During the 1960s and 1970s several British publishers created series of critical volumes designed to help students and general readers develop an appreciation for Victorian poets and novelists. John Pettigrew's contribution to the Edwin Arnold series, Tennyson: The Early Poems (1970), offers brief analyses of poems published in the volumes of 1827, 1830, 1833, and 1842. What is significant about this work is that Pettigrew adds his voice to the growing cadre of scholars who feel compelled to counter the “hopelessly partial” criticism of Sir Harold Nicolson (7) and demonstrate how Tennyson makes “great poetry out of his quarrels” between his tendency toward the personal, private side and his desire to please his friends by being a public poet (14). On the other hand, the Longman series volume on Tennyson written by B. C. Southam presents an enigmatic portrait of the poet. Southam's Tennyson (1971) seems highly eclectic in its selection of poems that merit explication. Southam believes Tennyson was a frustrated Romantic, and his interpretations bear out that conviction.

Distinguished critics Morse Peckham and Harold Bloom both wrote briefly about Tennyson, but with decidedly different points of view. Peckham's chapter on Tennyson in Romantic Revolutionaries (1970) ties the Victorian poet closely to his Romantic forebears, concentrating on Tennyson's early poems to demonstrate his development of a creative imagination. Peckham is decidedly laudatory in his reading of Tennyson's work. Arguing that “today we rather have a tendency to sneer at the Victorians for their facile belief in progress,” he explains how Tennyson's idea of progress links him much more closely to figures such as Wordsworth and Coleridge than to many Victorian contemporaries.