When Tennyson first published his poetry—or the more significant part of his juvenile poetry—there would be little to impress itself as remarkable originality of style, and this was as it should be. It is only the eccentric in art that arrests garrulous attention, an attention that has no memory. But the readers of the volumes of 1830 and 1833 could not but be aware that here was the old faculty speaking with a note of new personality, an impression to be strikingly confirmed in 1842. This was English poetry plainly enough, quite content to give tradition its due, properly proud of its ancestry, and yet it was the work of a man deeply engaged, indeed almost reclusively so, in the artistic ordering of his own spiritual life. In so far as he satisfactorily solved the technical problems that have been mentioned, he did so by a subconscious instinct of the creative mind—they cannot, it is needless to say, have appeared to him in the simple tabulation that we are able to give them at this distance of time. But the instinct that performed this office for him told him too that in drawing freely upon the tradition of English versification he must also add to it to be justified of his calling. This is true of every poet, but Tennyson knew it more decidedly, or at least more explicitly, than most. Tennyson’s subject matter could not well have been more unsophisticated, less affected by the challenge of the spiritual experience of the great poets who preceded him; but at the same time his style could not well have been more manipulated, more meticulously and self-consciously wrought into the highest excellence that he could attain. The picture of Tennyson as a “poet of the file,” forever labouring in a lapidarian discontent, is, perhaps, one that has been overdrawn, but hardly any creative faculty of the first rank in poetry has ever been so pervaded by the mood of the artificer. Nothing could be wider of the truth than to argue that the poise and balance and perfect dovetailing that mark all his best versification are merely so much decoration, a kind of seductive jugglery that used up good energy that might have been better employed. It was his peculiar distinction as a poetic craftsman that he was able to work his style to the highest pitch of minutely considered arrangement without sacrificing anything of spontaneity in effect.
The stanzas quoted from The Lady of Shalott show something of Tennyson’s deftness in the disposition of his words. A more matured example is this from The Princess—
Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font:
The firefly wakens: waken thou with me.
Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost,
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.
Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars,
And all thy heart lies open unto me.