"
The young poet from boyhood was original in his manner.
Byron made him blase at fourteen. Then Byron died, and Tennyson
scratched on a rock "Byron is dead," on "a day when the whole world
seemed darkened for me." Later he considered Byron's poetry "too
much akin to rhetoric." "Byron is not an artist or a thinker, or a
creator in the higher sense, but a strong personality; he is
endlessly clever, and is now unduly depreciated." He "did give the
world another heart and new pulses, and so we are kept going." But
"he was dominated by Byron till he was seventeen, when he put him
away altogether."
In his boyhood, despite the sufferings which he endured for a while
at school at Louth; despite bullying from big boys and masters,
Tennyson would "shout his verses to the skies." "Well, Arthur, I
mean to be famous," he used to say to one of his brothers. He
observed nature very closely by the brook and the thundering sea-
shores: he was never a sportsman, and his angling was in the manner
of the lover of The Miller's Daughter. He was seventeen (1826) when
Poems by Two Brothers (himself and his brother Frederick) was
published with the date 1827. These poems contain, as far as I have
been able to discover, nothing really Tennysonian. What he had done
in his own manner was omitted, "being thought too much out of the
common for the public taste." The young poet had already saving
common-sense, and understood the public.
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