Southam characterizes "Tennysonian" verse as "polished, melodious, and decorative; and in this artistry marooned, isolated from the central vitality of English poetry." In this light, the poetry of W. B. Yeats, Eliot, and Ezra Pound, at the beginning of the twentieth century, serves as an unromantic, unsentimental, subtle, and complex palliative to this Victorian master.
However, a plethora of other critics have also championed Tennyson for penning verse able to reach the man on the street with its direct messages and themes, its vibrant, rhythmic language, and its celebration of an earlier England, closer to nature. "Tennyson suffered particularly as the representative Victorian poet," Southam wrote. "His rejection was part of the historical process. . . . Although there is a good deal of Tennyson that is pompous, banal, grotesquely sentimental, and in many other ways laughably or unpleasantly Victorian, there is a sufficient body of his finest work to place him among the great poets of English literature."
Tennyson is perhaps best known for In Memoriam, a long poem in remembrance of a friend who died young. Most readers could also quote parts of his famous poem "Crossing the Bar." These two pieces, as well as other elegiac verses, however, managed to stereotype the poet as the voice of eulogy and death.
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