DURING the past year, there has been a program on educational television called "Anyone for Tennyson?" The series began with readings and discussion of Tennyson's poetry, and subsequent installments treated other Victorian and modern poets. The title is catchy and one that says something about Tennyson and about poetry in our time. Both the name of the program and the fact that reading and discussing poetry can attract a significant television audience suggests a new attitude toward Tennyson and toward poetry that emboldens me to pursue the topic of Alfred Tennyson as a poet for our time.

Tennyson's life from 1809 to 1892 spanned much of the reign of Queen Victoria (1837—1901). She made him Poet Laureate, to succeed Wordsworth, in 1850; and, upon the recommendation of Gladstone, raised him to the peerage as a Baron in 1883. The adulation in his own time by people of all classes throughout the English-speaking world is probably unmatched in literary history.

Soon after his death a reaction set in, and until about 25 years ago, it was fashionable to denigrate Tennyson, like all things Victorian, and to think of him as a complacent exponent of a self-satisfied, self-important, and self-righteous age. But historical research and literary criticism have now winnowed fact from prejudice, and "Victorian" is anything but the word of opprobrium that it once was. Indeed, Victorian literature, history, and culture have become the "rage." Beards, hair, and wire-rimmed glasses widely replicate personal styles of 100 years ago. Victorian societies and journals multiply. If Tennyson is the Pre-Eminent Victorian, as Joanna Richardson maintains in a book by that title, then the extent