Seamus Perry

W.H. Auden said of Tennyson that 'he had the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet'. Many readers have relished his opulent word-music, but less simply admiring critics have sometimes regarded that marvellous verbal gift with something like suspicion - as though it were merely a matter of beautifully empty words, or worse, a distracting screen used to pass off disreputable Victorian values. In this study, Seamus Perry returns to the extraordinary language of Tennyson's verse, and finds in the intricacies of his greatest poetry, not an evasion of responsibilities, but rather the memorably intricate expression of hesitancies and honest doubts - including doubts, not least, about the charms and obligations of his own art. Covering the great range of the poet's long career, Perry describes the rich life of Tennyson's lyrical imagination, exploring in turn its complex and paradoxical fascinations with recurrence, progress, narrative, and loss.

Alfred Tennyson

N. Trott

Meeting Coleridge was one of the Romantic age's most memorable experiences, and many of his contemporaries left vivid records - Wordsworth, Lamb, Hazlitt, Keats, Emerson and many others, often now forgotten. This book is a comprehensive, fully annotated collection of such reminiscences. Drawing on an eclectic range of materials (including private journals, letters, poems, and comic portraits), and printing many texts otherwise difficult to access, it will prove an invaluable resource for students of romanticism, as well as a treasure-trove for Coleridge's many admirers.

Interviews and Recollections

S.T. Coleridge

This title is a study of Tennyson's lyrical imagination, describing its complex fascinations with recurrence, progress, narrative, and loss, and its doubts about its own artfulness.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

This volume brings together leading international scholars in a unique celebration and reassessment of Tennyson: his influences, the impact on his contemporaries, and his legacy. All of the essays were commissioned for this collection, and feature original insights into the relationships between the leading poet of the Victorian age and the many other poets, from Virgil to Betjeman, who helped to shape his writing or have reshaped it in turn. Together these essaysprovide the widest and richest set of critical perspectives on Tennyson published for many years.

Bicentenary Essays

Tennyson Among the Poets

Published to mark the bicentenary of Alfred Tennyson's birth, these essays offer an important revaluation of his achievement and its lasting importance. After several years in which the temper of criticism has been largely political (and often hostile towards Tennyson in particular) a number of influential recent accounts of Victorian poetry have rediscovered the virtues of a closer style of reading and the benefits and pleasures of an approach that, without at all ignoring social and cultural contexts, approaches them through a primary alertness to textual detail and literary history. This volume, including entirely commissioned work by a wide range of critics and scholars from across the profession in both Britain and North America, seeks to bring such forms of attention to bear on the immense variety of Tennyson's career by exploring the complex and multiple connections between Tennyson and other writers - his predecessors, his contemporaries, and his successors. Collectively, the essays describe an intricate network of affiliation and indebtedness, resistance and reconciliation. They provide a unique assessment of Tennyson's origins, work, and imaginative legacy as he enters upon his third century.

The Waste Land, first published in 1922, is not far from a century old, and it has still not been surpassed as the most famous of all modern poems. In many ways, it continues to define what we mean by modern whenever we begin to speak about modern verse. At the same time, as Ted Hughes once observed, it is also genuinely popular, and not just among the cogniscenti or the degree-bearing. “I remember when I taught fourteen-year-old boys in a secondary modern school,” Hughes once said, “of all the poetry I introduced them to, their favourite was The Waste Land.” Not for nothing was it included, in its entirety, in The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (1973), edited by Philip Larkin, a poet not known otherwise for his hospitality to modernism. The poem’s appeal is intellectual, certainly, but also visceral. It fulfils in miniature the demands that Eliot made of the great poet at large: “abundance, variety, and complete competence” – the first of those criteria of greatness all the more surprising, and moving, to find accomplished in a poem that has its starting place in so barren a human territory. The poetry is modern in a wholly self-conscious way, but the modernity of Eliot’s poem stems in large part from a strikingly powerful awareness of what’s past. In this book, the Oxford scholar Seamus Perry points out some of the fruits of that acute historical awareness – and shares his own admiration of, and pleasure in, the extraordinary voicings and counter-voicings of this perpetually great work.

T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland

Seamus (Lecturer in English Literature Perry, Lecturer in English Literature University of Glasgow)

Fellow and Tutor Balliol College Lecturer English Faculty Seamus Perry

Throughout, close attention is paid to Coleridge the writer, the metaphor-maker and stylist, exhibited across the wide range of his oeuvre, in public and private works, prose and poetry. A coda offers a reading of 'The Ancient Mariner', tracing back the central threads of the study to Coleridge's early and surprising masterpiece."--BOOK JACKET.

Seamus Perry

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