SOURCE: Rossetti, William Michael. Review of Poems: 1851. In George Meredith: Some Early Appreciations, edited by Maurice Buxton Forman, pp. 3-13. London: Champman & Hall, Ltd., 1909.

In the following review, originally published in The Critic on November 15, 1851, Rossetti compares Meredith's poems to those of earlier poets, including Alfred, Lord Tennyson and, especially, John Keats. Rossetti finds the works of Poems: 1851 to be uneven, but concludes that the best of Meredith's writings show him to be a perceptive, accomplished poet, while not quite worthy to be classed among the very best.

The full poet is a thoroughly balanced compound of perception and intellect. By the first faculty he sees vividly, and feels to the inmost; by the second, he understands deeply and largely, and applies with a subtle searching breadth. The power of expression is a correlative of both; but it belongs more immediately to the first. Though Tennyson had not...