This selected edition is excerpted from The Poems of Tennyson, second edition, three volumes (1987). Each poem here is reproduced in full, together with the entire annotation (headnotes, footnotes, and alternative drafts) of the complete edition. For every poem included, then, this edition is identical with that of 1987. Likewise for the Preface, below, and for the Acknowledgments; the Chronological Table of Tennyson’s Life and Chief Publications; and the Abbreviations.
Tennyson’s four long poems are here: The Princess, In Memoriam, Maud, and Idylls of the King. So are all the masterpieces: onwards from Mariana, The Lady of Shalott, St Simeon Stylites, Ulysses, Tithonus… The necessity of reducing, by more than half, the two thousand pages of the complete edition entailed the enforcing of one principle: the inclusion of no poem which Tennyson himself had not included in his final edition, whether left unpublished or published by him and later rescinded. But this did not retrench quite enough. Judgement has been exercised to represent all of Tennyson’s genius, in his many kinds of poetry and throughout the phases of his publishing career of over sixty years.
The numbering of the poems in the complete edition has been retained, partly to facilitate the use of the two editions in conjunction, and partly because the footnotes were keyed to their poems through numbers; to change numbers would have been costly and might have introduced error as well as making for confusion in there being two distinct numberings.
Cross-references
In the complete edition, published in three separately-paginated volumes, cross-references are given as volume and page number, e.g. II 321. In this selected edition, cross-references to poems included are given as page number in italics, e.g. p. 279; cross-references to poems not selected continue to refer to the complete edition by volume and page number.
There are two Appendices new to this edition, numbered I and II to avoid confusion with the Appendices in the complete edition. Appendix I is of Alternative Drafts; these are from the earlier Appendix A and for these, page references are given for this edition. Page references to the complete edition are retained for drafts cited but not included in this selected edition. Appendix I also includes two items which had figured originally not in Appendix A but in the body of the text as poems in their own right: ‘Oh! that ‘twere possible’, which is given here as an alternative draft for Maud; and Tithon, an alternative draft for Tithonus.
Appendix II reproduces the Contents pages of the complete edition, enabling the reader to see at once the full sequence of Tennyson’s poems.
In both Appendix II and the Index of Titles and First Lines the use of a dagger indicates a poem included in this selected edition.