ABSTRACT
Tennyson, winner of the Chancellor’s Gold Medal with the prize poem, ‘Timbuctoo’, at Cambridge in 1829, was already the contributor to a volume of poems before he arrived there, Poems by Two Brothers (1827)–actually written by three brothers, for Frederick Tennyson contributed to the volume as well as Charles and Alfred-and the writer of some precocious juvenilia. It is Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830), however, which startles with its experiments, coming out of an intellectual environment arresting for the boldness and intensity of its enquiries and insouciant originality.
