“I do not think any poet in English has ever had a finer ear for vowel sounds, as well as a subtler feeling for some moods of anguish…”

“The surface of Tennyson stirred about with his time; and he had nothing to which to hold fast except his unique and unerring feeling for the sound of words. But in this he had something which no one else had.”

“And having turned aside from the journey through the dark night, to become the surface flatterer of his own time, he has been rewarded with the despite of an age that succeeds his own in shallowness.”

– T.S. Eliot, “In Memoriam,” (essay on Tennyson) Collected Prose, ed. Frank Kermode, 246-247