Which poem is considered as the crowning glory of Alfred Tennyson's poetic career ?
Answers
I think this question is not really useful because it tacitly assumes that there exists some poem written by Tennyson that is the “crowning glory” [yes, I know the OP wrote “crowing glory,” but I will resist the easy joke and simply pass over the typo] of his poetic career. There are poets where you can make such a choice — perhaps John Milton’s Paradise Lost, or Vergil’s The Aeneid, or Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. This sort of thing occurs when there is one great work that towers above the rest of the poet’s body of work.
Tennyson is not such a poet.
Tennyson was primarily a lyric poet, however much he tried at narrative in Idylls of the King. Yet Tennyson was not simply a talented poet, but an accomplished poetic craftsman, so there are a fair number of shorter poems that really stand out, in addition to a large number that are quite well-done but perhaps not of the first eminence.
The first poem that most experts will point to is his sequence “In Memoriam A. H. H.” Perhaps less ambitious, but no less distinguished, are poems like “Mariana,” “The Lotos Eaters,” “Ulysses,” “The Kraken,” “Tears, Idle Tears, “Tithonus,” “The Two Voices,” “The Eagle,” and “The Lady of Shallot.”
If you really want to see Tennyson at his best, you probably need to read all of these. Tennyson did not produce any LONG work that is representative of his true ability and achievement.