ABSTRACT
By at least one measurement-that of publication history-Tennyson's "Claribel" was and has remained his first poem. Although in the later editions of his work its prominence would be eclipsed by the dedicatory "To the Queen" (his first publication as Poet Laureate), "Claribel" greeted readers as the initial piece in Tennyson's first solo publication, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830), maintained that position in the 1842 collection, Poems, In Two Volumes, when Tennyson reemerged into print after the ten-year silence, and remained prominently placed as the first poem in all subsequent editions of his collected works. Although in these later collected editions Tennyson circumscribed "Claribel" somewhat by placing it under the heading "Juvenilia"-just as he did a number of other poems now often anthologized and considered among his most powerful (the "Juvenilia" section includes "Mariana," "Supposed Confessions of a Second-Rate Sensitive Mind," "The Kraken," "The Poet," and "The Poet's Mind")-quite possibly it was, at least until Tennyson's poetry became mainly an object of classroom study, the most read of his works simply by virtue of being the first words onto which a reader's eyes fell when opening one of Tennyson's books.
