SD1737. Robert Bulwer Lytton to John Forster

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 20, 368 (in part).

Florence

May 5th 1854

… Of Fred[eric]k Tennyson, I think Browning hit the mark exactly when, as I once heard him, he said of FT’s poems—“This is the proper stuff out of which Poetry is made: but it is all in a state of solution, and not yet crystallised into Poetry.” That’s just what it is, I think. …

Publication: Personal & Literary Letters of Robert First Earl of Lytton, ed. Betty Balfour (London, 1906), I, 49–53 (in part, as 1853).

Manuscript: Lord Cobbold.

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