"How sweet--while warn airs lull us, blowling lowly"

"Warn" is supposed to be "warm." But others are really confusing:

"Thro' many a women acanthus-wreath divine!"

"Women" is supposed to be "woven." I checked these in the first edition of the Norton Critical--the first edition has the correct lines. I guess Norton just scanned the first edition and put it on the shelves as a second "edition" without even editing it.

Very sloppy work--please don't buy the book. The texts are well selected--it is nice to have The Princess available. And the critical readings are also well chosen. But the texts are hardly readible.

11 of 11 found the following review helpful:

Editorial qualms  May 08, 2007
By D. Tomlinson
As editor of this collection, Robert W. Hill has, I feel, made some rather poor choices. For instance, in the Preface he audaciously writes that he removed "indisputably 'bad'" poems. In this capacity, he omitted "Godiva" -- a great loss -- as well as many charming short verses, well represented in other collections.

Additionally, although he claims deliberately not to have modernized Tennyson's spelling, he nevertheless Americanizes both spelling and punctuation (e.g. "honor" instead of "honour"; consistent placement of the full stop within quotation marks; and so on). This badly affects the very Englishness of Tennyson's voice, I should think.

I would recommend the edition for its highly informed annotations, but not as a source for the poems themselves.

1 of 1 found the following review helpful:

Poor Editing Compensated With Excellent Notes and Essays  Sep 08, 2011
By Kevin M. Derby
The second edition of "Tennyson's Poetry" as edited by Robert W. Hill is not going to win much praise when it comes to the editing of the poems. There are two excellent reviews at Amazon by Paul B. and D. Tomlinson that cover the problems with the editing and I can not add anything to them.

Nonetheless, I think the book has some solid qualities. While there are some omissions and the collection does seem to go a bit too in depth with some of Tennyson's earliest poems, Hill includes most of the major poems, a good selection of minor ones and does restore "The Princess" to a place of importance. The annotations and notes are excellent. So are the various essays by experts ranging from T.S. Eliot to Gertrude Himmelfarb to an excellent contribution by Hill himself.

While the various notes and essays do not completely redeem the work, they are an excellent--and accessible--resource for readers and students who want to understand Tennyson better. The second Norton edition is flawed but there are more assets here than strikes against it. There are better editions out there (the Longman edition edited by Christopher Ricks and the Oxford one with Adam Roberts come to mind) but this one is valuable.

3 of 7 found the following review helpful:

Nice collection of Tennyson's works  Oct 14, 2006
By Greg
Tennyson was a poet of the Victorian age who wrote very sensitively and beautifully about the pains and shortness of life, the growing problems of belief in conventional religion, and about personal grief and loss. His most important poem, In Memorium, focuses centrally on these themes, and is included in this edition with good explanatory notes.

As with any selection this doesn't include all of Tennyson's works (which fill a number of volumes) but is fairly representative and also contains good critical essays from Tennyson scholars at the back. And it is readily affordable in price, making it easily available to the lover of poetry and the student or scholar alike.