It was by his father's wish that Tennyson competed for the English
prize poem. The theme, Timbuctoo, was not inspiring. Thackeray
wrote a good parody of the ordinary prize poem in Pope's metre:-


"I see her sons the hill of glory mount,
And sell their sugars on their own account;
Prone to her feet the prostrate nations come,
Sue for her rice and barter for her rum."


Tennyson's work was not much more serious: he merely patched up an
old piece, in blank verse, on the battle of Armageddon. The poem is
not destitute of Tennysonian cadence, and ends, not inappropriately,
with "All was night." Indeed, all WAS night.

An ingenious myth accounts for Tennyson's success: At Oxford, says
Charles Wordsworth, the author was more likely to have been
rusticated than rewarded. But already (1829) Arthur Hallam told Mr
Gladstone that Tennyson "promised fair to be the greatest poet of our
generation, perhaps of our century."

In 1830 Tennyson published the first volume of which he was sole
author. Browning's Pauline was of the year 1833. It was the very
dead hours of the Muses. The great Mr Murray had ceased, as one
despairing of song, to publish poetry. Bulwer Lytton, in the preface
to Paul Clifford (1830), announced that poetry, with every other form
of literature except the Novel, was unremunerative and unread.
Coleridge and Scott were silent: indeed Sir Walter was near his