The Charm of Tennyson

Readers of Tennyson's poetry enter charmed lands—in "The Lady of Shalott," "The Palace of Art," "The Sleeping Beauty," the story world of The Princess, the entire kingdom of Camelot. They meet characters who have been charmed (as in "The Lotos-Eaters"), or wish to possess charm (such as the speaker of Maud), in poems that exert a distinctive stylistic charm of their own.1 Part of Tennyson's charm can be identified with his extraordinary facility with sound and repetition. But that is not, primarily, what charm meant to Tennyson; or rather, the long historical connection between charm and sound was only one component of his understanding, and it went hand in hand with another: an understanding of charm that he had learned from the Roman poet Horace.