I’ll begin not as usual with Bloom, but his nemesis, T. S. Eliot: ‘Tennyson […] has three qualities […] seldom found together except in the greatest poets: abundance, variety, and complete competence.’
In 1883 Tennyson was the first poet given a barony, raising him to Byron’s rank, whose death he remembered: ‘I was fourteen […] I rushed out of doors, sat down by myself, shouted aloud, and wrote on the sandstone: “Byron is dead!”’
Tennyson had been made Poet Laureate in 1850 – ‘the most felicitous of the poets laureate’ (DNB) – around the time he frequented the Star and Garter and lived in Twickenham. ‘Such was the sense of national loss’, the DNB goes on, ‘the abolition of the office of poet laureate was solemnly mooted when Tennyson died.’
Like Tennyson Court – the last to be built – Tennyson is a later addition to the canon. None of the Parkleys Poets match the architecture in being modernist, but, Brooke aside, Tennyson is the modernest, and the only one whose voice is preserved, thanks to the recording of him reading ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’. But rather than those uninteresting dactylics, I’ll close with ‘Crossing the Bar’, which Tennyson said should be ‘put […] at the end of all editions of my poems’:
Twilight and evening bell, And after that the dark! And may there be no sadness of farewell, When I embark; For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place The flood may bear me far, I hope to see my Pilot face to face When I have crost the bar. (9–16)
Tennyson – ‘a creature of some primordial English stock’1 – crossed the bar in 1892 and was interred, with Spenser and fellow Laureate Dryden, in Poets’ Corner. ‘I have no life to give’, he once said, ‘for mine has been one of feelings not of actions’. A vindication of the manliness of feelings.
Henry James.