It is always dangerous to cite a single book as the source of a change in attitudes toward any writer. With that caveat in mind, it may not be too farfetched to say that Jerome Buckley's Tennyson: The Growth of a Poet (1960) was a watershed in Tennyson criticism. Virtually everyone writing about Tennyson after the publication of Buckley's study has found it necessary to cite this work, either to expand on Buckley's suggestions on to refute his claims for Tennyson's greatness.

Buckley had already written approvingly of Tennyson in The Victorian Temper (1951) and had edited Tennyson's poems for the Riverside Press (1958). In the introduction to that edition, Buckley reveals his prejudice against Nicolson's view of the two Tennysons. Calling Nicolson's study “brilliant though incomplete,” he argues that “the distinction” between the morbid lyricist and the compromising laureate is “essentially false and misleading” (ix). Buckley claims Tennyson is a worthy successor to the Romantics, a poet who revels in the kind of work that Matthew Arnold was to disparage in the preface to his own 1853 volume of poetry. Tennyson's poetry, Buckley says, “deals typically not with the great action seen as an object in itself but with the search through situation and symbol for meaning and the sudden illuminating discovery of purpose” (xxi).

This judgment is carried forward, expanded, and defended brilliantly in the new book. Setting out to “study Tennyson's developing sensibility as a guide to critical evaluation” (Tennyson, vii), Buckley writes a critical biography that emphasizes the influence of Tennyson's experience on his work.