Alfred Lord Tennyson - Tennyson: A Selected Edition

Tennyson aged about 31. By Samuel Laurence. (By kind permission of the National Portrait Gallery.) TENNYSON A Selected Edition Edited by CHRISTOPHER RICKS
Revised Edition First published 1969 by Pearson Education Limited
First paperback edition 1989
Revised edition published in Great Britain in 2007 Published 2014 by Routledge
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The Round Table:Longman Annotated English Poets was launched in 1965 with the publication of Kenneth Allotts edition of The Poems of Matthew Arnold. F.W. Bateson wrote that the new series is the first designed to provide university students and teachers, and the general reader with complete and fully annotated editions of the major English poets.

That remains the aim of the series, and Batesons original vision of its policy remains essentially the same. Its concern is primarily with the meaning of the extant texts in their various contexts. The two other main principles of the series were that the text should be modernized and the poems printed as far as possible in the order in which they were composed. These broad principles still govern the series. Its primary purpose is to provide an annotated text giving the reader any necessary contextual information. However, flexibility in the detailed application has proved necessary in the light of experience and the needs of a particular case (and each poet is by definition, a particular case).

First, proper glossing of a poets vocabulary has proved essential and not something which can be taken for granted. Second, modernization has presented difficulties, which have been resolved pragmatically, trying to reach a balance between sensitivity to the text in question and attention to the needs of a modern reader. Thus, to modernize Brownings text has a double redundancy: Victorian conventions are very close to modern conventions, and Browning had firm ideas on punctuation. Equally, to impose modern pointing on the ambiguities of Marvell would create a misleading clarity. Third, in the very early days of the series Bateson hoped that editors would be able in many cases to annotate a textus receptus. That has not always been possible, and where no accepted text exists or where the text is controversial, editors have been obliged to go back to the originals and create their own text. The series has taken, and will continue to take, the opportunity not only of providing thorough annotations not available elsewhere, but also of making important scholarly textual contributions where necessary.

A case in point is the edition of The Poems of Tennyson by Christopher Ricks, the Second Edition of which (1987) takes into account a full collation of the Trinity College Manuscripts, not previously available for an edition of this kind. Yet the series primary purpose remains annotation. The requirements of a particular author take precedence over principle. It would make little sense to print Herberts Temple in the order of composition even if it could be established. Where Ricks rightly decided that Tennysons reader needs to be given the circumstances of composition, the attitude to Tennyson and his circle, allusions, and important variants, a necessary consequence was the exclusion of twentieth-century critical responses. Milton, however, is a very different case.

John Carey and Alastair Fowler, looking to the needs of their readers, undertook synopses of the main lines of the critical debate over Miltons poetry. Finally, chronological ordering by date of composition will almost always have a greater or lesser degree of speculation or arbitrariness. The evidence is usually partial, and is confused further by the fact that poets do not always write one poem at a time and frequently revise at a later period than that of composition. John Barnard
Paul Hammond

This selected edition is excerpted from The Poems of Tennyson, second edition, three volumes (1987). Each poem here is reproduced in full, together with the entire annotation (headnotes, footnotes, and alternative drafts) of the complete edition. For every poem included, then, this edition is identical with that of 1987.

Likewise for the Preface, below, and for the Acknowledgments; the Chronological Table of Tennysons Life and Chief Publications; and the Abbreviations. Tennysons four long poems are here: The Princess, In Memoriam, Maud, and Idylls of the King. So are all the masterpieces: onwards from Mariana, The Lady of Shalott, St Simeon Stylites, Ulysses, Tithonus The necessity of reducing, by more than half, the two thousand pages of the complete edition entailed the enforcing of one principle: the inclusion of no poem which Tennyson himself had not included in his final edition, whether left unpublished or published by him and later rescinded. But this did not retrench quite enough. Judgement has been exercised to represent all of Tennysons genius, in his many kinds of poetry and throughout the phases of his publishing career of over sixty years. The numbering of the poems in the complete edition has been retained, partly to facilitate the use of the two editions in conjunction, and partly because the footnotes were keyed to their poems through numbers; to change numbers would have been costly and might have introduced error as well as making for confusion in there being two distinct numberings. II 321. II 321.