How serious the reaction against Tennyson had become by the First World War may be seen in a brief essay by Alice Meynell. Writing in 1917 Meynell, herself a poet, displays the conflicted views so typical of her generation. Fearing that less judicious readers might dismiss all of Tennyson because of “the peculiar Tennyson trick” of appealing to sentimentalism and bourgeois taste (80), Meynell attempts to salvage what she can of the poet's reputation by proposing the idea of The Two Tennysons. “If ever there was a poet who needed to be parted from himself,” she argues, it is Tennyson (79). His “weakest kind of work” was blank verse (81) and he was indeed sentimental, even maudlin on occasion. He is “hardly a great master of imagery” (83) — but he is a master of scene-painting, and for this alone Meynell wishes to save him from those who would toss all his work on the ash heap of history. Although given to “excessive ease” (81) in his style, Meynell says he is a poet who can capture the imagination through his vivid descriptions, providing “a new apprehension of nature” (88). The Tennyson Meynell admires is England's “wild poet” (89), not the laureate suitable for drawing rooms.

Similar sentiments are echoed by F. J. C. Hearnshaw, who asks in “Tennyson Twenty-Five Years After” (1917): “Will [Tennyson] live; or will the comparative neglect and indifference with which he has been regarded during the past quarter of a century continue to be his lot during the present and subsequent generations?” (353) Hearnshaw believes that, although the passing of the Victorian era “with its transitional doubts and ephemeral perplexities” has “rendered much of his didactic poetry obsolete,” Tennyson will survive “as a permanent memorial” of that age and “as the writer of some of the most exquisite lyrics in the language” (353).