A very odd thing - the madness of Maud.
Tennyson had earned himself the role of spokesman for his nation, yet his poem of 1855 was full of both dissonant and dissident expression, dealing with individual instability and social ills in a form considered to be highly unusual in its time. The author argues that it both draws heavily on the past, in its debt to Hamlet, and is an exciting forerunner of the kind of literature we now associate with modernism.