Larkin on Tennyson

To open the complete works of Tennyson is to enter the Victorian age itself. There are the emerald-green landscapes, the dewy roses, the pearly-teethed children; the melancholy maidens, the heavy gardens; peasants, at once comic and pathetic, bob and curtsy. Then there is the tea-shop orientalism, the cardboard classicism, the sawdust Arthurianism. There are railways and geology. The silliness and sentimentality are excruciating. We see the flash of moral indignation, and hear the rumble of received opinion: the smoke of double-think drifts obscuring across the scene. Then suddenly we are brought up sharp by a voice speaking of doubt; there is a vision of fen country on a winter evening; something robust and chuckling digs us in the ribs; finally we hear the assertive trumpets of imperial patriotism and historic endurance. We are confounded by the range, the colour, the self-confidence of it all.

—In 1969, Philip Larkin reviewed a new edition of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poems. The New Statesman’s editor at the time, Paul Johnson, said it was one of the best reviews he had ever printed.

The portrait of Lady Margaret Beaufort

The prayer book in front of her lies unclasped on a pillow, the carefully written Latin text opening with a red circle ‘O’, perhaps: Obsecro te (I beseech thee) or O Intemerata (O undefiled one). She, too, is conspicuously undefiled, her hair bound up in a white headdress, her body swathed in black fabric that merges into the shadows on the floor. Her only visible features are a benign face, gazing into the next world, and a pair of pale hands studded with gold rings, lightly pressed together in supplication.

—Margaret Beaufort: Survivor, Rebel, Kingmaker (2025)