Selected Poems: Alfred Tennyson

As Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria`s reign, Alfred Lord Tennyson`s spellbinding poetry epitomized the Victorian age, and Selected Poems is edited with an introduction and notes by Christopher Ricks.

`Into the jaw of Death
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred`

The works in this volume trace nearly sixty years in the literary career of one of the nineteenth century`s greatest poets, and show the wide variety of poetic forms he mastered. This selection gives some of Tennyson`s most famous works in full, including Maud, depicting a tragic love affair, and In Memoriam, a profound tribute to his dearest friend. Excerpts from Idylls of the King show a lifelong passion for Arthurian legend, also seen in the dream-like The Lady of Shalot and in Morte d`Arthur. Other works respond to contemporary events, such as Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, written in Tennyson`s official role as Poet Laureate, or the patriotic Charge of the Light Brigade, while Locksley Hall provides a Utopian vision of the future, and the late poem Crossing the Bar is a haunting meditation on his own mortality.

In his introduction, Christopher Ricks discusses aspects of Tennyson`s life and works, his revisions of his poems, and his friendship with Arthur Hallam. This edition also includes a chronology, further reading and notes.

Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) was born at Somersby, Lincolnshire, the sixth of eleven children. His first important book, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, was published in 1830, and was not a critical success, but his two volumes of Poems, 1842, which contain some of his finest work, established him as the leading poet of his generation.