ALFRED LORD TENNYSON: IN MEMORIAM. AN AUTHORITATIVE TEXT, BACKGROUND AND SOURCES, CRITICISM.

Selected and edited by RobertH. Ross '38. New York: A Norton CriticalEdition, 1973. 261 pp. Hardback $8.95. Soft-back$1.95.

In Tennyson (1923) Sir Harold Nicolson suggested that the Nicolsonian times were to.o close to the poet's for objective appraisal. Ross now attempts it. With 14 other literary historians and critics he has indeed not attempted to portray the whole Tennyson, but evaluations of the famous elegy, felicitously updated, focuses on essentials. Succinct yet full, the Ross book is suited for the general reader interested in bereavement and adjustment; for literary persons curious about poetic architectonics and thematic patterns; for the historically minded about the glow and afterglow of the Victorian midday and twilight and year-by-year developments in Tennyson's life; for unskilled readers baffled by obscure lines and references; and for teachers at all levels from high school to graduate school. A former English professor at universities in Ohio and Washington State, now a rare-book specialist in Hanover, Ross, well qualified as a Tennyson scholar, for years has taken advantage of the excellent Victorian collections in the Dartmouth College Library.

Neatly tucked in on page bottoms and aimed at the 20th century reader, his notes identify Tennyson's allusions, supply biographical and historical information, paraphrase obscure passages, and occasionally serve as cross references. A brief Ross essay, "The Three Faces of In Memoriam," summarizes traditional critical approaches and alerts the reader to critical assumptions in other essays. One hundred and sixty-eight pages are given to background commentators, essayists, critics, and bibliographies. Basil Willey: Neither local nor ephemeral, the 'problems are universal among sensitive and meditative minds. T.S. Eliot: Tennyson has the three qualities found only in the greatest poets: abundance, variety, and complete competence. Carlisle Moore: Despite Tennyson's employment of Victorian concepts, he conveys successfully the mystical quality of his own vision and experience. A.C. Bradley: Internal chronology determines the structure. Paull F. Baum: In Memoriam lacks clarity and sureness of treatment. John D. Rosenberg: In 100 years following publication no poem more daring, persuasive, or eloquent exists. E. D. H. Johnson: Bridging earlier and later work, In Memoriam is surely as much testament to artistic as to philosphic growth. Jerome Buckley: The poem anticipates the serious debate that Darwinism in particular and Victorian science in general would provoke. Clyde de L. Ryals explores theme and symbol, and Alan Sinfield relates the language of modern poets to Tennyson's.

Ross proves himself marvellously able in the 1973 critical environment so different from the 1921 in Lytton Stracheys' ironic biography of Queen Victoria, who told Tennyson after the death of the Prince Consort that next to the Bible In Memoriam was her greatest comfort.