Tennyson: Selected Poetry (Poetry Library, Penguin)

It was thanks to reading Harold Bloom's last book (Take Arms against a Sea of Troubles: The Power of the Reader's Mind over a Universe of Death, 2020) that I revisited Tennyson's poetry and discovered some of his importance as a poet. Altering readers to important poetry should be part of the job

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of a literary critic, and Bloom's book, written as he was dying in hospital in part, is thus a good example of this. Reading this tenor of Victorian poetry, its high-flown and lush character, is a strange but enjoyable experience for a twenty-first century person used to cynicism, irony and understatement.

To watch the crisping ripples on the beach,
And tender curving lines of creamy spray;
To lend our hearts and spirits wholly
To the influence of mild-minded melancholy;
To muse and brood and live again in memory,
With those old faces of our infancy
Heap'd over with a mound of grass,
Two handfuls of white dust, shut in an urn of brass!

As Bloom says in his aforementioned book:

“The great poems, plays, novels, stories teach us how to go on living. . . . Your own mistakes, accidents, failures at otherness beat you down. Rise up at dawn and read something that matters as soon as you can.”

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