With regal melancholy and superb craftsmanship, Tennyson's poems evoke Past and Present-the Isle of the Lotos-eaters, Camelot, and his own twilit English gardens-seeking to reconcile the Victorian zeal for public progress with private despair. He juxtaposes opposites-not only Past and Present, but also Beauty and Squalor, High Class and Low-and then entwines them. The closeness of these opposites lets Tennyson's poems "transcend their own achievements...

Although Tennyson (1809-1892) has often seemed to personify the Victorian Age, he was a poet before it began and his poems endure to speak clearly to this modern one. His mastery of a great variety of poetic forms and moods enables him to communicate such extremes of feeling as 'calm despair and wild unrest' ; rapturous love : 'the soul of the rose went into my blood' ; and noble resolve ...

A fictionalized account of events leading up to the suicidal charge on Russian forces by the British at Balaklava during the Crimean War.