Tuesday, November 13, 2012

News at Eleven: Late in life, [Alfred Lord] Tennyson thought

back on [Arthur] Hallam and said that he could have been anything, except a great poet. That role was Tennyson's and he guarded it furiously. (There is an exceptionally funny account of Tennyson reading his own poems, and interspersing it with "that's good"). His very mellifluence sometimes tells against him: one rarely has the sense of him battling to incarnate his ideas in language, the way one has with Browning or Gerald Manley Hopkins.

from Scotsman: Tennyson by John Batchelor

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