The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson
Tennyson's early poems are musical, melancholy and often concerned with loss: a friend's death, a landscape that outlasts the people in it. This collection includes The Lady of Shalott, The Lotus-Eaters and Morte d'Arthur, the poems that made him the most popular poet of the Victorian age.
He was a craftsman above all, and the sound of the lines is often more important than the argument. Some of the medievalism can feel like escape, and Tennyson knew it. Read the shorter poems first; the long ones repay a second visit.
Public-domain status
First published in 1842. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Alfred Lord Tennyson died in 1892, so this work has been free to republish there since 1963.
Read the text free
- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 8601 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
- Internet Archive — scanned editions and free audiobooks
- Open Library — edition history and borrowable copies
Keep reading
- Leaves of Grass — Walt Whitman, 1855
- The Canterbury Tales — Geoffrey Chaucer, 1400
- Troilus and Criseyde — Geoffrey Chaucer, 1385
- Childe Harold's Pilgrimage — Lord Byron, 1812
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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