My friend began by stating that our best memorial verses
were elegiac verses, and that no strictly memorial verses could be called great poetry. I suggested that Tennyson's Ode to the Duke of Wellington was very nearly great poetry and that his verses to Canning and Franklin were, if not great poetry, then high veri:e. He denied this contention ; he called them " lapidary inscrip- tions "; he argued that the only memorial poems which were of supreme quality had been dictated by egoistic motives. He instanced Lycidas, Adonais, In Memoriam and Thyrsis. I begged him to add Swinbume's ode to the still living Baudelaire. He accepted this addition and then said that Milton had not been writing about Edward King but about his own rivals, that Shelley had not been writing about Keats but about poets who were unrecognised by their contemporaries, that Swinburne knew little and cared less about Baudelaire, that Matthew Arnold was merely writing a threnody upon his own lost youth, and that Tennyson had done little more than to compose graceful elegies upon the state of his own nerves.
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