Alfred Lord Tennyson has the dubious honor of being one of the most critically disputed great poets in the English language. The very term "Tennysonian" has taken on, in many quarters, the negative complaint of sentimentality, conservatism, too-easy rhyme, and shallow thinking. Praised during his lifetime, honored as a poet laureate whose every word became instant news, whose every new poem was eagerly awaited by the British populace, Tennyson suffered from his success after death. Poet W. H. Auden called him "the great English poet of the Nursery," while Irish playwright, George Bernard Shaw quipped that he had the "brains of a third-rate policeman." Poet T. S. Eliot, commenting on Tennyson's role as the poet of death, called him the "saddest of all English poets." After Tennyson's own death, critics from Matthew Arnold to F. R. Leavis condemned the poet as a "second-rater," according to Brian Southam in...