Newspaper cutting from The Times, 15 November 1852, of an article titled 'Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington. By Alfred Tennyson.' [Predating the publication of the poem by a day, and quoting more than half of it.]

Original cutting, 53 cm long, from The Times, of an article titled 'Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington. By Alfred Tennyson.' This poem, one of Tennyson's finest and best-known, was published on 16 November 1852 (two days before Wellington's funeral) by the London publisher Edward Moxon, who had offered Tennyson £200 for 10,000 copies. As Edgar F. Shannon, Jr. explains in his 'The History of a Poem: Tennyson's "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington"' (Studies in Bibliography, BSUV, 1960): 'Anticipating the date of publication by a day, the magisterial Times, on Monday, November 15, treated the ode to a full column, which was widely reprinted, paraphrased, and plagiarized by metropolitan, provincial, and Scottish newspapers. If "The Thunderer's" approach was somewhat condescending - "There is no affectation . . . in any of the lines . . . . [The poem] has more beauty than force, more sweetness and feeling than dignity and magnificence" - it found Tennyson "faithful to his mission" and quoted almost half of the poem. To introduce strophe VIII the reviewer wrote, "Never has . . . [the path of duty] been more simply and faithfully drawn than in the following lines."'