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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and Professor Christopher Ricks, through reference to a set of page proof for Macmillan's Magazine and a previously unpublished letter from the poet to Alexander Macmillan, both owned by Mr.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
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