Tennyson and “The Lover's Tale”

Abstract

Tennyson's “hundreds and hundreds of lines in the regular Popeian metre,” written when he was ten or eleven, and “the six thousand lines à la Walter Scott,” written “at about twelve,” have passed into oblivion. “The Devil and the Lady,” an unfinished blank verse drama written when Tennyson was fourteen, was not published until 1931. “The Lover's Tale” is the first of his early long poems to be published in his lifetime. That this product of Tennyson's youth was so long cherished in obscurity and ultimately published with affectionate apology affords grounds for speculation regarding the relationship of the writer and the written.