Alfred Tennyson Books

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.

Back in May of 1981 I read Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart, by Robert Bernard Martin, and I thought that was the perfect biography. Because I had such good memories of that great book, I decided to read this bio by Peter Levi. It does a good job, but whether I am not as interested in Tennyson as I was in 1981 or what, I did not enjoy the book as much. In my youth I committed to memory a few of Tennyson's poems (including Locksley Hall) and that memorization has been a source of enjoymnet to me for many years.

Before I read Enoch Arden, I imagined Tennyson's beliefs to be fairly conventional for his time. He was, after all, Queen Victoria's Poet Laureate.

And yet, reading this long narrative poem from today's perspective, it's hard to imagine that its author was trying to portray Providence as a benevolant force. At best, it might be taken to deny that there is any divine force shaping our lives (which would be my belief); at worst, it might speak of a malicious Deity who delights in tormenting good people with cruel ironies.

The story concerns a woman and two men who were intimate friends as children. When they grow up, the woman marries the rougher of them, Enoch Arden. Perhaps she feels he needs her more than the other, more respectable fellow who also wishes to marry her.

At first Enoch prospers and builds a good life for his wife and family, but then he loses everything, through no fault of his own. He goes to sea as a common sailor, determined to rebuild his family's fortune, but is shipwrecked. He finds himself alone on a desert island where he survives for many years.

What follows has been imitated so many times that it is fairly predictable, though Tennyson's rigorous Victorian verses lend it tragic eloquence. After many years of waiting, certain that Enoch has died, his wife finally agrees to marry the other man, thanks in part to what she takes as a message from God. She and her husband are happy and prosper.

Of course, Enoch is found and returns to his village. No one recongnizes him and, enquiring anonymously after his wife, he learns that she has married his best friend and that the children of both men are living happily in the new family.

Now Enoch, like the other two main characters, is as nearly perfect as anyone can be. This good man determines never to reveal himself and ruin the lives of the others. He lives the rest of his years, mercifully not too many, in a rented room, with no contact at all with those he loves. Eventually his landlady figures out who he is, but keeps his secret until after he dies.

In one of the most wrenching scenes in the poem, Enoch allows himself one surreptitious look through the window of the happy family. A superficial reading of this scene, or the one in which he dies, or any number of others, would give the impression of ripe melodrama. Many readers have objected to the very last line in which we are told that seldom had the village seen as rich a funeral as Enoch's. This is often interpreted as a gesture of consolation, but I contend that it is the opposite. It is the most bitter of ironies.

The readers for this recording performed satisfactorily. Derek Jacobi was particularly fine. However, there was too much narration between the poems. The commentator should have commenced-and ended-before the poems started. We paid to hear Lord Tennyson, not old controversy about him.

While not an avid reader of Tennyson myself, I bought this book for my brother's birthday. I was very impressed. The selection of peices was large and the book printed on high quality paper, with no cramped spaces. The work was presented in a setting very attractive to a poetry reader and was small enough to slip in anywhere. If you want to know about the poetry you will have to read it for yourself, but it was wonderfully presented in this volume.

I ordered this not knowing what to expect, and was delighted. The stories are mildly weird, well-written and certainly intriguing.

Lynne Truss is a very intelligent, hysterically funny writer. Expect loads of amusing sarcasm and many many laughs reading the columns and short novels in this book.

After reading EATS SHOOTS and LEAVES, I was anxious to read these three comic novels by Lynn Truss. She goes from being hilariously funny to going on and on like someone detached from reality. With only the first of these "comic novels" to pass judgment upon, I would be sure that this author is schizophrenic; or, at least schizoid. I'm disappointed in Ms. Truss and would not recommend this "Treasury" to anyone. Eats Shoots and Leaves is a classic which any and all "wordsmiths" appreciate.

Lynne Truss made her name in the United States with the grammar bestseller "Eats, Shoots and Leaves", a laugh-out-loud romp through the grammar mistakes that plague the English language. Yet she was well-known in her native England before that for her domestic columns about single life (and cats. Her columns and three short comic novels are collected together in "The Lynne Truss Treasury", which when all is said and done, is a mixed bag of humor, incredulity, and possibly discomfort.

The collection begins with 'With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed', the story of a gardening magazine that is about to meet its maker and its staff who doesn't know that the end is coming. When the wide cast of zany characters slowly learn that the magazine is in jeopardy, they do everything they can to stop the buyer from destroying their livelihood, with increasingly bizarre coincidences and events. The novel begins alright and is often times exceedingly funny, but as it progresses and everyone seems to become more deluded by the minute, the ending arrives too quickly and is too much of a summary for all the buildup Truss had mounted.

The second novel, 'Tennyson's Gift', involves a wide array of characters both fictional and actual. Truss centers her story around the eccentric poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and his time lived in relative obscurity on the Isle of Wight. Tennyson is fearful that his wife and sons will become mad and is forever oblivious to the attempts of those nearest to him to protect him from disruptions. Throw into the mix the author who would become Lewis Carrol, an American phrenologist and his young daughter, and a poor painter forever looking for a sponsor while ignoring his young virginal stage actress wife, and the plot has several storylines to follow. Yet Truss manages to wrap them all up in clever and humorous ways, making 'Tennyson's Gift' the highlight of the collection.

The last novel in the collection is 'Going Loco', an appropriately named book for a story that seems to be going nowhere and everywhere at once. Belinda Johansson is a writer of young adult "horsey" books who longs for a life of academic quiet so that she can pursue and write her master work on literary doubles a la "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde". When she acquires Linda, a new cleaning lady from a close friend, she seems heaven sent, quickly managing the parts of Belinda's life that Belinda has no time or temperment for, leaving Belinda to research and write to her heart's content. But Belinda is oblivious to the fact that her husband is living a lie, and can't see the similarities between her research and the life she has all but stopped living. 'Going Loco' is an almost ludicrous concoction of fluff disguised as a comic novel. While it does have its moments, overall it is bizarre and even a little disturbing.

The collection is finished out by a variety of columns on different topics, ranging from Christmas, to cats, to movies, to single life, a little bit of everything that Truss can wrap her thoughts around. For fans of Lynne Truss and that strange, idiosyncratic British humor, this collection will be enjoyable, if at times baffling and weird. Lynne Truss is a talented writer and shows promise as a comic writer, but needs to work on sustaining that promise throughout entire works longer than newspaper columns.

As a word nerd, I bought Ms. Truss's book Eats Shoots & Leaves, her satirical take on punctuation, but admit I have not read it yet. I saw her Treasury on the display shelf of the library and checked it out, expecting some very clever writing.

Maybe it's just that I'm not British, but I didn't find her fiction all that funny or even well-written. In the first story, she seems to try too hard. In all of the fiction, she seems almost self-conscious of the literary devices she's using. Her writing seems to scream, "Look at me -- I'm a writer writing about writers who write! And look at all the clever devices I use!"

The columns were a little less over-the-top, but by then I had wearied of her and just wanted to get through the (very hefty) book.

Oh, and finally, I don't think the differences between British and American punctuation are so great that comma splices and such are acceptable in Britain. The book wasn't even that well punctuated!

Maybe I should have given her only two stars, but the poor dear seemed to be trying so hard I didn't have the heart. If you still think you'd like to read this book, check it out of the library.

Tennyson was a poet of the Victorian age who wrote very sensitively and beautifully about the pains and shortness of life, the growing problems of belief in conventional religion, and about personal grief and loss. His most important poem, In Memorium, focuses centrally on these themes, and is included in this edition with good explanatory notes.

As with any selection this doesn't include all of Tennyson's works (which fill a number of volumes) but is fairly representative and also contains good critical essays from Tennyson scholars at the back. And it is readily affordable in price, making it easily available to the lover of poetry and the student or scholar alike.

As editor of this collection, Robert W. Hill has, I feel, made some rather poor choices. For instance, in the Preface he audaciously writes that he removed "indisputably 'bad'" poems. In this capacity, he omitted "Godiva" -- a great loss -- as well as many charming short verses, well represented in other collections.

Additionally, although he claims deliberately not to have modernized Tennyson's spelling, he nevertheless Americanizes both spelling and punctuation (e.g. "honor" instead of "honour"; consistent placement of the full stop within quotation marks; and so on). This badly affects the very Englishness of Tennyson's voice, I should think.

I would recommend the edition for its highly informed annotations, but not as a source for the poems themselves.

Do not buy this book. I adopted it as a text book for a course I am teaching but have found typos in just about every poem I have read in it. Some you can figure out:

"How sweet--while warn airs lull us, blowling lowly"

"Warn" is supposed to be "warm." But others are really confusing:

"Thro' many a women acanthus-wreath divine!"

"Women" is supposed to be "woven." I checked these in the first edition of the Norton Critical--the first edition has the correct lines. I guess Norton just scanned the first edition and put it on the shelves as a second "edition" without even editing it.

Very sloppy work--please don't buy the book. The texts are well selected--it is nice to have The Princess available. And the critical readings are also well chosen. But the texts are hardly readible.

"Alfred Lord Tennyson" is a compilation by Marion Shaw of the feminist views within the poet's works. Marion Shaw deeply investigated the works of Alfred Lord Tennyson to discover the numerous feminist references the great poet used in his works to express his thoughts on gender equality. The book itself consists of 174 pages, including a chronological table of Tennyson, an alphabetical list of references, and an index. Shaw identifies such feminist views as marriage, romantic love, mothers, desire, and even death. She pinpoints each of these topics in Tennyson's writings and beautifully praises him.

The Lady of Shalott, to me, is a poem of interest because of the Arthurian theme.

Another example of the tragic figures surrounding these legends, and how obviously hot that Lancelot bloke was, given how all the girls seemed to desperately want him.

When the breaks the magical taboo of actually looking at him, rather than via a mirror, her doom falls, and she sails, in death, down a river.

Oh that I had read the comments from others before I made this purchase. This book is a horrendous photocopy of an illegible 19th century copy of Tennyson's Works. Less than half of the volume's pages can be read. It is completely worthless and should not be foisted upon the consuming public.
AMAZON ! ! ! Remove this book from your lists!!!

This particular book was a very poor facsimile of the actual Complete Works of Alfred Tennyson. The quality was so poor, in fact, that the words were completely illegible on most pages. This book was a waste of paper and ink.

I agree with the other reviewer, and wish I had read that before purchasing this poor excuse for a book! I'd give it zero stars if there was an option. Every second page is, as mentioned, utterly illegible. The disclaimer in the book is laughable in light of the actual state of the facsimile. This book should be titled "Roughly Half of the Complete Works of Alfred Tennyson" and Amazon should be ashamed to sell it!

This book is *not* the complete works of Alfred Tennyson! It is a very poor reproduction of an old book, page for page, except that half of the pages are too dark to be even remotely legible. It is literally a page-by-page scan of an old document. The publisher says on the inside of the book: "This important reprint was made from an old and scarce book. Therefore, it may have deefects such as missing pages, erroneous pagination, blurred pages, missing text, poor pictures, markings, marginalia and other issues beyond our control..." this is putting it mildly. The scans are quite literally unreadable. I find that there is no reason whatsoever to purchase this book and am very disappointed that Amazon posted no description so I was unaware of what I was actually buying.