All great poets are poets of imagination, since imagination is the essence of all that is artistic. To understand the special qualities of Tennyson's imaginative power, we might do best by seeing what distinguishes him from both his predecessors, the Romantics, and his Victorian contemporaries.

The imaginative basis of Tennyson's work is both forward-looking and backward-looking. The Victorians were in some sense anchored in a material and literal world in a way the earlier generation was not, or did not think it had to be. Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," for instance, exists in a timeless fantasy-world into which the poet seeks to extend his own personal identity. Even in "The Mask of Anarchy," which is a metaphorical representation of a contemporary event (the "Peterloo Massacre"), Shelley presents an alternative world in which the actual happenings are subordinated to his own poetic design and vision. The same is true of the inclusion of historical figures in the apocalyptic but secular "The Triumph of Life," in which Shelley is concerned above all with how this vision relates to him personally. The vision is an extension of his ego.

Tennyson, despite the fantasy-like realm of much of his own verse, approaches his subjects much more cautiously and tentatively. The legends of England's past are shown to us as a distant mirror of the present, but in such a way that Tennyson's ego and his personal emotion are in the background, a kind of shadow presence. Though it might sound unfair to Tennyson to say this, his imagination has something prosaic and resigned about it. Except that his diction is beautiful, one gets the feeling that "The Lady of Shallot," for instance, just conveys "the facts" (though the facts as Tennyson imagines them) seen in that distant mirror. Tennyson focuses upon Arthurian legend as a metaphor for the modern world. Behind the seeming perfection there is a fatal flaw. In King Arthur's (and Tennyson's) view, it is

As if some lesser god had made the world,

But had not force to shape it as he would.

In "Ulysses," it is not English myth but the primal myth of European civilization to which Tennyson's imaginative thrust is directed. Ulysses sees himself in a time when the great achievements are past, yet decides almost defiantly,

'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Tennyson's verse expresses the irony of an artist feeling that he's living in a post-historical world in which the achievements of the past cannot be equaled, while the material world is moving inexorably forward with its industrial and technological transformation of mankind. Unlike Browning he doesn't feel that ongoing exuberance and optimism that are supposed to be the hallmark of their time.

But just as he looks backward to find modern meanings in legend, Tennyson uses his imaginative power to speculate about the future. In "Locksley Hall" he predicts the airplane, warfare in the skies, and an assembly of global leaders, a "Parliament of man, the federation of the world." Though it seems the opposite of his valuation of tradition and the past, his resolution is to

Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.

The poet resolves in the end that destruction must come to these past symbols, with the thunderbolt he invokes:

Let it fall on Locksley Hall, with rain or hail, fire or snow,

For the mighty wind arises roaring seaward, and I go.

Like that of many poets, Tennyson's imagination is a study in contrasts, but muted, subdued ones. It looks backward and forward, but in summary it is a force in which a man's expression of his values is punctuated by regret and yet finds solace in images of both past and future.