and the moral relations under which I have wished to exhibit its most ordinary appearances."[1]
His fame spread rapidly to America, where his poems were reprinted. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lowell, Margaret Fuller, and Edgar Poe added their tribute of admiration, "I am not sure," says the last-named, "that Tennyson is not the greatest of poets. The uncertainty attending the public conception of the term 'poet' alone prevents me from demonstrating that he is. Other bards produce effects which are, now and then, otherwise produced than by what we call poems, but Tennyson an effect which only a poem does. His alone are idiosyncratic poems. By the enjoyment or non-enjoyment of the 'Morte d'Arthur,' or of the 'Œnone,' I would test any one's ideal sense."
"There are passages in his works which rivet a conviction I had long entertained, that the indefinite is an element in the true ποιησις. Why do some persons fatigue themselves in endeavours to unravel such phantasy-pieces as the 'Lady of Shalott'? As well unweave the ventum textilem. If the author did not deliberately propose to himself a
- ↑ "Memoirs of William Wordsworth" (London, 1851), vol ii p. 416.
