Contemporay Signiture, Bombay 1861


Long misunderstood by critics, Tennyson's Maud is now widely regarded as his greatest poem. A fragmentary monodrama presented from the viewpoint of an alienated and often mad young man, it narrates his disillusion with Victorian commercialism, his love for the beautiful Maud, and his decision to enlist to fight in the Crimean War. Historians of psychiatry count the poem as among the earliest and most subtle descriptions of manic-depression, and literary critics now recognize it also as among the most innovative of Tennyson's works in poetic form.