As Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria's reign, Alfred Lord Tennyson's spellbinding poetry epitomized the Victorian age, andSelected Poemsis edited with an introduction and notes by Christopher Ricks.

'Into the jaw of Death
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred'

The works in this volume trace nearly sixty years in the literary career of one of the nineteenth century's greatest poets, and show the wide variety of poetic forms he mastered. This selection gives some of Tennyson's most famous works in full, includingMaud, depicting a tragic love affair, andIn Memoriam, a profound tribute to his dearest friend. Excerpts fromIdylls of the Kingshow a lifelong passion for Arthurian legend, also seen in the dream-likeThe Lady of Shalotand inMorte d'Arthur. Other works respond to contemporary events, such asOde on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, written in Tennyson's official role as Poet Laureate, or the patrioticCharge of the Light Brigade, whileLocksley Hallprovides a Utopian vision of the future, and the late poemCrossing the Baris a haunting meditation on his own mortality.

In his introduction, Christopher Ricks discusses aspects of Tennyson's life and works, his revisions of his poems, and his friendship with Arthur Hallam. This edition also includes a chronology, further reading and notes.

Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) was born at Somersby, Lincolnshire, the sixth of eleven children. His first important book,Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, was published in 1830, and was not a critical success, but his two volumes ofPoems, 1842, which contain some of his finest work, established him as the leading poet of his generation.

If you enjoyedSelected Poems, you might like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge'sLyrical Ballads, also available in Penguin Classics.

'He had the finest ear of any English poet since Milton'
T.S. Eliot