Letter to the Editor, The Sun
Aug. 14, 1909, p. 4
To the Editor of The Sun—Sir: “He [Tennyson] was unquestionably the greatest poet in the nineteenth century.” So emits Paul Shorey of the Chicago University. Has this provincial mind never heard of Heine, Shelley, Keats, Leconte de Lisle, Baudelaire, Hugo, Swinburne, Pushkin, Carducci, D’Annunzio, Verlaine, Gautier, Nietzsche, Poe, Whitman, de Banville, Browning? The least of these was further above Tennyson than Tennyson is above Alfred Austin.
Tennyson incarnated the soul of the middle classes. The poets named above were suckled by Aphrodite.
Benjamin De Casseres.
New York, August 12.