Alfred Tennyson Books

This book just recently showed up at my house from a second-hand dealer, and I am already in love with it. It was published by the Folio Society in 1975 -- 32 years ago -- yet my copy seems almost new. The binding, typesetting, and editing are all first-rate.

They say that Queen Victoria kept two books for bedtime reading -- the Bible and "In Memoriam." I think she would have been delighted to have this edition.

So much for the physical presentation. The poem itself is a masterpiece, composed on and off over 18 years, as Tennyson tried to reconcile himself to the death of his best friend, Arthur Hallam, a brilliant man who had just become engaged to Tennyson's sister, when a sudden stroke put his light out forever at the age of 31 or 32. Literally full of life one minute, and a lifeless corpse the next.

This unspeakable tragedy caused great philosophical and religious problems for Tennyson, which are all set down here in immortal verse.

Highest possible recommendation!

When I first began to read this book, it was in my Senior English class. At first I thought it would be some dumb poem. But as we read I became so enthralled I couldn't put it down. Alfred Tennyson wrote with such good emotion and truth I felt I knew what he was feeling. He describes so many emotions that most of us feel, and he did it so well. This is a very wonderful book! And although I have only read it once, that is all it took for me to know that it has become one of my favorite.

This book takes on a seemingly hopless project: Rowlinson uses deconstructionist methods to show how Tennyson's poetry was influenced by psychoanalytic theory. The biggest problem with this work is that Tennyson predated Freud by 75 years or so, and Freud predated deconstructionism by 30 years or so, and deconstruction also predated Rowlinson himself by 25 years or so. Also, Tennyson is (on the surface at least) perhaps the least psychologically introspective poet since Homer. Rowlinson's work seems doomed from the start--- but it works, thanks to the author's fierce sense of humor and relentless intellect.

I have always received the best service when I have placed an order from you. Outstanding!!!!!

The greatness of Tennyson's epic poems lie in the careful mix of life and legend. We are drawn in by stories of great heroism and power, with clashing steel and gallant oaths. But we also are forced to explore and consider very normal things about life; being worn down by constant nagging, suspicious spouses, temper tantrums, and tired old men. As a result, the "epic" is also easy to relate to, without losing the grandeur of its time and deeds.

I cannot recommend this highly enough to people who want to know how chivalry may be recaptured in our world.

I purchased this book for my seventeen year-old daughter, an avid reader of this genre and classics in general. Her reaction was very positive and was delighted that it also contained other work by Tennyson.

The style of writting within this book differs greatly from what the casual reader is probably used to not only because of the poem format but the language as well. The Medieval style of speech is carried into this book and older words we dont hear any more are used as well. It takes a page or two to understand the flow. I did find this book interesting and very useful for my research into the Arthurian Legends but would not recommend it for casual reading.

This book is certainly a classic in all regards. I feel that every man alive in this day and age should read this to revive the idea of chilvary and bravery. Perhaps, it would alleviate some of the problems of our nation.

Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote:

"Forgive my grief for one removed,
Thy creature, whom I found so fair.
I trust he lives in thee, and there
I find him worthier to be loved.

Forgive these wild and wandering cries,
Confusions of a wasted youth;
Forgive them where they fail in truth,
And in thy wisdom make me wise."

Zachary writes, "Life without Tristan is like the dark side of the moon. It's been eighteen weeks since I've seen him -- can't think of the last time I hugged him or told him I loved him or was proud of him. All I know is that I failed him, or he'd still be alife if I'd protected him more. This is not a rational thing, I realize, but it's how I honestly feel. I'm editing some of Tristan's poetry. He was more creative and much smarter than me."

"The lesser griefs that may be said,
That breathe a thousand tender vows,
Are but as servants in a house
Where lies the master newly dead;
Who speak their feeling as it is,
And weep the fulness from the mind:
`It will be hard,' they say, `to find
Another service such as this.'

My lighter moods are like to these,
That out of words a comfort win;
But there are other griefs within,
And tears that at their fountain freeze;

For by the hearth the children sit
Cold in that atmosphere of Death,
And scarce endure to draw the breath,
Or like to noiseless phantoms flit:

But open converse is there none,
So much the vital spirits sink
To see the vacant chair, and think,
`How good! how kind! and he is gone.'

"I still suffer enormously -- it's actually worse now, because the shock and numbness are wearing off." This is a tribute using A. Lord Tennyson's poem in memory of a son by my son.

Yes, I mean it.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) was definately the greatest poet of the Victorian Age, and in my opinion the greatest English poet of the nineteenth century.

This wonderful Norton Critical Edition presents his masterpiece, the great poetical work which made him poet laureate when it was published in 1850.

In this great work, it is Tennyson analysing his grief over the sudden loss of his friend from Cambridge University, Arthur Hallam, who died of a stroke in 1833. Later that year, Tennyson began his greatest masterpiece.

Definately get this version, if you like it, check out Tennyson's other great masterpiece, The Idylls of the King (1859-1885).

This is a critical edition with a vengeance. By page-count, the 3000-line poem occupies about 100 pages while the critical essays at the back take up about 150, and there is a preface as well. Whether this preface is from the pen of the editor Erik Gray or is by the previous Norton editor Robert H Ross I'm not fully clear, but I don't suppose it matters. For present purposes I am considering this introduction together with the appended essays.

The great and good of lit crit are out in force here. There is Andrew Bradley, there is T S Eliot, there is Basil Willey and there is Christopher Ricks to mention only four of the twelve essayists excluding Hallam Lord Tennyson, son of the poet himself. I myself have a rather low tolerance of literary criticism, much of which candidly seems to me neither here nor there, indeed at times a bit of a self-perpetuating racket. What I look for in it is genuine illumination, and I flogged through the contributions here dutifully if listlessly in search of that. Failing illumination I will settle for good sense, and the main instances of that here are two remarks of the poet's own, to the effect that this is a poem not a treatise, poetry not philosophy or biography. Poetry, said Housman, is 'a tone of voice, a way of saying things'. Earnest analysis of the religious and agnostic elements in the poet's mind is not literary criticism at all, but biography. It is using the poem to illustrate the poet. When this is extended into the further question, as Eliot once allowed himself to extend it, of the relative merits of firm Christian faith vis-à-vis agnosticism, it is simply extraneous philosophy and nothing to do with Tennyson or with his poem at all.

Roughly speaking, the more recent critics keep this basic point in mind better than the earlier do, although often alluding to one another as they go along. The quality of the various contributions does not of course depend on the extent to which they are literary criticism in the proper sense. I genuinely do find illumination here and there along the way, mainly but not entirely in the pieces that seem most relevant to the poem. I found T S Eliot very helpful in his contribution on the dry and academic-seeming issue of the versification, because to me this is not dry but accounts for the extraordinary effectiveness of this great poem to a major extent. To be able to keep a poem of 3000 short tetrameter lines going in their monotonous rhyme-scheme without fatiguing the ear is a phenomenal achievement, and I'm not sure which other English poet could have matched it. Swinburne's anapaests usually have me exhausted after a page and a half, but I can read In Memoriam from end to end at one sitting and finish up not only fresh but elated at its sheer skill and adroitness. On the other hand, Bradley hacks away at the 'structure' of the poem with a determination that leaves me cold. To me, In Memoriam has shape but not structure, in the way a cloud-mass has that. The poet's musings drift through his successive moods as the random thoughts occur to him: Bradley's pedantry would be better suited to some manual.

Perhaps the best essay, at least in the sense of covering the most ground, is by Ricks. However one that is particularly interesting is by Jeff Nunokawa, exploring possible homoerotic elements in the expression. He is very nimble-footed in his approach, wisely not over-committing himself and of course understanding clearly that some of the more amorous-sounding expressions are largely literary convention with a pedigree going back millennia. Tennyson's poetry, to me, doesn't usually convey much erotic impression of any kind, and I sense something else entirely here. What I sense is mental and emotional liberation - after his ghastly upbringing I suspect that Tennyson found in Hallam a window into a better and more beautiful world, and that eroticism may have had very little to do with it. Another aspect that needs and receives consideration from the essayists is the epilogue to the poem, and here again I wonder whether something has been missed. This epilogue is completely at variance with the rest of the great poem in tone and sentiment, and attempts to link it with the frequent expressions of aspiration to a better world earlier in the work, while fair up to a point, seem to me to miss the main point. Go back to old Chaucer and the epilogue to his own great Troilus and Criseyde. There also the poet goes off at a tangent, and I think for the same reason. There is an abstract aspect to poetry just as there is to music, and the soul of literature itself finally trumps all the mundane considerations of beliefs, passions, theories and personal relationships.

I don't suppose I would dare award this production less than the highest rating, but I wouldn't be right to either. My own reservations are mainly subjective, and what does not convince me often has for others the aspect of great and prevalent truth. As a passionate lover of the great English language and its incomparable literature I shunned like the pestilence academic courses in `English'. That is precisely the market this edition is aimed at, it has everything and everyone it should have basically, and the 100 pages of the book that matter to me are beyond the reach of all of them.

Isaac Asimov called Stanley Weinbaum a nova who burst into the field of science fiction writing like an exploding star in 1934 with his debut short story "A Martian Odyssey". Perhaps super nova would have been a better euphemism because, like a supernova, Weinbaum not only exploded onto the scene but disappeared a scant 18 months after his first story was published, a victim of throat cancer.

"The Best of Stanley Weinbaum" is a collection of short stories that, unfortunately, probably represents half of this astonishing writer's entire output.

Perhaps the greatest and most enduring charm of Weinbaum's stories rests with his collection of unique extra-terrestrial life - sentient, intelligent life that clearly had alien psychologies and motivations beyond human understanding. The most innovative feature of Weinbaum's collection of creatures was that they were not simply monstrous foils used to showcase the heroism of the human protagonists. Nor were they shallow anthropomorphized critters that merely happened to have green skin and six arms and legs. Tweel, the comical ostrich-like creature from "The Martian Odyssey" was Weinbaum's phenomenal response to John W Campbell's dictum "write me a creature who thinks as well as a man, or better than a man, but not like a man". The outrageously bizarre intelligent plant "Oscar" from "The Lotus Eaters" challenged the thinking sci-fi reader in ways that had never been achieved up until that time. Indeed, a case may be made that no sci-fi writer has created this type of alien intelligence since.

Although current knowledge of our solar system has moved beyond what was available to Weinbaum in the thirties, his presentation of alien ecologies was fascinating, compelling and yet wholly believable in the context of the science of the day. His presentation of a hostile Venusian jungle in "The Parasite Planet" is positively chilling.

Beyond that, even within the limitations of the short story format, Weinbaum also demonstrates the ability to create complete characters whose achievements matter to the reader. They are fleshed out utterly human down-to-earth "folks" with foibles, failings, happiness and sadness to accompany the heroism and feats of derring-do that are only to be expected in stories like this.

If you've never sampled Stanley Weinbaum, then you are in for a truly delicious treat. Read slowly and savour it, because, sadly, there is far too little of his work available. Highly, highly recommended!

Paul Weiss

Weinbaum's writing is as fresh, entertaining, and though-provoking now as it was nearly 70 years ago (not that I was there, mind you :-) ). This book is a 'must have' for anyone who likes the field of science fiction, or enjoys a good yarn.

Stanley G. Weinbaum in his 1 1/2 years as a published author broke new ground in his stories involving real alien aliens. In one of the stories in "The Best of" collection he also predicts the atom bomb being used in the south Pacific. This was in 1934 or 1935. There are 12 of his 23 stories in this collection. If anyone knows of a more complete colection, please let me know

In this book we find a collection of verses from a longer poem of the same name first published in 1855.

Opening with "For men may come and men may go, But I go on forever.....," these lines are a well-loved ode to nature.

Now, Micucci contemporizes this work with illustrations of people and animals who live by the stream.

This book was published in 1959. It lacks much of what we would consider 'standard' for such a book of essays today. There is no chronology of Tennyson's life and work. There are no biographical sketches on the contributors.
Nonetheless it contains a number of essays which are insightful, two of which are by Marshall MacLuhan. The work also has a very detailed tracing of the reputation of Tennyson centered on its dramatic decline after his lifetime. There is too an essay by Elliot in which he talks about Tennyson's being the most competent and musical of poets, and of his having the best ear of any English poet since Milton.
Two essays are devoted to my favorite Tennyson poem 'Ulysses'. They relate to the idea of Tennyson's son Hallam that the poem is Tennyson's response to the death of his great friend Arthur Hallam for whom he wrote 'In Memoriam'. Tennyson's determination to go on, to struggle on when it seems all is lost with the loss of this great friend is discussed as one of the elements of the poem. However one of the essays reads 'Ulysses' as Tennyson's religious affirmation of the value of faith and love in life. And I must admit that my own simple reading of the poem has always taken hope for the great lines of strength and determination by which it concludes.

"Thou much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are-
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
made weak by time and fate but strong in will
To strive, to seek , to find,and not to yield. "

We read for many reasons and one of them is to enhance our hope in life.
The beauty and greatness of these lines of Tennyson does this for me, as it has done for and will do for many others.

This was a really good book and if you plan on using monologes for trying out for dramatic roles then i highly suggest this book.

This collection is an anthology of Tennyson's work for young readers
edited by George MacBeth.
It includes selections from 'Idylls of the King' and includes some of Tennyson's most well- known works, such as 'The Lady of Shalott' 'Mariana' 'The Charge of the Light Brigade'
But it does not include what to my feeling is Tennyson's greatest work, "Ulysses" and the work generally considered his most important "In Memoriam".
Tennyson is one of the great masters of music in English poetry. He loves the Medieval , the world of Nature, but also homely domestic life is subject of his poetry.
He is too one of the great phrasemakers of English poetry.
Still I have never found him to be among my favorites, except that is in a few anthology pieces i.e. Ulysses. The archaisms, the decorativeness, the long- windedness and a certain absense of the personal have always distanced him from a place as most beloved poet.