This gorgeous new collection gathers into one concise volume the finest work by Queen Victoria's favorite poet. Whether steeped in sensuous melancholy, as in "Maud," or chivalric, heroic, and allegorical, as in "Morte D'Arthur," Tennyson's poetry epitomizes the Victorian age for which he became a spokesperson when named Poet Laureate of England in 1850....

Tennyson was the chief poetic voice of his age, and he remains one of the most highly regarded masters of the music and mood of verse. This authoritative edition brings together a unique combination of Tennyson's poetry and prose, spanning his entire career, from his striking juvenilia, through his career as Poet Laureate, to the powerful poetry he wrote in his ninth decade. It contains such classics as "The Lady of Shalott," "Morte d'Arthur," Break, Break, Break," "Locksley Hall," "Ulysses," "The Charge of the Light Brigade," and "Tears, Idle Tears." It also includes in its entirety Tennyson's quasi-feminist epic The Princess, as well as the whole of In Memoriam, Maud, and Enoch Arden, and several sections of Idylls of the King. The poems are augmented with a broad selection from Tennyson's letters, as well as relevant passages from his son Hallam Tennyson's Memoir of his father, where Tennyson talks widely about his own poetry and the writing of others. Robert Adams provides an insightful introduction and valuable notes, and the edition includes an up-to-date bibliography....

The Norton Critical Edition of Tennyson's Poetry, 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 The poems are organized chronologically, from "Unpublished Early Poems" and "The Devil and the Lady" through "Poems" (1872-92).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" includes early assessments of Tennyson and his poetry by Arthur Henry Hallam, John Wilson, John Wilson Croker, John Stuart Mill, John Sterling, James Spedding, and James Knowles. "Criticism" collects seven seminal essays-six of them new to the Second Edition-on both Tennyson and the major poems. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, I 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....