Seamus Perry at Literary Review:
Edward FitzGerald long remembered the heavenly spectacle of his younger contemporary Alfred Tennyson at Cambridge. ‘At that time he looked something like the Hyperion shorn of his Beams in Keats’s Poem’, FitzGerald wrote fifty years later, ‘with a Pipe in his mouth.’ In fact, it was not Keats that he was invoking, but Milton’s description of the recently fallen Satan – ‘Archangel ruined’, yet retaining some of his angelic glory, ‘as when the sun new-risen/Looks through the horizontal misty air/Shorn of his beams’. It is a telling connection for FitzGerald’s subconscious to have made. Charles Lamb had adduced the same passage when he described the middle-aged Coleridge, a man broken by self-obstruction and opium but still possessing some vestige of the young genius whom Lamb had so loved and revered. Coleridge’s gifts were immense but imperfectly exploited. FitzGerald seems to have seen in Tennyson a similar case.
FitzGerald first read ‘The Lady of Shalott’ while an undergraduate, waiting for the night mail, and he never forgot it. Years later, he found himself reciting it aloud as he strolled in the Suffolk countryside. FitzGerald always believed in his friend’s genius, but he came to think that Tennyson had somehow gone wrong. ‘
more here.
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