Formation of Tennyson's Style

Excerpt from The Formation of Tennyson's Style: A Study, Primarily, of the Versification of the Early Poems In connection with a few preliminary explanations and acknowledgments, it will not be impertinent, indeed it is almost obligatory, to mention the fact that this study has been in hand, at intervals, for a good many years. Collection of the data which furnished the basis of the study began at a time when I was less sensible than I now am, of the difficulties of the subject; at a time, too, when English metric was even less settled as to theory and nomenclature than at present, and when materials for a study of Tennyson's formative period were less accessible than they have since become. At a later time, these observations were re-tested and some of them, not so much for want of accuracy as of usefulness, were entirely discarded, while, in certain directions, they were very much amplified, and the whole was recast, approximately in the present form. Preparatory to publication, it has been revised and presumably deprived of obvious anachronisms. Although confident that this re-handling, at considerable intervals of time, has not been to the disadvantage of the work as a whole, I scarcely venture to hope I have removed every indication that it is not of a single mintage. The metrical analyses to which Shakspere and his contemporaries had been subjected, for the purpose of giving exactness to internal evidence on questions of authorship and chronology, first suggested a similar treatment of Tennyson's verse, only here with the different object of providing data for more precise discriminations as to a poetic manner. A start in this direction could be seen in certain chapters of Corson's Primer of English Verse and in Mayor's Chapters on English Metre, as well as in short passages of Schipper's Englische Metrik. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.