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I read Tennyson for myself, learning by heart the greater part of the original volumes and thinking, as I still think, that for subtle workmanship no one had at all approached the same perfection since Milton. I did not then recognise how little thought is contained in that pomp and melody of verse, still less how very little of what thought there is, is the poet's own. For instance, a very large number of people are apparently unaware that Tennyson's idyll "Dora" is simply a story in Miss Mitford's Our Village broken up into blank verse with poetic touches added, and in later life his "Idylls of the King" are whole chapters of Malory's Morte d'Arthur and Lady Charlotte Guest's Mabinogion treated in the same way. (en) |
