“... approaches with verve and point. It was, in nothing but the good sense of the word, a modest book. Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism is not short, neither is it modest. It is the Big Book which American academics must ‘produce’. The brilliant close readings which distinguished the earlier book can still be found, but their context has altered: they ...”

“... useful and stimulating readings of particular poems and images. One of the best chapters is on Tennyson. She suggests compellingly that his early interest in Sappho was connected to his relationship with Arthur Hallam, and that he discovered his own identity as a poet partly through his rewritings of Sappho. The chapter ...”

“... Tennyson was not a poet for whom T.S. Eliot professed much love, though he was judicious as well as cool in his appraisals: ‘He has three qualities which are seldom found together except in the greatest poets: abundance, variety and complete competence.’ (He means ‘they must be like Dante.’) And ‘he had the finest ear of any English poet since Milton’ – an opinion that loses warmth when one recalls what Eliot said elsewhere about Milton ...”

“... or confusion. ‘Perhaps you like me too much.’ Liking too much is dangerous to the state, as Tennyson may have felt with Hallam and Housman with Moses Jackson. Because I liked you better Than suits a man to say ... Girls with girls were ever more forthcoming, their advances a compliment rather than an ...”

“... so. And though he wrote many literary-critical articles, including a rather celebrated piece on Tennyson and Hallam, none of his full-length books was, like the Nashe, a literary study. ‘I feel I must first make my mark as a “scholar” in Eng Lit,’ he explained, ‘before seriously embarking on any other ...”

“... persons; there was endless leisure for the ‘gossip and badinage’ which, according to Charles Tennyson, formed the staple of talk among his intimates; admitted among these was always at least a select number of undergraduates whose friendship, more often than not, he retained throughout life. In later years the scene darkened. There was an intellectual ...”