Collected Poems (Tennyson)

Although Tennyson (1809-1892) has often seemed to personify the Victorian Age, he was a poet before it began and his poems endure to speak clearly to this modern one. His mastery of a great variety of poetic forms and moods enables him to communicate such extremes of feeling as ‘calm despair and wild unrest’; rapturous love: ‘the soul of the rose went into my blood’; and noble resolve:…One equal temper of heroic heartsMade weak by time andjate, but strong in willTo strive, to seek to find, and not to yield.