Volume 19, Number 7 · November 2, 1972
The Magician
By R.W. Flint
The Poems of Tennyson
edited by Christopher Ricks
Norton, 1,835 pp., $12.50
Tennyson
by Christopher Ricks
Macmillan and Collier Books, 349 pp., $3.95 (paper)
No one should be surprised that a true estimate of England's great poet of Evolution—the nineteenth-century master in English of the pathos of time and distance—should have been so long evolving. Compared with the work of his friend Edward FitzGerald, a tidy, lifelong devotion to a single poem, Tennyson's was continental, each mental landscape so distinct and finished that his earliest critics, in several respects more acute than his later, were often the proverbial blind men describing an elephant. Christopher Ricks is a first-rate critic of Tennyson. After editing a nicely produced, 1,835-page variorum edition of all the poetry except the plays, he must have begun his critical book the least inclined of Tennyson's modern critics to attribute the poet's successes to chance or mere Ossianic inspiration. For sheer energy and persistence, tempered by a good-natured confidence in the grounds of his advocacy, by a readiness to open the courtroom to a babble of sharply contending opinions, the book is a landmark of post-Leavisite criticism.
Review, 3890 words
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