Poe on Tennyson

(Crossposted from the Tennyson Bicentennial blog)

For Tennyson, as for a man imbued with the richest and rarest poetic impulses, we have an admiration — a reverence unbounded. His "Morte D'Arthur," his "Locksley Hall," his "Sleeping Beauty," his "Lady of Shalott," his "Lotos Eaters," his "Ænone," and many other poems, are not surpassed, in all that gives to Poetry its distinctive value, by the compositions of any one living or dead.
—from Graham's Magazine, August 1843 [quote taken from here]

The pronunciation of Ligeia

Here, for the curious, is a discussion speculating on the pronunciation of the name Ligeia: http://users.boardnation.com/~poeforum/index.php?board=1;action=display;threadid=57;start=0 I myself (knowing that others pronounced it differently and that I was probably wrong) have always pronounced it LIEZ-yuh. (I leave the proper phonetic representation of my error to those who know.)

The prize in the discussion goes to the rejoinder in this exchange:

PHILLYPOE: Poe rhymes Ligeia with "idea" in Al Aaraaf:

Ligeia! Ligeia!
My beautiful one!
Whose harshest idea
Will to melody run,

so we at least know the pronunciation of the last two
syllables.

TRON1977: Well I'm from NY so I guess Ligeia rhymes with deer.

Tennyson on Poe

Crossposted from the Tennyson Bicentennial blog.

An excerpt--

Tennyson: There is one spot in your country which I should like to visit--a spot, which as your poet, Fitz-Greene Halleck, finely expressed it, is hallowed ground, a pilgrim shrine, a mecca of the mind.

Interviewer: You mean Mount Vernon, where Washington is entombed?

Tennyson: No; I mean a long-neglected spot in the provincial town of Baltimore, where the greatest American genius lies buried. I mean the grave of Edgar Allan Poe.

--from "A Visit To Tennyson", The New York Times, February 13, 1886

Tennyson

Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Lord Tennyson were born in the same year and so share this year as their bicentennial. That being the case (and with apologies to visitors for not posting here lately), I have made some slight effort to acknowledge the accomplishments of the latter in a blog not dissimilar to this one. You can find it here: http://tennyson200.blogspot.com/

I should point out that Tennyson and Poe, although they never met, were among the uncommon cases of great writers and contemporaries who respected one another's work. And someone who wanted to understand something of the sensibility and technique of Poe's verse could do far worse than study the works of his English counterpart.