Maud, and Other Poems

by Alfred Tennyson Tennyson

"Maud, and Other Poems" by Baron Alfred Tennyson is a poetry collection published in 1855. The title poem follows an emotionally unstable narrator who falls passionately in love with Maud, transforming his despair into obsession. When her brother forbids their contact and arranges a rival suitor, passion turns to violence. A duel, death, and madness follow, leaving the narrator psychologically shattered. Told through shifting meters that mirror the speaker's manic-depressive state, this disturbing monodrama explores identity, grief, and Victorian anxieties through fragments of sensation rather than linear narrative.