arden poems of 1864, The Holy Grail of 1869, and the final Idylls of 1872.

From 1873 onward there is an interval in which the Laureate was occupied, with amazing obstinacy, in writing plays, but in 1880, the fourth and last period, the splendid Aldworth period, opens with Ballads and Other Poems, with Rizpah, and Lucknow and De Profundis. In 1885 we find Tiresias and the Ancient Sage and the lines to Fitzgerald, and the period closes only with the posthumous publication of The Death of Oenone in 1892.

It is important, I think, clearly to mark the difference between these four periods. For whereas the early period has given us things like Mariana and The Lady of Shalott; whereas the second period has revealed to us the essential lyrical inspiration of Tennyson, and convinced us of his greatness and permanence as a poet; whereas the last period is a magnificent monument to his vitality and his mastery of language; the third period, the mid-Victorian period, can make no appeal whatsoever to the modern mind.

And, unfortunately, it is by this third period, the Farringford period, by the Idylls and Enoch Arden, that he is condemned. And that this should be so is both unfair and unintelligent.

We must not, however, make the mistake of concluding from this that the Victorians had exceptionally bad taste and did not appreciate these poems of Tennyson which we think good, or that we are any better judges of our own contemporaries. A poet may write bad poetry in three ways.

He may be bored or in a hurry and write work which is technically slipshod or carelessly expressed. From this fault, of which Shakespeare is not infrequently guilty, Tennyson is quite free. Secondly, by overlooking verbal and visual associations he may be unintentionally funny at a serious moment; […]

Thirdly, he may suffer from a corruption of his own consciousness and produce work the badness of which strikes the reader as intentional; i.e., in the case of carelessness or accidental bathos, one feels it would only have to be pointed out to the poet for the latter to recognize it instantly, but in the case of this kind of badness one feels certain that the poet is very pleased with it. The faults, for instance, of the following extracts, could not be cured by literary criticism alone; they involve Tennyson’s personality […]

In no other English poet of comparable rank does the bulk of his work seem so clearly to be inspired by some single and probably very early experience.

Tennyson’s own description of himself as

An infant crying in the night;

An infant crying for the light :

And with no language but a cry.

is extraordinarily acute. If Wordsworth is the great English poet of Nature, then Tennyson is the great English poet of the Nursery, of

das ungewisse Licht von Nachmittagen

in denen man sich furchtete als Kind,

[the uncertain light of afternoons

in which one was afraid as a child

– from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke]

i.e., his poems deal with human emotions in their most primitive states […]

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)