All but by definition, all selections of a poet's works, sooner than later, became dated. Any edition containing criticism is palpably ephemeral. Perhaps only two popular exceptions exist in the English language: England's Helicon (1600) and Palgrave's Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics (1861). Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1855) has at last count gone through sixteen editions, new ones appearing as others drop into literary history's fathomless maw.

The Norton Critical Edition of Tennyson's Poetty, Second Edition, represents a significant revision of its predecessor and assimilates the Tennyson scholarship of the last twenty-five years.

The texts of the poems are based on the Eversley edition of Tennyson's Works (published in nine volumes, 1907 09).Under earlier interdiction, the significant Trinity College,Cambridge, manuscripts have been incorporated here. The poems are organized chronologically, from Unpublished Earl), Poems and The Devil and the Lady through Poems (1872-92). The Princess appears in its entirety. Each poem is accompanied by ample explanatory annotation.

"Contexts" collects seven seminal essays--six of them new to the Second Edition--on both Tennyson and the major poems. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, T. S. Eliot, Isobel Armstrong, Herbert F. Tucker, Christopher Ricks, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and Robert W. Hill, Jr., present their varied perspectives.

A Chronology, Selected Bibliography, and Index are also included.

Preface

The Texts of the Poems

 Earliest Poems (ca. 1823 ft. ): From Unpublished Early Poems ( 1931 )

 and The Devil and the Lady (1930)

 Translation from Claudian's "Proserpine"

 From The Devil and the Lady

 Armageddon

 From Poems by Two Brothers (1827)

 Memory

 Remorse

 "I Wander in Darkness and Sorrow"

 From Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830)

 Ode to Memory

 Song ("A spirit haunts the year's last hours")

 The Dying Swan

 The Sleeping Beauty

 A Character

 Supposed Confessions

 The Kraken

 Mariana

 Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere

 From Poems (1832, dated 1833)

 "My Life Is Full of Weary Days"

 The Lady of Shalott

 Mariana in the South

 (Enone

 To -- (With the Following Poem)

 The Palace of Art

 The Hesperides

 A Dream of Fair Women

 To -- ("As when with downcast eyes we muse")

 ToJ. S.

 The Lotos-Eaters

 The Eagle

 From Poems (1842), Including Several Other Pieces

 Written between 1833 and 1842

 Ulysses

 The Two Voices

 Saint Simeon Stylites

 Tithonus

 Tithon

 Tiresias

 Break, Break, Break

 The Epic

 "Move Eastward, Happy Earth"

 A Farewell

 Locksley Hall

 The Vision of Sin

 To -- (After Reading a Life and Letters)

The Princess (1847; 1849-51)

In MemoriamA. H. H. (1833-49; 1850)

Poems 1850-1872

 To the Queen

 To E. L., on His Travels in Greece

 Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington

 The Daisy

 De Profundis

 To the Rev. F. D. Maurice

 The Charge of the Light Brigade

 Maud; A Monodrama ( 1855)

 In the Valley of the Cauteretz

 Milton

 Enoch Arden

 Northern Farmer (Old Style)

 Northern Farmer (New Style)

 "Flower in the Crannied Wall"

 The Higher Pantheism

 In the Garden at Swainston

From Idylls of the King (1857-1874)

 Dedication

 The Coming of Arthur

 Merlin and Vivien

 Lancelot and Elaine

 The Holy Grail

 Pelleas and Ettarre

 The Last Tournament

 Guinevere

 The Passing of Arthur

 To the Queen

From Poems (1872-1892)

 The Revenge

 Battle of Bmnanburh

 Rizpah

 "Frater Ave Atque Vale"

 Despair

 To Virgil

 The Dead Prophet

 The Ancient Sage

 Vastness

 Locksley Hall Sixty Years After

 Demeter and Persephone

 To Ulysses

 To Mary Boyle

 Far--Far--Away

 By an Evolutionist

 Parnassus

 Merlin and the Gleam

 The Oak

 June Bracken and Heather

 The Dawn

 The Making of Man

 God and the Universe

 The Silent Voices

 Crossing the Bar

Contexts

 Arthur Henry Hallam · On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry, and on the Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson

 John Wilson ["Christopher North"1 · Tennyson's Poems

 John Wilson Croker · Poems by Alfred Tennyson

 John Stuart Mill · Tennyson's Poems

 John Sterling · Poems by Alfred Tennyson

 James Spedding · Tennyson's Poems

 James Knowles · A Personal Reminiscence

Criticism

 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick · Tennyson's Princess: One Bride for Seven Brothers

 T. S. Eliot · In Memoriam

 Isobel Armstrong · The Collapse of Object and Subject: In Memoriam

 Herbert F. Tucker · Maud and the Doom of Culture

 Christopher Ricks · Idylls of the King, 1859-1885

 Gertrude Himmelfarb · Household Gods and Goddesses

 R. W. Hill Jr. · A Familiar Lesson from the Victorians

Tennyson: A Chronology

Selected Bibliography

Index of Poems and First Lines