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 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.”

one of my favorite poets. the lady of shallot is a must read for feminists. ( )