Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson

Wordsworth went on writing to the end, but all his best poetry was written in about five early years.

Tennyson went on to a patriarchal age, but there is little of his later work that bears comparison with what he wrote before he was forty.

Browning produced volume after volume, but with the exception of an occasional fine lyric, his later work is hardly more than an illustration of his faults of writing.

Coleridge deserted poetry very early.

There are poets indeed, like Rossetti and Fitzgerald, who made a worse poem out of a better by scrupulous correction.

And the first drafts of great poems are generally the finest poems of all.

A poem has sometimes been improved by excision, notably in the case of Tennyson, whose abandoned stanzas printed in his life show how strong his instinct was for what was best and purest a great poet for instance never like a lesser poet keeps an unsatisfactory stanza for the sake of a good line tennyson in a fine homely image said that a poem must have a certain curve of its own like the curve of the rind of a pared apple thrown on the floor it must have a perfect evolution and progress and this can sometimes be best arrived at by the omission of stanzas in which the inconstant or flagging mind turned aside from its design but it is certain that if the poet gets so much into the habit of writing poetry that even when he has no sense of inspiration he must still write to satisfy a craving the result will be worthless as it too often was in the case of Wordsworth, because such poems become literary instead of poetical, and literary poetry has no justification.

If we take a book like Rossetti's House of Life, we shall find that certain sonnets stand out with a peculiar freshness and brightness as in the golden sunlight of an autumn morning while many of the sonnets give us the sense of slow and gorgeous evolution as if contrived by some poetical machine i was interested to find in studying the house of life carefully that all the finest poems are early work and when i came to look at the manuscripts i was rather horrified to see what an immense amount of alternatives had been produced there would be for instance no less than eight or nine of those great slowly moving words like incommunicable or importunate written down not so much to express an inevitable idea as to fill an inevitable space and thus the poems seemed to lose their pungency by the slow absorption of painfully sought agglutinations of syllables with a stately music of their own of course but garnered rather than engendered rossetti's great dictum about the prime necessity for poetry being fundamental brain work led him here into error the brain work must be fundamental and instinctive it must all have been done before the poem is conceived and very often a poet acquires his power through sacrificing elaborate compositions which have taught him certainty of touch but are not in themselves great poetry subsequent brain work often merely clouds the effect and it was that on which rossetti spent himself in vain the view which keats took of his own endymion is a far larger and bolder one i will write independently he said i have written independently without judgment i may write independently and with judgment hereafter The genius of poetry must work out its own salvation in a man.

Not that one of us really wants to die, though, Marshal.

Tennyson spoke truth when he said that.

There's old Mrs. Wallace up at the glen.

She's had heaps of trouble all her life, poor soul, and she's lost almost everyone she cared about.

"That is so like a man." And then she laughed in spite of herself.

It sounded so like an echo of Miss Cornelia.

"Well, if you won't accept Tennyson as an authority, perhaps you will believe the words of a greater than he,"

said Gilbert seriously.

That sums up their admirable qualities.

And it may be said that the poet's greatness became commonly acknowledged when, on the advice of Tennyson, who had a special admiration for him, five of the poems were included in The Golden Treasury.

It has been explained that no man is a hero to his valet for the reason that it takes a hero to recognize a hero.

And although Marvell's fame as a poet was so long denied, it is perhaps no slight compensation that it should at last have been established by Lamb, Poe, and Tennyson.

The story of Marvell's life is full of interest and blank spaces.

His father, a Cambridgeshire man by birth, was rector of Winstead in Yorkshire, where Andrew was born on the thirty-first of March sixteen twenty-one.

Marvell, in spite of derivations from the metaphysical school, is one of our most original poets.

His union of imagination and wit, pathos, realism, and fancifulness gives his verse a remarkable individual quality, which is enhanced by the Doric delicacy of his style.

Again, it's a rousing defense of the men of the Revenge and, of course, his relative, Richard Grenville.

It would also, over 200 years later, inspire a popular poem entitled The Revenge, A Ballad of the Fleet by Lord Alfred Tennyson, in that he dramatically narrates the course of the engagement in the poem in a very famous one.

So this, as we talk about in the title of this, is the glorious defeat.

It is the romanticization of a heroic failure.

An indescribable confusion it was of letters, newspapers, and books, an ink bottle on one chair, a glass of lemonade on another, a pile of manuscripts on a third, a hat on the floor.

Imperturbably composed, the poet surveyed his best-loved books, Scott, Carlyle, Tennyson, Emerson, translations of Homer, Dante, Hafiz, Saadi, renderings of Virgil, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, versions of Spanish and German poets.

Most well-worn of all, Shakespeare and the Bible.

Finally, out of the heterogeneous collection he selected George Sand's Consuelo, and seated himself at the window with it.

Although the best of comrades, and one who found companionship most exhilarating, he had a bedrock of deep reserve, and to such as he did not like he became as a precipice.

But to those with whom he was truly on rapport, whether by letter or in the flesh, he was spendthrift of his personality.

His English literary friends, Tennyson, Rossetti, Buchanan, Browning, and others, had supplied the financial aid which enabled him to recuperate at Timber Creek.

Compatriots such as Emerson, John Burroughs, and a host of old-time friends were welcome visitors.

Prefatory note.

let me frankly admit to begin with that the attractiveness and probable selling qualities of the title of this little book the hundred best english poems proved when it had been once thought of too powerful arguments for it to be abandoned i am fully conscious of the presumption such a title implies in an unknown selector but at the same time i submit that only a plebiscite of duly qualified lovers of poetry could make a selection that could claim to deserve this title beyond all question and such a plebiscite is of course impossible i can claim no more than that my attempt to realize this title is an honest one and i can assert without fear of contradiction that every one of the poems i have included is a gem of purest ray serene that none can be too often read or too often repeated to one's self that every one of them should be known by heart by every lover of good literature so that each may become as it were a part of his inner being i have not inserted any poems by living authors i have taken the greatest care with the texts of the poems the editions followed have been mentioned in every case i have scrupulously retained the punctuation of these original editions and only modernized the spelling of the old copies while i have not ventured to omit any part of any poem i have not supplied titles of my own but have adopted those i found already employed in the editions used as models or in some of the cases in which i found none have merely added a descriptive one such as song from don juan in conclusion my very warmest thanks are due to messrs macmillan co ltd for permission to include tennyson's crossing the bar to mr d nutt for permission to insert w e henley's to r th b and margarita to messrs smith elder co for a like privilege in regard to browning's epilogue and to mr lloyd osborne and messrs chatto windus for permission to reproduce stevenson's requiem without these poems the volume would have had a much smaller claim to its title than it does possess slight as that may be My thanks are also due to the following gentlemen who have kindly allowed me to reproduce copyright texts of non-copyright poems from editions published by them.

Messrs. Bickers and Son, Ben Johnson, Messrs. Chapman and Hall, Ltd., Landor, Messrs. Chatto and Windus, Herrick, Mr. Buxton Foreman, Keats and Shelley, Mr. Henry Froud, Wordsworth, Mr. Alex Gardner and the Reverend George Henderson, B.D., Lady Nairn, Messrs. T.C. and E.C. Jack, Burns, Messrs. Macmillan and Company, Limited, Clough and Tennyson, Mr. John Murray, Byron, Messrs. Smith Elder and Company, Browning, Messrs.

Ward Locke and Company, Limited, Coleridge and Hood.

Adam L. Gowans End of prefatory note.

it is the miller's daughter and she is grown so dear so dear that i would be the jewel that trembles in her ear for hid in ringlets day and night i'd touch her neck so warm and white and i would be the girdle about her dainty dainty waist and her heart would beat against me in sorrow and in rest and i should know if it beat right i'd clasp it round so close and tight and i would be the necklace and all day long to fall and rise upon her balmy bosom with her laughter or her sighs and i would lie so light so light i scarce should be unplasped at night saint agnes eve deep on the convent roof the snows are sparkling to the moon my breath to heaven like vapor goes may my soul follow soon the shadows of the convent towers slant down the snowy sward still creeping with the creeping hours that lead me to my lord make thou my spirit pure and clear as are the frosty skies or this first snowdrop of the year that in my bosom lies as these white robes are soiled and dark to yonder shining ground as this pale taper's earthly spark to yonder argent round so shows my soul before the lamb my spirit before thee so in mine earthly house i am to that i hope to be break up the heavens o lord and far through all yon starlight draw me thy bride a glittering star in raiment white and clean he lifts me to the golden doors the flashes come and go all heaven bursts her starry floors and strows her lights below and deepens on and up the gates roll back and far within for me the heavenly bridegroom waits to make me pure of sin The Sabbaths of eternity, One Sabbath deep and wide, A light upon the shining sea, The bridegroom with his bride.

Break, break, break.

By Lord Tennyson.

This fundamental fact of nature Spencer did not perceive.

The struggle for existence within every species, the free fight for every morsel of food, Tennyson's nature read in tooth and claw with Ravin.

He accepted as a fact, requiring no proof, as an axiom.

Only in recent years did he begin in some degree to understand the meaning of mutual aid in the animal world, and to collect notes and make experiments in this direction.

It is the soul-elevating idea that no man can consider himself entitled to complain of fate while in his adversity he still retains the unwavering love of woman.

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.