THE FOLIO SOCIETY

Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack'd from side to side;
'The curse is come upon me,' cried
The Lady of Shalott

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92) embodied the Victorian age. Succeeding Wordsworth as Poet Laureate in 1850, he was genuinely admired by the Queen and revered for his imposing, if sometimes austere, company. The energy and daring of Tennyson's language, the profundity of his imagination, his ability to reach from the sober to the frivolous in a single couplet, make him one of the greatest of English poets.

This anthology includes his finest verse: In Memoriam, a series of elegies to his friend Arthur Hallam, with its immortal lines, ''Tis better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at all'; 'Locksley Hall', in which a jilted lover returns to the scene of his betrayal and rages against the modern world of steamship and railway ('Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change'); and The Idylls of the King, a narrative epic inspired by Arthurian legend. Atmosphere is everything in Tennyson's poems, from the gothic melancholy of Maud to the sylvan landscape of 'The Lady of Shalott', a haunting evocation, rendered in a hypnotic meter, of a tragic maiden's voyage to 'many tower'd Camelot'. And who can fail to be stirred by Tennyson's evocation of Cardigan's cavalry thundering toward their doom at Balaclava? ('Into the valley of Death/Rode the six hundred'). Published in December 1854, a mere six weeks after the events it describes, 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' turned one of the most foolhardy actions in British military history into a celebration of the pluck and heroism of the common soldiery - although the line 'some one had blundered' has echoed long and loud down the years. This superb edition provides a beautiful setting for some of the most popular poems in the English language.