‘A Poet in the Truest and Highest Sense’: The Early Poems and their Reception

Abstract

Alfred Tennyson became a published poet at the age of seventeen, when Poems by Two Brothers was issued by the booksellers J. and J. Jackson, of Louth in Lincolnshire, in April 1827. From his first published volume Tennyson was reviewed in the periodical press and by January 1833 he was ‘admitted on all hands to be a true poet’.1 Tennyson’s early poetry — Poems by Two Brothers (1827), Timbuctoo (1829), Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832) — appeared in turbulent times. Revolutions were taking place in many Continental countries and states; in England, transformed by industry, there were ‘Swing’ uprisings and agitation for electoral reform, concerns for the royal succession and for the future of poetry. In Chapters 1 and 2 I examine how critics of the early poems attempted to define and shape Tennyson as an English poet in the context of contemporary concerns, and consider the ways in which poems selected or rejected by reviewers reflect changing notions of nineteenth-century Englishness. Twentieth-century critics argue that Poems, Chiefly Lyrical ‘immediately raised nearly all the problems which were to preoccupy critics during the next four decades’.2 However, contemporary critics’ concerns are foreshadowed in the earlier reviews of Poems by Two Brothers and Timbuctoo, which are also considered in this chapter.