With regal melancholy and a superb sense of craft, Tennyson's poems evoke Past and Present - the Isle of the Lotos-Eaters, heraldic Camelot, his own twilit English gardens - seeking to reconcile the Victorian zeal for public progress with private despair. Using his own eloquence or masks of mythic figures, Tennyson was the stylist most imitated by poets of his day - praised over all the rest for his vigorous portrayals of the "general conscience" of statesmen and common men alike.