ABSTRACT
Versatility and growth in power were the signal features of Alfred Tennyson’s art and artistic life. There can be no more striking passage in the history of poetry than that which puts on record the fruitage of Tennyson’s genius in old age. Few even among thoughtful critics conceived of his dramatic period as other than a day of decline, filled with experiments in an uncongenial form by one who had already exhausted his best powers in the work that lay behind him. In Becket, as in Queen Mary, Tennyson, though he attains no dramatic success, creates striking characters in the persons of the stern Ecclesiastic and the unhappy Rosamond. The results of Tennyson’s studies in the drama may be seen in his heightened power in dealing with such situations as those of The Wreck, The Flight, and that most tragic of any in Tennyson’s poetry, or, indeed, possible, in Despair.
