ABSTRACT
First published in The Tatler, II, 24 February 1831 pp. 593–4; see headnote above, pp. 117–20. It was reprinted in Hunt, Literary, pp. 344–52. The present review was occasioned by a package Arthur Henry Hallam (1811– 33; DNB) sent to Hunt in January 1831. The package contained two volumes of poetry: Poems, chiefly Lyrical by Alfred Tennyson, and Sonnets and Fugitive Pieces by his older brother Charles Tennyson (1808–79; DNB). Hallam also enclosed a letter in which he praised both volumes, but Alfred’s especially. ‘You will, if you pursue this book’, he told Hunt,
be surprised & delighted to find a new prophet of those true principles of Art, which, in this country, you were among the first to recommend both by precept & example. Since the death of John Keats, the last lineal descendant of Apollo, our English region of Parnassus has been domineered over by kings of shreds & patches. But, if I mistake not, the true heir is found. (The Letters of Arthur Henry Hallam, ed. Jack Kolb (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1981), p. 396)
Hunt was quick to agree with Hallam’s estimate of Alfred Tennyson, as the present review demonstrates: ‘If Mr Keats had seen…The Poet’s Mind’, he declares at one point, ‘he would have felt it as a magic circle, drawn round him to repulse the assaults of worldliness and folly’ (see below, p. 165). By 1832 Hunt was describing Tennyson as ‘a genuine young poet, who will by and by be an eminent one’ (Brewer, Letters, p. 195). Hunt and Tennyson met at a dinner party in April 1833, and ‘exchanged compliments at a great rate’. Later in the evening ‘Alfred repeated glorious fragments of “The Gardener’s Daughter,” which seemed to produce proper effect upon Leigh Hunt’ (The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson, eds Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon, Jr. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1981), vol. i, pp. 91–2). In 1837, Hunt pronounced Tennyson ‘our best living poet, next to Wordsworth’ (Gates, Letters, 298). The following year, on his recommendation, Tennyson appeared in The Book of Gems by S. C. Hall (1800–89; DNB), where he is described by Hunt as in ‘the school of Keats; that is to say, it is difficult not to see that Keats has been a great deal in his thoughts’ (Hunt, Literary, p. 667). In 1850, when Hunt’s friends were urging his candidacy for the vacant post of poet laureate, he declined, and argued that,if the office in future is really to be bestowed on the highest degree of poetical merit, and on that only…then Mr Alfred Tennyson is entitled to it 154above any other man in the kingdom; since of all living poets he is the most gifted with the sovereign poetical faculty, Imagination. (Gates, CD, p. 172).
As he had done with Keats and Shelley, Hunt was among the very first to recognize Tennyson’s abilities, and thereafter was one of his most discerning supporters.
Hunt published his review of the Tennyson brothers in four parts, two of which were devoted to Alfred’s volume, and two to Charles’s (see Hunt, Literary, pp. 358–71). He was initially unsure of which brother’s was ‘the superior’, but soon decided in favour of Alfred, whose volume contained poems ‘both longer and superior to any in Charles’s’ (see below, pp. 155– 6). Later he was even more emphatic: ‘the more closely we have become acquainted with Alfred Tennyson’s poems’, he stated,
the more the author has risen upon our admiration. Perhaps we feel ourselves the more inclined to prefer him to Charles, because he seems less disposed to tie himself down to conventional notions, – less willing to blink any great question or feeling, and to put up with a consciousness of doing so. (Hunt, Literary, p. 370)
Poems, chiefly Lyrical. By Alfred Tennyson. 12mo. pp. 154. Effingham Wilson.