University of Virginia Library

Tennyson's "Lucretius," first published in Macmillan's Magazine for May, 1868, was scheduled for simultaneous publication in the United States in the May number of the Atlantic Monthly; but the poem appeared on May 2 in Every Saturday, a weekly journal owned by Ticknor and Fields (the proprietors of the Atlantic and Tennyson's American publishers), because the page proofs from England providing the text did not arrive in time. This eventuality was only one of the impediments to publication that arose, and from the beginning a question hovered over the arrangements as to whether or not some of the erotic details of Lucretius' monologue would exceed the limits of contemporary public taste. The full description of an Oread pursued by a satyr, which appeared in America but not in Macmillan's and which Tennyson restored when he included the poem a year and a half later in The Holy Grail and Other Poems, has become celebrated in this regard.

Professor William D. Paden, using a manuscript which is now in the library of Yale University, has written valuably concerning variations in several texts of "Lucretius"; and Professor Christopher Ricks, through reference to a set of page proof for Macmillan's Magazine and a previously unpublished letter from the poet to Alexander Macmillan, both owned by Mr. W. S. G. Macmillan, has shed further light on the evolution of the poem.[1] Mr. Simon Nowell-Smith later published two additional letters relating to "Lucretius" from Tennyson to George Grove, the editor of Macmillan's Magazine, and reproduced in facsimile the letter that Ricks printed.[2] Fortunately, a number of other documents

pertinent to the poem are extant and presently available to scholars: letters from Macmillan and Grove in the archives of the publishing firm in the British Library, several letters by Tennyson and his wife in libraries in England and America, early drafts of passages of the poem at Harvard University, the poet's complete autograph manuscript at Trinity College, Cambridge, a galley proof in the Tennyson Research Centre at Lincoln, and five sets of page proof for Macmillan's in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.[3] These make it possible to place the materials already published in context, to give an account of the circumstances leading to the publication of the poem and of its critical reception, and to provide a record of the alterations in the manuscripts and a historical collation of the various stages of the text. Such an enterprise not only will clarify the textual development but will supply significant insights into the poet's personality and method of composition and into the human relationships among author, publisher, editor, and wife.