Laureate's Return

A SELECTION FROM THE POEMS OF ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON--W. H. Auden --Doubleday, Doran ($3).

Soon after Victorian England's great Poet Laureate died in 1892, the younger generation began discrediting his work. 'I felt a wave of shame," admitted Critic Harold Nicolson, "at having ever admired anything so smug and insincere. . . ." In the giddy 1920s scarcely any of the brilliant young critics or poets doubted that Alfred, Lord Tennyson was The Forgotten Poet, and deservedly so.

Then the wheel spun round again, and the darling of the Victorians began coming back into favor. "We may not admire his aims," admitted Poet T. S. Eliot in 1930, "but In Memoriam is great poetry." Now W. H. Auden (The Orators, For the Time Being), most influential of the younger poets, has made a selection of 60 poems from the mass of Tennyson's works, reintroduced them with a sharply critical but respectful preface. Tennyson, says Auden, was really rather stupid, but he had "the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet." In addition, unlike many of his successors, he refused to fall into "the error of making a religion of the esthetic." Tennyson's message, concludes Poet Auden, in words that would make Victorian moralists nod approvingly, is not art for art's sake but recognition of the fact that "an art which is beyond good and evil is a game of secondary importance."

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