Word: tennysons
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...Tennyson...
...belly, and sharp tongue there lurked a small, narrow, smug, Philistine, and thoroughly reactionary mind, and a nagging weakness for the most squalidly dull-thud variety of pun. Both these latter qualities are prominently on display in Princess Ida. Moreover, some mad infatuation (something, perhaps, to do with the Tennyson poem of which Ida is a parody) led him to cast the thing in blank verse, of the sort Shaw must have had in mind when he said that blank verse was easier to write than prose. On the other hand, Gilbert was a master of his own peculiar medium...
...euphemisms such as "bally" and "ruddy" work their way into the tale of a British knight who once "allowed some hornswoggling highbinder to stick him with . . . dud Smelly River Ordinaries"*-and, of course, there are the usual Wodehousian references to or quotations from Shakespeare and Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, Lord Tennyson and Publishers Knopf, Holt, Doubleday, Simon & Schuster-all balled up together...
...content to whisper 'Dear Jane' as they pause at the grave in the ancient aisle of Winchester Cathedral." This remark (from the Concise Cambridge History of English Literature) shows precisely the position Jane Austen holds in English literature, for would anyone whisper "Dear Alfred" at Tennyson's grave or "Dear Charles" at Dickens'-still less be urged to do so by an academic history? The fact is that though no two "Janeites" can ever agree on what words to use in venerating the author of Pride and Prejudice, Emma and Mansfield Park, none doubt that worship...
...Service settled into an expatriate's life in France. The Service ballads, still selling a steady 20,000 books a year, financed the sybaritic life he led in Brittany, Nice, and in his ocher-faced Monte Carlo villa surveying the azure Mediterranean where Tennyson once slept. For four decades he soaked up the kindly sun. "I want every day of my life to belong to me, to do with as I please," he said...