To JOHN FORSTER, [7 AUGUST 1842]

⁶ See To Tennyson, 9 Mar 43, fn. Poems, in two vols (the first chiefly poems published 1830 and 1833, though often revised), had been published by Moxon on 14 May 42; by August widely and favourably reviewed, in contrast to earlier vols (E. F. Shannon, Tennyson and the Reviewers, Cambridge, Mass., 1952, pp. 60–81); Tennyson was now regarded as a poet of the first rank. On 8 Sep 42 he wrote to Edmund Lushington: "500 of my books are sold: according to Moxon's brother I have made a sensation!" (the 1833 volume had taken two years to sell 300). Forster's enthusiastic review (four columns) in the Examiner of 28 May was perhaps the earliest; he was also very probably the fervent reviewer of Poems, 1833, in the True Sun, 19 Jan 33 (E. F. Shannon, op. cit., p. 18). The volumes were much talked of: Elizabeth Barrett on 21 May said they had "rapt [her] in Elysium" (Elizabeth Barrett to Miss Mitford, ed. Betty Miller, 1954, p. 117); Carlyle wrote to Tennyson, 7 Dec, that it was long since he had felt in an English book "the pulse of a real man's heart … strong as a lion's, yet gentle, loving and full of music … a genuine singer's heart ! there are tones as of the nightingale" (Alfred Lord Tennyson, a Memoir, by his Son, 1897, i, 213), and he used his authority to spread his view abroad: see for instance his letter to Jane Wilson, 9 Dec 42 (Nineteenth Century, lxxxix [1921], 811).

¹ Poems, 1842, included "The Merman" and "The Mermaid" (first published 1830).

² Cf., in "The Mermaid", the great snake who would "look in at the gate | With his large calm eyes"; and, in "The Merman", "the pale-green sea-groves straight and high".

³ Stanza ix of "A Dream of Fair Women" (first published 1832).